HERE’S TO DEVIL’S NIGHT: THIRTY YEARS WITH THE CROW
Cinema has changed a lot in the last thirty years. Sequels and reboots and vast comic book universes have become dominant. We experience movies differently too. A whole generation now knows only streaming. Memories of the recent past seldom seem more quaint than in the searing glow of the lights of the video store.
Before Netflix there was Blockbuster and before Blockbuster, at least in England, there was a wondrous array of independents, small chains and video rental services run out of the back of newsagents.
Borrowing a film on tape couldn't be simpler. We'd walk to the video store – by the time I was in the habit Blockbuster was more or less the only game in town – and look for a film to enjoy. Clacking through the racks, we'd pull out one box and read the bumph. Then another. And another. Streaming feels different, less tactile, but some of us were swiping through films before it was cool.
Alighting upon a choice with next to no information to back it up, we'd take it to the counter, where it would be swapped out of its meticulously designed artwork, stripped of its outward identity as if to highlight the inherent guesswork involved in taking it home and watching it. If we were lucky, the previous renter might have rewound it to the start before returning it.
“Believe me. Nothing is trivial.”
Eric Draven, The Crow (1994). Improvised by Brandon Lee.
It was in a nondescript white Blockbuster box that I discovered The Crow a few years after its theatrical run. I knew nothing of the lore or context but the contents of that VHS tape did something wonderful to my brain.
As a teenager, I struggled at life. There was no real hardship, no cause to complain about a lack of opportunity despite not coming from wealth. I just wasn't very good at it. It didn't suit me; I never felt at home or at rest. I was angry at a world I didn't recognise in myself.
I watched The Crow in the dark in the early hours of the morning, alone in an apartment I didn't want to be in, during my most difficult years. Rain tapped the windows, as of someone not-so-gently rapping. I immediately became obsessed.
The Crow is set in a neogothic facsimile of Detroit where it can't rain all the time but it seems to anyway. It drips with danger, possessed of the kind of enveloping, pervasive evil that can only originate in fiction.
The movie opens on a vast shot of the city from above, the sky teeming with fiery light, on Devil’s Night. In the world of The Crow, October 30th is an annual orgy of arson directed by the city’s criminal underworld. Smoke billows up through street grates, illuminated by lightning. Eric Draven rises from the dead and claws himself out of the grave.
This Detroit couldn't be further from a nineties suburban childhood on the south coast of England but I was seduced by it completely. The character of the place, while necessarily exaggerated to rid it of perfections, called out to the disaffected. We can never go there but we know its godforsaken streets and alleys because they are ours too.
The movie was released in the United States on 13th May 1994. It was a Friday, naturally. It was the first US feature by Alex Proyas, a 33-year-old Australian director, who took on the challenge of bringing the idiosyncratic source material to the big screen.
The production deadline was missed in the most tragic circumstances. Brandon Lee, the star of the picture, was killed in an accident on the set. Paramount exercised its right to not pick it up but Miramax stepped up to the plate in early 1994, ensuring that the darkest darkness was dragged out into the light.
Thirty years later, The Crow still has its wings. For all the mystique of its genesis, all the sideshow stories and the indescribable sadness that inevitably drifts along on the airborne vapours of the fictionalised Detroit, at the heart of the matter is a piece of art that’s both of its moment and lost in time. The novelty might have worn off but the essence remains and the movie, three decades after its release, stands tall.
The Crow isn't immune to the sins of Hollywood. It had three sequels, if they can be called that with no shared narrative thread beyond the conceit of the returning dead, and they slipped from awful to abysmal. There was a television series that was more related to the original and at least had some heart. The unwelcome reboot has finally come to pass.
City of Angels, Salvation and Wicked Prayer have the same overall premise as the original but not the black magic. On paper it was replicable; the bare bones of the plot are simple. The Crow adheres to a structure that fits neatly into narrative theory, the secret story sauce of ten thousand and one flicks before it and since. But the 1994 version has something more. It seeps into your psyche. It becomes you.
The graphic novel on which the movie is based is a deeply personal labour of love and loss by James O’Barr, a Detroiter and former US Marine who knew all about both. O’Barr grew up in foster care and cut his artistic teeth producing instructive works in the military after his fiancée had been killed by a drunk driver. O’Barr wore his bereavement like a millstone. His few public recollections are affecting even to those for whom equivalent tragedy remains mercifully out of reach.
The story of The Crow is woven through with sadness of its own. The movie was shot mostly at night at Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. From the very first day of filming in February 1993 it was beset by a sequence of mishaps and accidents. A member of the crew was badly burned in one of them. A truck caught fire in another.
Production of The Crow was regarded and indeed reported as plagued long before Lee was killed. Production coordinator Jennifer Roth told the media that she didn’t find the unfortunate happenings at Carolco unusual. “We have a lot of stunts and effects,” she said. “I’ve been on productions before where people have died.”
By the end of the same month there was another. Lee was shot in the early hours of March 31st and passed away twelve hours later. He was 28 years old. In late April, North Carolina District Attorney Jerry Spivey announced that the cause of Lee’s death was negligence.
The investigation concluded that the broken-off tip of a dummy cartridge used to film a close-up became stuck when the dummy was removed. When the gun – now loaded with blanks – was fired at Lee by co-star Michael Massee, the tip went with it. Massee died in 2016, taken by cancer shortly after his 64th birthday. He continued to work until his passing but was haunted for life by the accident on the set of The Crow.
