Christopher Nolan has directed thrillers, mysteries, sci-fi, action, superhero movies, a World War II movie, and a historical drama, but one genre the man behind Oppenheimer hasn’t fully ventured into is horror. And while he has said that he doesn’t want to move away from the large scale movies he has been making for most of his career, he does have a strong interest in horror, as he revealed during an event at London’s British Film Institute. While speaking to a “rapt, sold-out audience”, Nolan said he would “love to make a horror film”.
Variety provides the transcription of what Nolan said: “Oppenheimer has elements of horror in it definitely, as I think is appropriate to the subject matter. I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very cinematic devices, it really is about a visceral response to things and so, at some point, I’d love to make a horror film. But I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea. And those are few and far between. So I haven’t found a story that lends itself to that. But I think it’s a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view. It’s also one of the few genres where the studios make a lot of these films, and they are films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction. They have a lot of the qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.“
While some would describe Oppenheimer as a biopic, Nolan would disagree, as he says biopics are “not a useful genre“. Instead, he sees the film as a blend of the heist and courtroom genres (with, as mentioned, elements of horror). “The reason I settled on those two genres (heist and courtroom) is they are mainstream genres in which dialogue, people talking, is inherently intense and interesting to an audience. That’s the fun thing with genre, you can play with a lot of different areas, where in a different type of film you really wouldn’t be allowed to.“
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What’s Not Allowed