| Jacob's Ladder | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Adrian Lyne |
| Written by | Bruce Joel Rubin |
| Produced by | |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Jeffrey L. Kimball |
| Edited by | Tom Rolf |
| Music by | Maurice Jarre |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Tri-Star Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 113 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25 million[2] |
| Box office | $26.1 million[3] |
Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 Americanpsychological horror film[4] directed byAdrian Lyne, produced byAlan Marshall and written byBruce Joel Rubin. It starsTim Robbins as Jacob Singer, an American infantryman whose experiences during his military servicein Vietnam result in bizarre hallucinations. The supporting cast includesElizabeth Peña andDanny Aiello.
Jacob's Ladder was produced byCarolco Pictures and released byTri-Star Pictures on November 2, 1990, ten years after being written by Rubin. The film garnered acult following, and its plot and special effects became a source of influence for various other works, such as theSilent Hill video game series.A remake was released in 2019.
On October 6, 1971, American infantryman Jacob Singer is with the1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in Vietnam'sMekong Delta, when his unit comes under attack. As many of Jacob's comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior with some sufferingcatatonia,convulsions, andseizures. Jacob flees into the jungle and is stabbed with a bayonet.
Jacob awakens on theNew York City Subway and glimpses a tentacle protruding from a sleeping homeless person. When he finds the subway station exit locked, he crosses the tracks and is almost hit by a train. The year is 1975; Jacob is a postal worker and lives in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jezebel. Jacob misses his old family and experiences visions of them, especially the youngest of his sons, Gabe, who had died in an accident before the war. Jacob is beset by disturbing experiences and apparitions, including glimpses of faceless vibrating figures, and narrowly escapes being run over by a pursuing car. He attempts to contact his regular doctor at the localVA hospital but is informed that there is no record of him ever being a patient there and that his doctor has died in a car explosion.
At a party thrown by friends, a psychic reads Jacob's palm and tells him that he is already dead, which Jacob dismisses as a joke. After declining to dance with her, he appears to witness an enormous creature dancing sexually with Jezebel before killing her; Jacob collapses. At home, Jacob experiences a dangerous fever, which Jezebel attempts to bring down with a painful ice bath. Jacob wakes up in another reality where he lives with his wife and sons, including Gabe. In Vietnam, a wounded Jacob is evacuated under fire in a helicopter, which is subsequently shot down.
One of Jacob's former platoon mates, Paul, contacts him to reveal he is suffering from similar experiences. Shortly after, Paul is killed when his car explodes. Commiserating after the funeral, other surviving members of the platoon confess that they have all been experiencing horrifying hallucinations. Believing that they are suffering the effects of a military experiment performed on them without their knowledge or consent, they hire a lawyer to investigate. However, the lawyer quits the case after reading military files documenting that the soldiers were never in combat and were discharged for psychological reasons. Jacob's comrades back down, while Jacob suspects they have been threatened into doing so. Jacob is then abducted by suited men, who attempt to intimidate him. Jacob fights them and escapes but is injured and nearly paralyzed in the process. He is taken to a nightmarish hospital, where he is told he has been killed and this is his home, but hischiropractor friend Louis comes to his rescue and heals him. Louis quotes the 14th-century Christian mysticMeister Eckhart, who said that one must make peace with death to realise that the "devils tearing your life away" are instead "angels, freeing you from the earth".
Jacob is approached by a distressed man who has been following him from a distance and who had dragged Jacob away from Paul's burning car. Introducing himself as Michael Newman, he tells a story of having been a chemist withthe Army's chemical warfare division where he designed a drug he called the Ladder, which massively increased aggression. Michael claims that to test the drug's effectiveness, a dose was secretly given to Jacob's unit before the battle, causing some of them to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy. Michael's story triggers a vision of Jacob wounded in Vietnam, which shows his attacker as a fellow American soldier. Jacob returns to his family's home, where Gabe leads him up the staircase into a bright light. In atriage tent in 1971, military medics declare Jacob dead, saying that he had fought to stay alive but now looks peaceful.
The horror of the movie would be in the revelation that hope is hell's final torment, that life is a dream that ends over and over with the final truth: that life was never real, that we are all creatures trapped in eternal suffering and damnation.
