In 1988, Robert Kurtzman started working on a vampire flick called From Dusk Till Dawn to showcase his talent with makeup effects. The film wouldn’t be made for almost ten years, and by then it had become something wholly different. No one can know for sure what Kurtzman’s treatment would have turned into if he hadn’t lost his scriptwriter to a Stephen King movie, but it was never intended to be a cultural touchstone, and a sprawling franchise including two sequels, a video game, and a running television series. When Kurtzman scraped together fifteen hundred bucks to hire Tarantino to write it, his work had only appeared in two films, and Tarantino was still working in a video store.
Today, Kurtzman’s makeup work has been seen in everything from Evil Dead 2 to current favorites like It Follows. If you watch horror, you’ve seen his handiwork. Tarantino is a household name. When he hired the unknown writer, the intent was to put the Gecko Brothers on the road to Mexico, team them up with the Fuller family, and throw them to the vampires in about fifteen minutes.
Even if you’ve never seen the film, I probably don’t need to tell you that’s not what happened.
To the casual viewer, what makes From Dusk Till Dawn special is the flip in the middle of the film. For the first half of the movie, we’re watching The Gecko Brothers (played by George Clooney in his first “big” movie role, and Tarantino himself) tear shit up and try to escape the Texas Rangers and the FBI on their quest for a criminal haven known as “El Rey.” Then, after a scene that functioned as the sexual awakening for many a teenager, there are motherfucking vampires everywhere.
The reality is a little more complex. While we’re sitting back and enjoying the ride for the first time, the surprise is everything. When you’re watching it for the hundredth time, George Clooney’s ice cold one liners are everything. The viewer doesn’t ask how the film earned the flip, or even how it earned our suspended disbelief, because it’s done so well, we don’t realize we should.
From the start, we’re faced with a hard proposition – the film asks us to root for two of the most despicable criminals on film. The solution, at the start, is simple. The ranger and the cashier are so crass, prejudiced, and awful that we don’t particularly mind when Richie flips out and kills the ranger. We don’t even mind when the cashier is taken down in the first moment of the film that hints at the horror movie lurking at the end of the line.
Two very important things happen in this scene that set you up for everything that follows:
1. Seth Gecko does not become violent, does not loose his cool, does not fire his gun until his brother is injured.
2. At 1:47, the two innocent girls, who haven’t said horrible things about the disabled, who haven’t shot anyone in the hand, who only ever just stood there in fear with guns to their heads – escape.
This is a twist on an old trick – if the first time you see a character, they’re sympathetic, you’ll be sympathetic to them for the whole ride. If the first people you see Seth and Richie kill are absolute pieces of shit, well, that’s a start. The movie is quick to remind you who we’re dealing with. Within minutes, Richie is revealed to be a sex offender, possibly a serial killer. We see a grinning newscaster tally their death toll. We understand that we’re dealing with, in Seth’s words, “a couple of real mean motor scooters.”
From here, the movie quickly undoes any goodwill we were willing to extend to Richie. He brutally murders (and probably rapes) the meek, terrified hostage, then treats the entire event with disinterest. If not for Clooney’s incredible performance as Seth, the movie would have trashed any suspension of disbelief. Clooney comes through with disgust and horror on his face, and the juxtaposition of both anger and compassion for his brother and suddenly we’re on board again.
Now, the movie gets ramblin’. We meet the Fuller family, the Geckos’ only chance at crossing the border. Seth continues with his personal morality – he only hurts who he has to, as much as he has to. Richie becomes more menacing by the moment. From the second he meets Kate Fuller, the teenage girl played by Juliette Lewis, the audience has to cope with an intense discomfort every time he looks, or speaks to her. Many movies try, and few succeed, at smashing two sets of rivals together to fight a larger evil.
When the vampires show up, it should be difficult to believe the Fullers wouldn’t decide to let Seth and Richie die immediately, and work as a family to escape both their kidnappers and the otherworldly horror they are facing – but they don’t.
This is where the first half being a straight crime movie really pays off. Seth is the perfect crime protagonist – cool under pressure, plays by his own set of rules (that are still definitely rules), and gets what he wants. This is the guy the primal part of us really wishes we could be. Seth Gecko never thinks of the perfect thing to say ten minutes after a conversation, he’s never caught off guard, and you get the idea that he’d rather not hurt anyone. He just wants his cash and a bed somewhere he can get fresh Mexican food. He becomes ever more sympathetic when paired with his brother, who is a more realistic version of a criminal. He’s clearly disturbed, takes joy in violence, and has no sense of justice – by his rules or anyone else’s. Without Seth, Richie is impossible to root for. With Seth, you only want him to live so Seth does not suffer.
Seth is okay with using his brother’s predatory menace to threaten the Fuller patriarch, but agrees easily when Jacob Fuller says, “If he touches her, I’ll kill him.” He intervenes when Richie makes Kate uncomfortable. He beats the shit out of the guy who objectifies her outside the bar.
When Kate shouts, “Richie, watch out!” we believe it. It is easy to believe because we’ve seen them settle into a cautious companionship. We’ve seen them accomplish their goal together, and start to relax at the bar now that the “hard part” is over. Seth even allows Jacob Fuller to dress him down when he’s amped up over almost getting kicked out.
What is special about the movie are these small moments where something greater pokes its head out. When Seth convinces Jacob that he is not a faithless preacher, but a “mean motherfucking servant of God.” When Richie is sacrificed for the group’s safety, and Seth says, he is giving Richie “the peace in death I could not give you in life,” the group rallies around him. He lashes out, but Kate is still understanding. Jacob’s move to save his family is a worn trope, but it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. When Seth and Kate are back to back, their families dead, she asks if she should save the last two bullets for themselves and he tells her to keep fighting, and we see how far these two have come, how much they’re willing to trust each other and fight for each other. We believe it so much, that when Kate asks to join Seth at the end, and he refuses, it feels a little wrong.
The next time you hear someone (it might be me) talking about how this film opened up something most people didn’t think could be done – become a wholly different movie right in the middle – remember that it never actually did that. This was a movie about two families coming together to fight evil all along.
