One The Odyssey Scene Confirms The World Isn’t Ready for a Chris Nolan Horror Movie
Christopher Nolan has been a fan-favorite director for over two decades now, having put his mark on a slew of different genres. Having totally changed superhero movies with his The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan has been instrumental in delivering sci-fi blockbusters too, with Inception and Interstellar, and later the war film with Dunkirk. His latest, The Odyssey, sees the director take on the fantasy epic, and in doing so, inject many of his trademark thriller moments. Nolan has been vocal in the past about wanting to make a horror film, and it seems clear that some moments in The Odyssey feel like a test ramp for a full, terrifying movie.
There are a couple of different scenes in The Odyssey that clearly harken to the horror genre, both by design in terms of their place in the story and in how Nolan executes them. The encounter with the cyclops is one of the biggest, as they not only encounter a terrifying beast in that moment, but escape becomes elusive. Furthermore, a sequence where Odysseus ventures to the shores of the underworld and confronts the soldiers who died under his command, only for the deceased to give chase and try to escape their fate. One scene, though, beats them all and proves the world’s not ready for that Christopher Nolan horror movie just yet. Spoilers for The Odyssey will follow.
The Odyssey’s Body Horror Scene With Circe Is a Nightmare
Maybe halfway through The Odyssey‘s epic runtime, the film arrives at one of the familiar story beats that those familiar with the story’s structure will recognize. Odysseus and his men land on an island hoping to find food, but his men tell Odysseus not to come with them, fearing that the way he’s angered the gods will only make things worse. He agrees and elects to hunt for food while they venture inland.
As the men walk ahead, they’re greeted by a slew of wild animals, like a lion and a panther that appear to be totally harmless, before finding a small cottage occupied by a lone woman (Samantha Morton’s Circe). She convinces the soldiers to leave their armor and weapons outside, which becomes their second clue that something is amiss, as piles of armor are found in the overgrown grass. They circle her table and begin to eat, but the scene quickly takes a turn, as it becomes clear that their interest in the meal isn’t because of their empty stomachs, but a compulsion to do nothing but eat.
This moment in and of itself is quite horrifying, as they gag on tentacles and meat while continuing to shove more and more food into their mouths, but Circe takes it a step further. Standing from her seat, she starts stroking the men’s ears and faces as they eat, revealing that they are undergoing a massive change. Stark white hair begins to sprout from pieces of their head and necks, their faces stretch and contort into inhuman shapes, and their cries for help begin to morph from muffled human screeching to animalistic wails that translate to nothing but pain.
The audience is left with the terrifying realization that Odysseus’ men are being transformed into pigs. Still, their shift from man to beast isn’t done at the drop of a hat and has more in common with Pinocchio’s donkey scene or even An American Werewolf in London, a moment that languishes in the horror of your body changing in front of you, stretching your muscles and bones into your new form.
On top of the terrifying shriek of the transformation itself, the scene builds on the body horror and maintains a terrifying undercurrent as Odysseus discovers the truth, firing an arrow at a deer only to watch it turn into a man upon death. His entry to Circe’s home sees all the pigs in her yard shrieking in terror as he enters, his men futilely trying to warn their leader.
Christopher Nolan’s Horror Movie Love Is Established
The scene in Circe’s cabin in The Odyssey is one of the most intense moments in a film already filled with details that will make you grip your armrests. What’s clear from this scene, though, is that not only would Christopher Nolan be able to make a kick-ass horror movie, but that the world may not be ready for something that’s this terrifying for an entire movie and not just one scene.
Nolan has been open about his interest in making a horror movie for years, revealing in 2024 that he was up for it and reiterating that he’d be up for it as recently as this week while promoting The Odyssey. As Nolan has said, though, he hasn’t yet found the story that would give him the basis for a horror film. While we wait for him to find that storyline, we can relish in the moments from his filmography thus far that are terrifying.
Across his career, Nolan has also offered plenty of praise for horror movies over the years, highlighting the likes of Alien as one of his favorites from Ridley Scott, plus American Psycho and 28 Days Later (both of which led to him casting Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins). In an interview with BBC4’s Front Row, he specifically highlighted his love for An American Werewolf in London as being influential on the above scene.
“I’m a big fan of that era of cinema in the 1980s, where all of us from An American Werewolf in London to Thriller, that John Landis director for Michael Jackson, but also Company of Wolves, the Neil Jordan film. I mean, they’re always incredible kinds of physical transformation movies made at that time with very interesting approaches to the technology,” Nolan said. “My team and I, Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, you know, we analyzed all of those. We looked at all those and thought, how can we make this fresh for a new audience? How can we bring something new to that?”
If that was what Nolan could accomplish in one moment by studying and modernizing a classic horror movie, imagine what he could do with a full film. I’m not sure we’re ready to find out.
