• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 689 0

the inevitable sequel, he added jokes that alienated his audience. His career was also potentially damaged after his biggest break: getting the job as the director for Poltergeist, produced by Steven Spielberg. It was one of the most anticipated horror releases of the decade. Soon after shooting began, however, rumors began flying that Spielberg took control of the project. The Los Angeles Times suggested that Spielberg was directing scenes. Hooper says the reporter showed up on a day when Spielberg was helping shoot some minor footage for establishing shots. The story reported that it was difficult to tell who was directing. Hooper claims that he was involved with every aspect of the film, and his stamp is certainly on some of the scares. Nevertheless, the perception stuck, and Hooper, whose political skills were never that able, could not change that. “I’m still learning from that experience,” Hooper says, pausing to collect his thoughts in an empty lobster house in Encino. “I’m really not sure. I’m not ready for that just yet. In politics, when you say something it can’t be retrieved. Once it’s out there, you’re through.”

Hooper struggled through a few scripts. He was replaced on one project and after Poltergeist, made an outer space flop, Lifeforce, penned by Dan O’Bannon. He dropped out of several films before shooting started. He signed up to direct a zombie movie written by some of the makers of Night of the Living Dead before abandoning it. The troubled production, which had undergone several transformations, eventually landed with O’Bannon.

In the wake of the success of Alien, O’Bannon became preoccupied with the idea that someone was trying to kidnap him. He stayed out of the public eye and kept photos of his face scarce. With the money he made, he bought a house in Santa Monica, but then spent an extra $75,000 on a security system. His gun collection grew. O’Bannon remained the alienated pessimist, certain of the evil outside his door. If anything, he became even more like the monster in Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” cloistered in his tower, resentful to the point of rage.

In Return of the Living Dead, he made his directorial debut, a zombie comedy. It was 1985. Along with pushing the potential humor of the undead further than it had ever gone before—when one zombie ate a paramedic, he famously radioed back, “Send . . . more . . . paramedics”—the movie pioneered the fast-moving zombie that would become standard by the twenty-first century. While it developed a cult following, the movie remained more obscure than it should be. The next year, producers David Giler and Walter Hill put together Aliens, the sequel to Alien that helped launch director James Cameron into the top tier of Hollywood directors. O’Bannon was not invited to play any role. Nor did Hollywood give him another chance at a big science-fiction movie. He made one more movie, The Resurrected, an adaptation of a story by Lovecraft. Despite being one of the most influential minds in genre movies, he had only two directing credits, and is overlooked in discussions of the major figures of horror.

But he did find balance in his personal life. After Return of the Living Dead, he reconnected with his old girlfriend from USC, Diane, then single, and they started dating and fell in love all over again. She provided ballast to his occasional madness. And he was fascinating to her. She had stayed away for years, since he never seemed like the kind of man to settle down. She even purposely didn’t see Alien. When she reconnected with him after Living Dead, she found him a changed man, calmer, surer of what he wanted. “Dan could say out loud everything I wanted to say, but didn’t have the nerve,” she explains. “[I had] a ringside seat to brilliance, adventure.”

O’Bannon passed away in 2009, ending his three-decade battle with Crohn’s disease mere hours before the opening of James Cameron’s Avatar , a $400 million blockbuster whose ambition, expense, and seriousness of purpose are, in a way, a direct tribute to the success of O’Bannon’s passionate lifetime commitment