Before stumbling into the New Year, ray gun cocked and Bigfoot traps baited with tender Chupacabra breast meat, I think it only appropriate to offer a moment of silence to the memory of the legendary Dan O’Bannon, who passed away on December 17th of this year.
Rather than regurgitate a cursory posthumous bio, complete with a comma-strewn list of the man’s many accomplishments, I’d like to single out a few of his creative contributions to the beautification of the pop cultural landscape and the redefinition of genres.
The Postmodern Horror Film
The genius of O’Bannon’s 1985 movie “The Return of the Living Dead” isn’t that the characters at the center of the zombie apocalypse have seen “Night of the Living Dead” and, as a result, know the “rules” surrounding a zombie’s mannerisms and weaknesses – it’s the way O’Bannon pulls the rug out from under these characters when he reveals that Romero’s fictional rules don’t apply to actual zombies. That’s right – eleven years before a smarmy Jamie Kennedy checked off horror clichés amidst the most banal of slasher rampages, O’Bannon created a self-aware horror film that was smarter, funnier, gorier and host to a better set of ‘80s punker jugs than any of its latter day imitators. Also – those Running Zombies that everyone attributes to “28 Days Later” and/or James Gunn’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake? Straight from the mind of O’Bannon, who knew that nothing would undermine the myth of the shuffling, moaning brain-eater better than a cemetery full of screaming, sprinting corpses.
The Blue-Collar Science Fiction Film
How insane is it that saying, “Dan O’Bannon gave the world ‘Alien’” actually reduces the importance of his achievement? Not only did his script (an idea he had while working with John Carpenter on the wonderfully half-baked sci-fi comedy “Dark Star”) revolutionize the Sci-Fi Horror genre, but it also issued in an entirely new era of science fiction – the era of the proletariat. Looking at Kubrick’s 2001 and its predecessors, you’d think spaceship clothes washers didn’t have a “colors” setting. Meanwhile, the vessels themselves looked like newly sanitized hospital hardware drifting through the cosmos in search of an Ikea. “Alien” found a bedraggled company of mining ship employees piloting a giant, greasy refinery vessel through the barely charted backwaters of empty space. Beginning to end, from the opening conversations about wage percentages up to the moment that Ripley uncovers the horrible secret of their mission’s hidden company agenda (“crew expendable”), the film gives a voice to the working class of the future – hard-toilin’ folks who don’t have the time or money to have arguments with singing, homicidal computers or piddling, melodramatic trouble with tribbles, but who have stories to tell, nonetheless.
Also
O’Bannon wrote the 1997 straight-to-video inbreeding-themed horror flick “Bleeders,” which I purchased because it had a viscous, red corn syrup solution that oozed around inside a little pouch affixed to the front of the VHS box. Alas, much like O’Bannon, the goo eventually dried up into a lifeless, chunky crust. Dan – you will be missed!