The title refers to the Biblical story ofJacob's Ladder, or the dream of a meeting place betweenHeaven and Earth (Genesis 28:12). The film's alternative title isDante's Inferno, in a reference toInferno byDante Alighieri.[6][7][8] Screenwriter and co-producerBruce Joel Rubin perceived the film as a modern interpretation of theLiberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, theTibetan Book of the Dead.[9][10] Rubin said: "The inspiration in a sense is my entire spiritual upbringing. Once you have ameditative life you start to see that the world is really far different than what it appears to be. What appears to be finite is really couched in the infinite, and the infinite imbues everything in our lives."[11] Before writingJacob's Ladder andGhost, also released in 1990, the Jewish-born Rubin spent two years in aTibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal.[2][12] Previously, he had also written theafterlife-themed filmsBrainstorm andDeadly Friend.
Rubin began work in 1980, inspired by a nightmare in which he dreamt about being trapped in a New York City Subway station. For several years, he failed to sell the script. He was given offers from studios specializing in low-budget horror productions, but waited for better funded studios and directors. The script began attracting attention afterAmerican Film named it as one of the top ten unproduced screenplays.[13]Thom Mount ofUniversal Pictures said he "loved it, but it was not for his studio". DirectorsMichael Apted,Sidney Lumet andRidley Scott all expressed an interest, but still no major studio was ready to invest in Rubin's "toometaphysical" stories as "Hollywood does not make ghost movies". Eventually, afterDeadly Friend was filmed byWes Craven in 1986, Rubin's screenplays forJacob's Ladder andGhost were picked byParamount Pictures.[9]
In 1988,[2]Adrian Lyne, who described the script as one of the best he had read, decided to directJacob's Ladder instead of an adaptation ofThe Bonfire of the Vanities as he had originally planned. The project was canceled following ownership and policy changes at Paramount; the executives had doubts about the ending and the scenes in Vietnam. Theindependent film studioCarolco Pictures took over the production, giving Lyne a greater creative control[9] and a budget of $25 million.[2] Rubin became the co-producer, along withMario Kassar,Alan Marshall andAndrew G. Vajna.
I can see why people didn't want to make it for so long. It reads like a novel, and it's very intimidating because it's written so descriptively. Bruce had these very literal images of heaven and hell that I didn't know how to bring off. How do you introduce a character with horns?
Lyne, who downplayed Rubin's "intimidating"Old Testament themes,[14] prepared by watching documentary films about the war in Vietnam and reading chronicles ofnear-death experiences.[2] The plot device of a long period ofsubjective time passing in an instant was inspired byRobert Enrico's 1962 short filmAn Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,[15] one of Lyne's favorite films.[9] Lyne saidJacob's Ladder depicted "a man'sdying process ... while he remembers his wife and kid and while he imagines a life with Jezzie that he's never had. So it's his memory and imagination and essentially the whole film is just in his mind."[16] The cinematographerJeffrey L. Kimball based the dream sequences on the art ofFrancis Bacon.[13]
Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Peña were among the first to audition for the roles of Jacob and Jezzie, but Carolco Pictures demanded more established stars.Dustin Hoffman,Richard Gere andAl Pacino were considered for Jacob, whileAndie MacDowell,Julia Roberts,Demi Moore andMadonna were considered for Jezzie. Lyne cast Robbins and Peña anyway.[13] Robbins said the film presented for him "a great opportunity to go in a different direction. I love doing comedy, but I know I can do other things as well."[2]
Filming began in New York City on September 11, 1989, on location inStaten Island,Queens, andBrooklyn. Jacob and Jezzie's apartment was filmed on a soundstage in West 23rd Street, while the subway dream sequences were shot on an abandoned level ofBergen Street station. TheSeaview Hospital of Staten Island; theEssex County Veterans Courthouse of Newark, New Jersey; andMadison Square Garden were also used. The military advisor was Vietnam veteran CaptainDale Dye,[17] who provided a five-dayboot camp training for the actors playing soldiers in the Vietnam storyline (including Robbins,Pruitt Taylor Vince,Eriq La Salle andVing Rhames). The war scenes were filmed in the jungles nearVega Baja, Puerto Rico, featuring theUH-1 helicopters provided by thePuerto Rico National Guard. Filming concluded atTortuguero Lagoon in January 1990 with a $40 million budget.[13]
The special effect sequences were filmed in camera, without post-production effects. In several scenes, Lyne used abody horror technique in which an actor is recorded shaking his head around at a lowframe rate, resulting in horrifically fast motion when played back. Lyne said he was inspired by the art of the painterFrancis Bacon when developing the effect.[18] In his screenplay, Rubin used traditional imagery of demons andHell. However, Lyne decided to use images similar tothalidomide deformities to achieve a greater shock effect.[15] After many heated arguments,[2] Lyne persuaded Rubin. Lyne and Rubin were influenced by the work by the artistH. R. Giger, the photographersDiane Arbus andJoel-Peter Witkin, and theBrothers Quay's 1986stop motion short filmStreet of Crocodiles.
