Shock Value: Dan O’Bannon

Dan O’Bannon, Alien screenwriter and co-conceiver, may now only vaguely register in the minds of contemporary Blu-ray jockeys as a name that appears on screen in every one of the franchise’s sequels and spin-offs, his co-writer credit guaranteed in perpetuity. Before the first Alien, O’Bannon was broke and couch-hopping when a planned, Alejandro Jodorowsky-directed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune went bust. Thus his most profound life experience between midwife/jack-of-all-trades duties on Dark Star, John Carpenter’s debut feature, and Alien, a macabre, anti-Star Wars space slasher that jumpstarted more than half a dozen major Hollywood careers (including those of Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver), must have been one of bitter disillusionment and uncertainty. In interviews, a tone of amused cynicism always quietly undercuts the delivery of a veteran industry creative who’s mastered his innate awkwardness to become a natural extemporizer, fearless in his ability to deliver highly detailed and confident criticism, especially concerning his own work.

Having directed only two features on his own, the instrumental effects of a mind like O’Bannon’s (he passed away in 2009 after a 30-year bout with Crohn’s disease) on genre culture can be difficult to gauge. His contributions to films like Alien, Total Recall, Dead & Buried, Lifeforce, Blue Thunder, Heavy Metal magazine, and other projects, seem indivisible from those of other writers, directors, editors, and designers. The mark of a true collaborator is often elusive, not a mark at all but a change in the weather. As Slavko Vorkapich revolutionized American montage in the 1930s at MGM, as William Cameron Menzies radically reimagined movie-production design across four decades, O’Bannon’s lasting effect on horror and sci-fi from the 1970s onward has less to do with isolated achievements and more to do with his influence on the style, tone, and atmosphere of countless films and graphic media, as well as fostering a connection between traditional craft and the demands of the pop-culture moment. If you think of moments in sci-fi and horror that are fantastically—perhaps erotically—grotesque, yet also very funny (call it “spastic splatstick”), think of O’Bannon. When you watch Alien and detect the barest outlines of Val Lewton’s “horror is what you don’t see” showmanship, think of O’Bannon. He would also honor—as George A. Romero would in his own work, but in a different mode—Howard Hawks in The Return of the Living Dead.

In a sampling from a directing career 44 years across and almost as many pictures deep, Hawks would give us Mike, Julie, Holly, Lindy, Sean, Pockets, Dallas, Kurt, Brandy, Chips, Dorothy, Lorelei, Piggy, Jim, Boone, Zeb, Chance, Dude, Colorado, Feathers, Stumpy, Irish, Monk, Winocki, Matt, Marlowe, Norris, Canino, Steve, Eddie, Slim, Cricket, Gerard, Geoff, Kid, MacPherson, Bonnie, and Joe. (“Who’s Joe?” began the deluge.) In a single film, O’Bannon gave us Burt, Frank, Ernie, Freddy, Tina, Chuck, Casey, Spider, Scuz, Trash, Suicide, and—most memorably—a lumbering, giant carnivore known only as the Tarman. It’s not the nickname-to-character ratio that counts, however, but the way O’Bannon manages to take rough sketches in a script and turn them into vivid, unique characters on screen. Fans of the film will easily recall, years or decades after seeing it, luscious scream queen Linnea Quigley spontaneously stripping in the middle of a cemetery, the witless medical-supply warehouse employees battling a bifurcated dog and an orange, nude corpse, the decomposed half-woman who explains the dead’s hunger for brains (“It huuurts to be dead!”), as well as many other moments.

