From Dusk Till Dawn

Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 film is two pictures stacked into one. The Gecko brothers take a preacher’s family hostage while running from Texas, the rendezvous is a desert bar, and no vampire appears until the film is half over. The script’s origin explains the shape. Quentin Tarantino wrote it in 1990 for fifteen hundred dollars, commissioned by Robert Kurtzman of the makeup effects house KNB, which in return did Reservoir Dogs free. The back half was built from the start as a showroom for that company: the plot stops and scenes present transformations in sequence. Kurtzman says the split is why the film sat unmade for years. While it waited, Tarantino moved the Ezekiel 25:17 speech, written for the preacher Harvey Keitel eventually played, into Pulp Fiction. Salma Hayek’s dance with the snake was not in the script when she signed; she has a snake phobia and agreed only once told the part could go elsewhere. The ratings board objected less to the massacre than to a burning clerk whose legs twitch in spilled popcorn. A good fit if you want to watch Keitel’s lapsed preacher turn his own loss of faith into literal weaponry after the switch. Not for anyone unwilling to sit through what Richie, played by Tarantino, does to the hostage family across the whole first half.