Vietnam was really a means to an end. It was a plot device rather than something we were trying to make a huge issue of.
At the end of the film, a message is displayed saying thePentagon denied that the Army testedBZ, ahallucinogen, on its soldiers during the Vietnam War. Lyne said a part of the inspiration for this motif wasMartin A. Lee's bookAcid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and Sixties Rebellion, but noted that "nothing in the book suggests that the drug BZ ... was used on U.S. troops".[9] According to Lyne's audio commentary,test audiences found the first version of the film overwhelming, and so about 20 minutes of disturbing scenes, mostly from the last third of the film, were removed.[19]
Jacob's Ladder opened on November 2, 1990, distributed byTriStar Pictures.Jacob's Ladder: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack with the music byMaurice Jarre was released byVarèse Sarabande in 1993 and then byWaxwork Records in March 2020 on a single LP.[20][21] Rubin's companion book, released byApplause Theater Book Publishers on the same day as the film,[9] features a final draft of the screenplay, including thedeleted scenes, and his essay on making of the screenplay and the film.[15]
The Special EditionDVD was released byArtisan Entertainment on July 14, 1998, containing three deleted scenes ("Jezzie's Transformation", "The Antidote" and "The Train Station") along with several other special features, such as audio commentary by Adrian Lyne and a 26-minutemaking-of documentary "BuildingJacob's Ladder".[22] On September 14, 2010, the film was released onBlu-ray Disc byLions Gate Entertainment and retains all of the special features of the DVD version, along with two promotional trailers, omitting only a TV spot that came with the DVD.[23][24]
The film took the number one spot at the weekendbox office in North America, garnering ticket sales of $7.5 million from 1,052 screens.[25] However, the attendance dropped fast and its overall domestic box office result was only $26,118,851.[3]
On review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes, 72% of 68 reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The site's consensus reads: "Even with its disorienting leaps of logic and structure,Jacob's Ladder is an engrossing, nerve-shattering experience".[26] OnMetacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 20 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[27] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.[28]
Roger Ebert of theChicago Sun-Times wrote thatJacob's Ladder left him "reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair," and called it a "thoroughly painful and depressing experience — but, it must be said, one that has been powerfully written, directed and acted." He awarded it three and a half out of four.[29]Janet Maslin ofThe New York Times wrote that this "slick, riveting, viscerally scary film about what in other hands would be a decidedly unsalable subject, namelydeath" is "both quaint and devastating."[30]
Desson Thomson ofThe Washington Post wrote that the film is "ultimately flat on its surrealistic face, the victim of too many fake-art sequences".[31]Owen Gleiberman ofEntertainment Weekly wrote that "Jacob's Ladder is so 'dark' it sucks Robbins right down with it. By the time Jacob is being strapped to a bed and wheeled down a hospital corridor strewn with bloody limbs, it's hard to care whether theOrwellian image is a hallucination or not. You just want out."[32]Kim Newman called the film "effectively the blunt remake" ofCarnival of Souls.[14]
According toIGN's review of the DVD release in 2004, "After movies likeSe7en, it may not pack the same subtle horror for today's audiences it did when it was first released, but it's still a great film."[22]IGN's review ofJacob's Ladder's 2010 Blu-ray release called it "an emotionally poignant, creepy horror masterpiece."[23] According toSlant Magazine,Jacob's Ladder is "a bizarrely cohesive hybrid of war movie, character study,art film, and horror flick" and "the very act of watching the film is so emotionally draining that the viewer leaves the film feeling worked-in; the thought of repeat viewings is daunting yet insatiable."[24]John Kenneth Muir called the nightmarish hospital scene "one of the most terrifying moments in all of 1990s horror cinema". Muir further wrote: "In its musings about death, about the end we all fear, Jacob's Ladder proves a deeply affecting and meaningful motion picture. After a screening, you'll immediately want to hug the people you love and then go outside and breathe the fresh air, or otherwise affirm your very existence."[33]