O’Bannon’s first movie memory was Hawks’s The Thing From Another World, and it’s easy to point out the Thing-like aspects of The Return of the Living Dead, from the James Arness-like Tarman to the “get ready to open that door” sequence (which here is used twice), but there’s an even more pronounced influence by Bringing Up Baby; no other horror film has made the scramble for survival into as unlimited an opportunity for slapstick and manic commentary on an unwinnable battle. O’Bannon adapted a book by John A. Russo, co-writer of Romero’s first Dead film, by throwing out the entire plot and starting from scratch. (You’ll note that none of Romero’s subsequent Dead films use the word “Living” in their title, nor do they couple, narratively, with the plot of that 1968 cannibal-zombie progenitor.) His masterstroke among masterstrokes is in writing dead characters who are far more intelligent, resourceful, and articulate than the living, who by contrast are almost to a man a lot of oafish, crude, scheming, harebrained slobs. Tarman displays a flair for solving engineering puzzles by using a chain and winch to bust a tasty victim out of the storage locker in which she’s hiding; the risen dead quickly set up an ingenious system for luring emergency vehicles into their clutches, the better to keep their smorgasbord from running out.

The prizewinner among the living, distinguished by the role he plays in gluing together the film’s three seemingly incongruous truths (they must survive, they are too stupid to survive, they will not survive—but not because they’re stupid) is Don Calfa as Ernie, the mortician. In one character he seems to be a webbed mass of the living characters’ best and worst traits, but O’Bannon seems to allow him to land, in the end, on the side of “fatalistic hero.” He shrieks at a huddle of dumbstruck characters to help him blockade the door, a flash-bang commentary on the stolid direction that compromises many a 1980s schlockfest. He pounds tiny nails into a door that’s already half-smashed by a rabid undead; almost singlehandedly he’s the cattle-prod that allows O’Bannon to transform a pro forma living v. dead under-siege story into one long, breathless, breakneck farce.

O’Bannon’s only other film as director came in 1992. The Resurrected is a straightforward, and unfortunately more than a little stolid, expansion of an H.P. Lovecraft story “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Drawing on a well of Lovecraftian imagery (as the legendary author would himself reuse many of the same images and ideas throughout his work), the movie stars John Terry (Jack’s dad on Lost) as a private investigator in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. In a story that would be used to better effect by Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate) and John Carpenter (Cigarette Burns), Terry’s P.I. goes chasing after a mysterious guy doing mysterious things, only to find himself in water way over his head. Flashes of inspiration (a disorienting dream montage, some outstanding animatronics depicting a nearly-consumed yet stubbornly alive human cadaver, a brilliantly Lewtonian skirmish against a “thing” in a crypt), some Hawksian interplay with the P.I. and his team (Ridgemont High alum Robert Romanus gets the Allen Jenkins role; Laurie Brisco is Ruth Hussey on a minor key), and a pleasingly campy performance by Chris Sarandon, are all outmatched by a rote script by Brent V. Friedman, and a monotone rhythm. However the stars aligned to liberate O’Bannon’s manic/comic sensibility in Return of the Living Dead, they didn’t realign here.

It’s a good guess that O’Bannon, who prized robust storytelling and precision timing as a way to earn the right to depict gore and schlock, rather than viewing narrative as mere scaffolding for grisly money shots, and who was mercilessly critical of filmmakers who tried and failed to bring Lovecraft to the screen (Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator was the only one that met with his approval), wouldn’t have disagreed with any complaints registered toward The Resurrected. In one of his last interviews, O’Bannon spoke with bitter disappointment about how the film’s producers took the film away from him in post-production and, through the meat grinder of indifferent editing, destroyed what he felt had been his best work to date.

Still, in spite of the glee with which O’Bannon would take a wrecking ball to directors and producers he felt were doing poor or unsatisfactory work (he called Lifeforce helmer Tobe Hooper a clown; he didn’t see eye to eye with Paul Verhoeven’s malevolent, blood-spewing urges that governed the direction of Total Recall, and correctly surmised that humor and comic staging were not the Dutch auteur’s strongest suits), there’s a pronounced lack of cruelty in his demolition jobs. This is mostly due to his tone, which suggests the attitude of a can’t-believe-this-nonsense employee, but also the sadness of a genre savant who was always a little bit ahead of and behind his own time.

BAMcinématek’s retrospective “Shock Value: Dan O’Bannon” runs from July 11 – 19. For more information click here.