8 Famous Movies That Started Out In Completely Different Genres
4. Christopher Nolan Initially Envisioned Inception As A Straight Horror Film
There are moments of horror in Christopher Nolan's brilliant sci-fi blockbuster, Inception; moments intended to shock and scare, like the one that sees Mal, Cobb's dead wife, coming at him with a knife in an apartment towards the end of the film. Looking at that scene, it's easy to see how Inception could've been a horror.
And Nolan originally did conceive his sci-fi heist flick as a horror movie that would have seen an early version of Dominic Cobb's character traversing through nightmarish dream layers, each one built to shake him to his core. Think The Matrix meets Jacob's Ladder.
During the development stages, however, which spanned more than 11 years, Nolan eventually introduced the notion of "dream stealers" and begin to reimagine Inception as a kind of science-fiction heist flick instead.
As such, the horror themes that had kick-started the premise in the first place seemed oddly out of place, so Nolan made the decision to play them down. He probably made the right choice, of course, though Inception does retain some really scary scenes - the director intentionally nodding at the film's origins, perhaps.