“I am reminded of Brandon in all things true, beautiful and strong.”
Eliza Hutton
Distraught, the cast and crew broke from production. Proyas returned to Australia and a quick decision to continue was followed by nearly two months away from the set, a rest in the shadow of heartache. The Crow had eight filming days remaining. Though not all required Lee’s presence – while those most affected were his loved ones – the push to complete the picture did pose a practical problem.
Proyas and producers Jeff Most and Edward R. Pressman completed The Crow with the use of state-of-the-art digital techniques and Lee’s stunt double. Chad Stahelski was a friend and martial arts training contemporary of Lee’s and went on to work extensively with Keanu Reeves. He was Reeves’ double in The Matrix and acted as a stunt coordinator on the two remaining films of the original trilogy. Twenty years after standing in for Lee, Stahelski directed the smash hit that ignited the John Wick franchise.
The circumstances around the film are often said to give it that extra spark, a particular kind of gothic mystique, but the truth is more mechanical. After Lee’s death, Proyas and the writers made significant changes to the script that were geared towards softening the story.
Michael Berryman’s character, a guide for souls in purgatory by the name of the Skull Cowboy, was to serve as a narrative spirit for Draven. He had to be cut reportedly because Berryman and Lee had important remaining scenes still on the schedule.
Without the Skull Cowboy’s guilelessly spelled-out plot signposts, The Crow feels tighter. A straightforward anti-hero comic book movie overloaded with characters larger than life, “turned out to be a really nice, beautiful love story,” according to Ernie Hudson, who played Detroit cop Darryl Albrecht. If that was the production’s tribute to its fallen star, it was a fitting one.
After his tortured resurrection, Draven picks off the street gang who murdered him and his fiancée, Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas), 365 nights earlier.
He stabs Tin Tin (Laurence Mason) to death with his own throwing knives in an alleyway. He injects junkie Funboy (Massee) with syringes of morphine. He incinerates ringleader T-Bird (David Patrick Kelly) in a runaway car with a lapful of dynamite. Seventeen nameless bodies later, he throws Skank (Angel David) out of a window onto a police cruiser.
All the while, Michael Wincott’s übergothic Detroit criminal overlord Top Dollar is guided towards a realisation of what’s happening on his watch. In an epic final showdown, the crow notches a kill of its own before a freshly mortal Draven and Top Dollar slug it out with swords on the church roof overlooking the graveyard. Top Dollar meets a grisly end and Draven returns to the earth.
It really is that linear. The Crow emerged from its tragic retooling as a masterful demonstration of the value of soul over complexity. Simplicity allows the story to shine and it’s the performance of the star that elevates it to something truly special.
Lee is transcendent. Regarded by the industry as a martial artist and supporting actor but with his own designs on being a leading man, his embodiment of Eric Draven feels like a fulfilment of destiny. Actor and character are one.
The flame that flickers around the edges of The Crow is the result not only of Lee’s death, but of his so fully inhabiting a deathless avenger zombie – mortality and eternity, truth and fiction, all rolled into one painted face and preserved forever in the most awful way.
“Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil?”
Eric Draven, The Crow (1989) by James O’Barr
Proyas and Lee lobbied for the entire picture to be shot in black and white. The studio wouldn’t sign that off and Proyas elected to wash out the colour instead. David Lynch is a lover of what he calls happy accidents. Proyas stuck the landing and the consequent style of The Crow is one happy accident that seems to draw to it the dark hearts and sorry souls.
In the early- to mid-nineties, fashion and music were in flux. There’s something very 1994 about how The Crow looks and sounds, but so much of its styling and soundtrack proved timeless, in subcultural standards if not the mainstream, and that’s a big part of its durability.
The original soundtrack is thought of as one of the best there’s ever been. As a lover of The Cure and the proud owner of a Nine Inch Nails tattoo that required three painful days in the chair, it’s fair to say there are some songs in The Crow that mean a lot to me. But Graeme Revell’s haunting score is too often overlooked and is essential to the cult success of the film.
When I first saw The Crow I was a sensitive and angry kid, confused and irritated by the chore of existence. The film appealed to me. I was enthralled by the pictures it painted, by the notion of vengeance, by the love story at its core, by the music, by each kill and every cheesy one-liner delivered in the midst of a performance for the ages.
I’ve seen The Crow more times than is necessary or healthy. I know it inside out and back to front, body by body and word for word. By that measure alone, one might label it my favourite film. But it’s not that. It’s more. The smoke of a Detroit that never was has left its scent on my skin and in the threads of my clothes. We all absorb a little of our cultures, and I’ve been passively inhaling The Crow for more nearly thirty years.
In a very real sense, The Crow has been one of few constants in my life. It took me through school and university, out of adolescence and into adulthood. It shaped my taste in music and art as well as cinema. It made me appreciate atmosphere and mood. Though I live out here in the mundanity of the real world, The Crow has become my portal to the fictional one. It’s the lens through which I view the land of make-believe.
As the film adaptation of O’Barr’s gut-wrenching tale reaches its thirtieth anniversary, I’m still that sensitive and angry kid. It’s just that I have other layers now, too: experience, maturity, professionalism, insight and knowledge, artistic outlets for what would otherwise be a ruinous temper. I’ve learned how to process my existence in the world.
I love, and I’m loved. I recognise the emotional intensity of The Crow as an adult in ways I never could have as a teenager. Buildings burn. People die. But real love is forever.