The Odyssey’s Scariest Scene Proves It’s Time for a Christopher Nolan Horror Movie

“Horror is a valid genre in cinema, the same way as drama, or romance, or comedy, or anything else,” Christopher Nolan told me a few years ago. “Movies can be anything. And when we speak of entertainment in movies, we're not necessarily talking about fun and laughter and happy things. We're talking about engagement. We're talking about being riveted by a very tense and dramatic story. And possibly appalled, possibly horrified.”

The Odyssey is not a horror film, but within its twisting tale lie pockets of terror, and the most palpable chills the director has put on screen yet. Nolan has always danced with the unsettling in his thrillers, all the way to the stalking threat at the heart of his debut, Following, but his latest overtly channels the genre in more than one of its sequences, presenting both body horror and otherworldly creatures in a way that’s designed to shock and scare, sneaking them into the film’s adventure like a Trojan Horse full of nightmares ready to pounce. It’s incredibly effective, and our clearest proof yet that it’s time for a full-blooded Christopher Nolan horror film.

The world of myths and legends presents Nolan with a new challenge, but new opportunities. With so many of his previous works preoccupied with the problems the human mind can pose — quite literally, when it comes to Inception — The Odyssey uses its vast canvas to expose its hero, Odysseus, to all manner of external obstacles. Yes, the unpredictable terror of the sea must be respected, as should pitch-black caves with a 30-foot-high Cyclops roaming around them or beaches with the dead waiting to be awoken beneath them, but there’s no doubt that one character brings about this adaptation's most chilling moment: Circe.

Masterfully brought to life by Samantha Morton, she’s a presence that brings something entirely new to a Nolan film: full-fledged body horror. When Odysseus’ crew eagerly chow down on the stew before them, little could they, nor us, know quite the gruesome nature of what would follow. Himesh Patel and friends’ skulls are steadily sculpted by Circe’s hands, manipulating their heads like human clay on pottery wheels as skin sheds, sinew stretches, and bones crack until they resemble the pigs their famished nature resembles. It’s truly horrifying, and it resurfaced childhood nightmares within me that were implanted in my too-young brain after watching the donkey transformation scene from Disney’s Pinocchio.

But this is far from cartoonish animation, instead having been constructed entirely with in-camera effects — something Anne Hathaway, who stars as Penelope in the film, couldn’t quite believe when she first saw it. “I remember when I was watching it, I thought, ‘Oh, so Chris has finally broken the rule.’ This has to have been done with computers because how on earth?” Hathaway told me. “It doesn't make sense. So in my head, I'm just like, ‘Oh, I can't wait to find out what's behind that.’ And then I asked him, and he said, ‘Nope, it's all practical. All practical, done on the day.’ And I won't give away how that happened because people should discover it for themselves. It was just a combination of ingenious filmmakers using practical effects with a brilliant actress giving an astonishing performance. I'll never forget it. It's a highlight of the film for me by far.”

Those secrets are being held closely to the cast and crew’s chests for now. Special effects transformations like this have been made for decades — just take a look at the still very impressive An American Werewolf in London — but there’s so much more going on in Circe’s hut that I can’t quite fathom that it isn’t the work of CGI. It’s body horror on a level the likes of David Cronenberg would be proud of, and despite being one of his generation's greatest filmmakers, something completely new and unexpected for Nolan.

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The horror that awaits inside the witch’s home is one thing, but the buildup to it is equally effective. The whole tone of the movie eerily shifts as whistling winds take the place of the otherwise thundering score — so much so that I practically felt a chill pass through the theatre screen I was sitting in. Big cats from lions to tigers flank the grassy pathway, calling each rocky nook home in this unnatural habitat of theirs. These are familiar creatures to us, unlike the one-eyed goliath and six-headed Scylla seen elsewhere on this adventure, but their uncannily calm demeanour is altogether more unsettling. I couldn’t help but feel like we’d arrived somewhere like Summerisle and been transported into the sort of folk horror film that The Wicker Man remains the standard-bearer for. It’s far simpler filmmaking on a technical level compared to the screeching contortions that will follow, but just as effective.

Nolan has enjoyed throwing us off-kilter in the past. Indeed, when I spoke to him in 2023 about his Academy Award-sweeping Oppenheimer, he told me that he hoped that it would leave “people with sort of an uneasy feeling,” and that its Trinity Test centrepiece aimed to deliver both “beauty and horror in equal measure, that contradictory impulse.” There’s little doubt that he succeeded there, with the “celebratory” scene that follows in which a shell-shocked Cillian Murphy comes face-to-face with the horror of what he has created appearing in front of him with a blinding flash.

Again, it’s an internal horror projected externally, much like a symptom of Scarecrow’s fear toxin in Batman Begins or how The Joker’s trauma is painted all over his face in The Dark Knight — the disturbing, clownish makeup covering an altogether much scarier reality: the ambiguous origin of those scars and the very human horror story likely at the source of them. But The Odyssey switches things up, placing its terror front and centre for stretches of its extensive runtime, giving us a fascinating window into a new side of Nolan.

I wouldn’t dare to predict what a Christopher Nolan horror film would actually look like — much like how I would never have imagined him following up a billion-dollar box office hit about a nuclear physicist with a retelling of one of our planet’s oldest myths — but I do know that I want it. In truth, though, with a track record like his, only extended by his astonishing interpretation of The Odyssey, I’m at a point knowing that whatever he chooses to do next, I’ll be first in line to see it, hoping to be unsettled as much as I am entertained.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.