Rubin's script was included on the list of "Hollywood's ten best unproduced screenplays" byAmerican Film in 1983.[2] In 1991,Jacob's Ladder was nominated atHorror Hall of Fame II for best horror film of the year, losing toThe Silence of the Lambs. The film was also featured inBravo's 2004 documentary miniseriesThe 100 Scariest Movie Moments[34] and in the 2009 book1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. In 2013, theJacob Burns Film Center projectionist Andrew Robinson chose it as his favorite scary film.[35]LA Weekly listed this film in thevetsploitation subgenre.[36]
Jacob's Ladder greatly inspired theSilent Hill horror franchise,[37] including the 2006film adaptation byChristophe Gans.[38] The film's influence on their works was also recognized byRyan Murphy, writer of the 2011 TV seriesAmerican Horror Story: Asylum,[39] and byShinji Mikami, creator of theResident Evil series and director of the 2014 video gameThe Evil Within.[40]Kim Manners prepared for directingThe X-Files episode "Grotesque" by listening to the music fromJacob's Ladder.[41] The music video for the 2010 song "Nightmare" byAvenged Sevenfold is a homage to the famous hospital scene from the film, chosen by the directorWayne Isham, because the band's deceased drummerThe Rev was a fan of the film.[42] DirectorChristopher Nolan has said thatJacob's Ladder, specifically its use of abstract imagery, was an influence on his 2023 filmOppenheimer.[43]
Several direct references toJacob's Ladder exist within theSilent Hill games, particularlySilent Hill 2 (2001), whose plot is largely inspired by the film; the head-twitching effect seen in the film recurs throughout the game series, and inSilent Hill 2, the protagonist, James Sunderland, wears anM-1965 field jacket nearly identical to the one Jacob wears in the film.[44] Gans said hisSilent Hill 2 film "tells the same story" asJacob's Ladder as "everything happens in the last glimpse of consciousness" and thus he also hid the references to the film within his adaptation.[45] Other references to the film itself include the mentions in the 2002The Twilight Zone episode "Night Route" (dialog[46]) and the 2010The Simpsons episode "The Squirt and the Whale" (visual).Rick and Morty refers to the film in the 2020 episode "Never Ricking Morty" with a flashback when Morty stabs Rick with a bayonet, reminiscent of what happens to the main protagonist at the beginning of the film.[47]
In music,Claytown Troupe used asample of Michael's quote 'It's a fast trip ... ' at the beginning of the track "Rainbow's Edge" from their 1991 albumOut There.UNKLE sampled dialogue from the film in their 1998 "Rabbit in Your Headlights" and again in 2003 in "Inside".VNV Nation's track "Forsaken" from the 1998 albumPraise the Fallen ends with the quotation from Eckhart. "Devils" fromIVardensphere's 2011 albumAPOK begins with the same quotation. A sample of Jacob's cry 'Stop it, you're killing me!' is used in "Next in Line" fromNevermore's 1996 albumThe Politics of Ecstasy.Biosphere's track "City Wakes Up" from albumMan with a Movie Camera features a sample of departing train sounds from the subway scene.
The film's possible influence can be arguably seen in many other works ranging fromM. Night Shyamalan's 1999 hit psychological horror filmThe Sixth Sense[48] toPeter Arnett's controversial 1998CNN report "Valley of Death" about the 1970Operation Tailwind.[49]Jeff Millar ofHouston Chronicle wrote thatGiuseppe Tornatore's 1994 psychological thrillerA Pure Formality uses the plot device ofJacob's Ladder mixed with several other sources.[50] According toPremiere,Massy Tadjedin's 2005 psychological thrillerThe Jacket "is a film for those who don't rememberJacob's Ladder, perhaps for someone like Jacob himself," as it "resemblesJacob's Ladder too much for its own good."[51]
Jacob's Ladder is a longtime running gag on the podcastHow Did This Get Made?, in which a group of comedians examines various bad movies. At some point in every episode, either co-hostJason Mantzoukas or an audience member will posit that week's film might be "aJacob's Ladder situation."[52]
A remake directed byDavid M. Rosenthal and written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorp and Jake Wade Wall was released in 2019, to negative reception. The film starsMichael Ealy,Jesse Williams,Nicole Beharie,Karla Souza, andGuy Burnet.[53]
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