Christopher Nolan: ‘The Odyssey’ Has Me More Eager Than Ever to Make a Horror Movie
Christopher Nolan says he’s now seriously thinking about making his first horror movie, his clearest hint yet that a genre pivot could be next.
Fresh off a record-breaking opening for The Odyssey , Christopher Nolan says that, yes, the pull of horror is still there — but he won’t make one until the concept is bulletproof. In new interviews, he described a decades-long fascination with the genre and why he keeps holding back despite flirting with it in his latest film.
“It very much whets my appetite for more.”
That’s how Nolan put it to The Hollywood Reporter, before adding that genre alone isn’t enough to move him into a full-on horror feature.
“But I’ve always believed that horror as a genre has to be approached very carefully from a conceptual point of view,” he told THR, pointing to Brian De Palma ’s Obsession as an example that, in his view, works because the core idea is undeniable — not because of stylistic flourish.
Waiting for the right idea
In a separate conversation with Empire, Nolan called horror the most visceral of genres and said that nothing else relies so completely on making an audience feel something immediate and physical. That standard, he explained, is why he’s still waiting for a premise strong enough to carry a feature.
He also traced the unnerving side of The Odyssey to two places: ancient myth and 1980s craft. He framed the film’s darker undertones around Zeus’s law — a code of mutual respect — and the tension it creates between civility and danger. And for the film’s more frightening imagery, including how he built Circe’s menace, he credited the practical-effects era of the ’80s as a major influence.
For now, Nolan says he hasn’t found the concept that clears his own bar. As he put it, the appetite is there — the movie just needs the right idea to exist.