{"id":2511162,"date":"2026-07-21T16:39:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T16:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2511162"},"modified":"2026-07-21T16:39:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T16:39:40","slug":"christopher-nolan-should-make-a-horror-movie-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/christopher-nolan-should-make-a-horror-movie-next\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Nolan Should Make a Horror Movie Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 H.P. Lovecraft, 1927<\/p>\n

I shivered when I saw the Cyclops. Before Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2019s latest blockbuster The Odyssey<\/em><\/a>, I was only aware of the Homeric tale via osmosis. Because my high school, for some reason, determined the Greek classics were for honors students, which left the rest of us dumb-dumbs reading Shakespeare<\/a>. But I knew the saga was full of monsters, and being familiar with Nolan\u2019s insistence on realism, the promise of seeing strange things through his filter had me buzzing in my seat before the lights went down. After all, Nolan was the director who deprived Bane of his venom in The Dark Knight Rises.<\/em> How on earth<\/em> could he imagine a one-eyed colossus?<\/p>\n

Then I saw him: Polyphemus, in the dark, chewing on one of Odysseus\u2019 men in a near replication of Saturn Devouring His Son<\/em>, one of the most frightening works of visual art<\/a> ever made. But the terrors didn\u2019t stop. From Odysseus\u2019 encounter with the armored Laestrygonians (whose anachronistic medieval-style armor informs their otherworldly aura) to the king of Ithaca\u2019s eerie ordeal at the mouth of hell, The Odyssey<\/em> is underscored by its dreadful atmosphere where mortals live under the oppressive shadow of gods. The movie is by far the closest Nolan has come to directing horror, and speculation over what the director\u2019s next project should be\u2014or what \u201cunfilmable\u201d text he oughta adapt\u2014I humbly propose that whatever Nolan chooses, it should be a horror movie. The Odyssey<\/em> has already mapped out what that might look like.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Melinda Sue Gordon\/Universal Pictures<\/span><\/figcaption>

With The Odyssey<\/em>, Christopher Nolan has finally whetted his appetite for horror. Might he have it in him to do a full horror feature?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Throughout The Odyssey<\/em>\u2019s epic runtime, I was reminded less of Homer and more of H.P. Lovecraft, the architect of cosmic horror who instilled terror in our insignificance at the feet of uncaring giants. His legacy, however complicated (read: he was a vile racist), is cemented in works like The Call of Cthulhu<\/em>, At the Mountains of Madness<\/em>, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. <\/em>It isn\u2019t just because they share a penchant for tentacled monsters, but rather Nolan\u2019s choice to frame his \u201cmonsters\u201d from eye-level view and render most of the Greek pantheon absent yet omnipresent, that feels evocative of Lovecraft. (Aside from Charlize Theron\u2019s Calypso, only Athena, played by Zendaya, appears on screen, and there\u2019s an easy argument to make that she is only a product of Odysseus\u2019 tortured conscience.)<\/p>\n

This may be chiefly owed to Nolan\u2019s insistence for tactile realism in his craft. We\u2019re talking about a director who built a sixty-foot puppet on set so that Matt Damon and co. could react to anything besides a tennis ball, and hired actual seven-foot tall stunt guys<\/a> to play the Laestrygonians. But Nolan\u2019s trait has the ironic effect of making the Greek gods real\u2014it\u2019s just in terms of how humanity saw them for millennia. You don\u2019t see the god(s) you worship, but you\u2019ve weathered hurricanes and watched lightning crack the sky. Before science told us how warm moisture and air density create thunderstorms, it was easy to chalk it up to the gods being really, really pissed off.<\/p>\n

Since The Odyssey<\/em> opened wide, scholars have criticized Nolan\u2019s choices. Among the critics is none other than Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation made The Odyssey<\/em> a twenty-first century best-seller and whom Nolan credited for shaping his film. In an interview with Associated Press<\/em><\/a>, Wilson lamented Nolan\u2019s omission of the gods in the story.<\/p>\n

But Nolan didn\u2019t actually exclude them. On his blown-up IMAX canvas, Nolan framed them in negative space\u2014a feature, not a bug, in Nolan\u2019s system of filmmaking. That\u2019s also a pillar of cosmic horror, where the things that overwhelm the characters are typically out of sight. (Cthulhu, perhaps the most iconic monster in Lovecraft\u2019s canon, \u201cappears\u201d through written secondhand testimonies.) In the times when Lovecraft characters do<\/em> lay eyes on unspeakable things, it\u2019s a traumatic experience that shatters their grasp of the natural order. In Nolan\u2019s film, the sight of a humongous cyclops is strong enough to make your sensory systems go haywire. Polyphemus\u2019s slow-burn reveal has the tempo and vibe of a masked slasher approaching their first victim until you glimpse the beast in all its terrible and naked glory.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> is as stirring as it is tenebrous; even quiet moments around fires and warm meals are just a respite from the ever-encroaching darkness. That\u2019s a uniquely Lovecraft signature, where victories aren\u2019t won by brute force or clever strategy but by sheer luck of the draw. Many of Lovecraft\u2019s tales end with the protagonists given the meager reward of simply living to see another day (if at all), and they are almost always left knowing too much to live a normal life again. That\u2019s basically Odysseus\u2019s routine at sea, and Nolan paints his journey in the same exact bleak shades. Though we know Odysseus is eventually triumphant in his journey, he\u2019ll never reclaim his throne, and he lives forever burdened by his actions at Troy and the deaths of his men.<\/p>\n

The Odyssey <\/em>is a lot of other things: a studio tentpole, a summer blockbuster, another crowd-pleaser centered on bringing Matt Damon home. It\u2019s also an exercise in cosmic horror, snuck in the casing of an oversized fantasy epic. It\u2019s a moving proof of concept for all that Nolan inherently possesses to suit the horror genre, which I think he would be exceptional. I\u2019m also not alone in feeling this way. Nolan himself has spoken as much on his movie\u2019s press tour, notably with The Hollywood Reporter<\/em><\/a>. In a post-release interview, Nolan confessed that his latest work allowed him to whet his appetite for horror, and offers insight as to how he might approach a true horror movie.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always believed that horror as a genre has to be approached very carefully from a conceptual point of view,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cIn other words, you have to have an amazing idea. When you go see a film like Obsession<\/em>, that\u2019s an amazing idea. That movie works like a motherfucker. It\u2019s not about the technical side. It\u2019s not about what technical itches I would have to scratch. It\u2019s about story. So I\u2019m always looking.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not in the business of telling artists like Christopher Nolan what they should do. But if he is deadly serious about wanting to make audiences squirm and shiver again, as I did during The Odyssey<\/em>, I will happily nudge him to the horror section.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.\u201d \u2014 H.P. Lovecraft, 1927 I shivered when I saw the Cyclops. Before Christopher Nolan\u2019s latest blockbuster The Odyssey, I was only aware of the Homeric tale via osmosis. Because my high school, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2511163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[495425,274717,495426,285977,466866,285684,446345,495424,488699,438951],"class_list":["post-2511162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-nolan-should-do-horror-next","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-f0bb08c6-434e-4d5e-923c-9d19d9765e9b","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-read_time-5","tag-shorttitle-after-the-odyssey","tag-sponsored-false","tag-subsection-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Christopher-Nolan-Should-Make-a-Horror-Movie-Next.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2511162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2511164,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511162\/revisions\/2511164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2511163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}