Christopher Nolan is one of modern cinema’s most respected directors, making his latest movie Oppenheimer automatically one of the year’s most-anticipated releases. On the surface, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man chiefly responsible for developing the atomic bomb that helped end World War II, would not seem relevant to horror fans. However, in his own words, Nolan has now said that it is indeed kind of a horror movie.
The film sees Cillian Murphy, of 28 Days Later fame, as the titular Oppenheimer, in a race against time to try to end the war. In the process, he becomes responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It’s easy to see where some horrors could emerge in telling a tale such as this. Speaking to Wired recently, Nolan went so far as to define it – albeit loosely – as a horror movie. Here’s what he had to say about it:
“It is an intense experience, because it’s an intense story. I showed it to a filmmaker recently who said it’s kind of a horror movie. I don’t disagree. It’s interesting that you used the word nihilism earlier, because I don’t think I’d quite managed to put my finger on it. But as I started to finish the film, I started to feel this color that’s not in my other films, just darkness. It’s there. The film fights against that.”
Nolan declined to name the filmmaker who chose those words, but the important thing here is that he agreed with that classification. Nolan has yet to make an outright horror movie, though he’s gone horror-adjacent with movies like Insomnia. So, even if this isn’t a horror movie in what we might call the traditional sense, it sounds like it may well be the closest he’s come thus far. Speaking a bit further, the director also said that people who have seen the movie are having a pretty visceral reaction to it.
“Some people leave the movie absolutely devastated. They can’t speak. I mean, there’s an element of fear that’s there in the history and there in the underpinnings. But the love of the characters, the love of the relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done.”
Nolan penned the screenplay for the film personally based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The stacked cast for the film also includes the likes of Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Florence Pugh and Kenneth Branagh.
Oppenheimer hits theaters on July 21.
