Quentin Tarantino’s films are sometimes brutal and frightening, but you won’t find a pure horror film in his filmography. The auteur filmmaker has a whole list of favorite horror films, as Far Out reported two years ago. Influences of the genre can be seen again and againbe it From Dusk Till Dawn or Death Proof. But even though these films are very close to the horror genre, they are not real horror films in the true sense.
Tarantino was initially afraid of real serial killers
In another Far Out article from this year, the online magazine reports on two moments in which Tarantino was afraid. One of them is the first time the directing legend actually felt fear. In a conversation with Eli Roth Eli Roth’s History of Horror He talked about seeing a police report highlighting wanted criminals in the city. One of them scared him very much and triggered panicked ideas:
The rest of the night this guy broke into my house and killed my entire family. Shortly before the Manson Family emerged, a serial killer was running around Los Angeles killing people with a hammer. This guy scared the hell out of me.
This experience can also be found in his last film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. The first film that scared him, on the other hand, was actually a horror comedy.
This horror comedy scared Quentin Tarantino as a child
This film was the first time Tarantino was afraid of the screen: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein combine his favorite childhood genres: horror and old comedy. In Eli Roth’s History of Horror he talks about how this film actually had both. Only Abbott and Costello are funny in the film, but the monsters don’t break out of character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4EA_mxglJo&ab_channel=AMCTVUK
In the book Quentin Tarantino: The Man, The Myths and The Movies also explains what it was about this film that scared him. Accordingly, it was a scene in which Frankenstein’s monster throws a nurse out of a window and kills her. It probably became clear to him that the film was not only funny, but also a horror film. And the most important thing about it: Tarantino says he was only three or four years old when the horror comedy taught him fear. At the time he thought it was “the best film in the world”.