Three Faces of Fear

 

Remakes have always been commonplace in Hollywood but for decades television series versions of feature films were always judged to be second rate. For every successful small screen adaptation like Buffy the Vampire Slayer there are dozens of forgettable attempts like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Lethal Weapon.

In 1962 after the movie going public had been scared out of the seats by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) actor-producer Gregory Peck had the idea to bring John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners to the big screen. Changing the title to Cape Fear, Peck hired the director of his previous film The Guns of Navarone (1961), Englishman J. Lee Thompson to bring a special Hitchcock-like quality to the project. Still fresh from his Oscar winning role as a southern lawyer fighting racism in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Gregory Peck this time starred as a different kind of lawyer, one capable of bending the law to protect his family who are being stalked by a psychopathic rapist and ex-con played by Robert Mitchum. Opposite Peck in one of the most memorable villain roles in his career, Mitchum is a terrifying menace whose bestial swagger oozes leering insinuations about Peck’s young teenage daughter. Fresh from Psycho, Hitchcock music composer Bernard Herrman contributes a nerve-jangling film score that accentuates the unrelenting threat and shock for a Sixties audience who were unaccustomed to overt depictions of sexual assault. Reactionary in its depiction of a justice system that seems unable to protect average citizens from violent criminals, the film was a significant hit with both critics and movie-goers alike.

In 1991 director Martin Scorsese and producer Steven Spielberg decided to update the same material for a contemporary remake. This Cape Fear would increase the violence and dramatic stakes by giving marital problems to the protagonist lawyer played by Nick Nolte, who in this version willfully suppressed evidence that could have helped his client’s case. Modern sensibilities are also expressed by turning the previously innocent daughter into a more sexually curious adolescent played by an Oscar nominated Juliette Lewis. Scorsese chose his most frequent on-screen leading man Robert De Niro to play the evil ex-convict who tortures the family of his former defence attorney whom he blames for his conviction. Unfortunately, De Niro’s theatrical Southern drawl and cartoonishly mannered performance undermines the credibility of the suspense. His cardboard villain together with Scorsese’s baroque camera and lighting effects, give the film an artificial melodramatic quality that only seems to work in the scenes of sexual danger between Lewis and De Niro. An hysterically colorful version that does not improve on the black and white original, Cape Fear (1991) must be viewed as a missed opportunity by this pair of world class filmmakers.

35 years and many f-bombs later comes this new 10 part streaming adaptation of Cape Fear starring Amy Adams, Patrick Wilson and Javier Bardem. Although executive produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and despite some rather heavy handed visual and musical references to their 1991 film, this Apple TV series version has all the excessive ingredients of an over-egged pudding. Now it’s the wife (Adams) who is the alcoholic defence lawyer whom ex-con (Bardem) blames for his wrongful imprisonment. To put it even more over the top, she gave birth to a daughter from a failed relationship during the trail, and after her client was convicted she married the prosecutor (Wilson). There is also a son, whose anti-social drug addiction leads him to bite off his own toe while in an anger induced stupor. Not to be left out of the various family crises, the husband and father is also using some sort of secret drug self-medication. Blood and gore take the place of any suspense in the early episodes making any shocks seem cliched and predictable. What aren’t as predictable are the performances, especially those of the two protagonists Adams and Bardem. Both are humanistic rather than theatrical in their acting styles, communicating a tense realism to their scenes together that helps to tamp down the melodramatic plotting. Their welcome chemistry should have kept audiences watching until the end but they were poorly served by a very free adaptation of the novel that goes right off the rails in terms of plausibility. The previous versions had their moments of histrionics but they never had you questioning the filmmakers for their narrative choices.

Cape Fear has always been a powerful story. It deals with the issue of legal justice versus primal instincts. Now more than ever themes like these are important to address and portray. Do we want to live in a society protected by the rule of law or do we allow the slow degradation of our primitive selves to govern our actions? Watch any of these three versions and ask yourself that crucial question.

A 1984 Voyage into the Unknown

 

1984 was supposed to be bad year for all of us if you believed George Orwell’s dystopian novel written in 1948. For me it was a memorable year and turning 16 was something I excited about. Being born in August means that the summer movie season is always an important time for me, but the Christmas movie season was also a big event and many of the films that opened around the holidays in 1984 still give me a thrill. Of all the films I saw at that time of year there were two that have special significance for me.

Living in Peterborough, Ontario at the time I was envious of the large capacity cinemas in Toronto. In 1984 a few of the old movie palaces were still in business and none was more spectacular the University Theatre on Bloor Street. The art deco theatre, built in 1949, was the largest cinema in Canada, with 1300 seats and a giant curved screen.

For me, going to the beautiful University was a more spiritual experience than going to church. The sheer size of the auditorium with its grand balcony made you feel in your bones the excitement of movie-going.

In May of 1980 I had stood in line for an hour at the University to see The Empire Strikes Back a day after it opened. The crowd was electric with excitement, for this was a sequel to the most popular film we had ever seen: Star Wars in 1977. The audience (including me) reacted ecstatically to the film.

In December of 1984 I decided to make a special trip to Toronto and the University Theatre to see another much-anticipated film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Being of a younger generation I had never seen 2001 on the big screen, only on television where its state-of-the-art design and special effects were impressive but diminished by the reduced size of the image. 2010 boasted the cutting edge of model and camera effects available to filmmaker Peter Hyams during this era before CGI. I can remember holding my breath and gripping the armrest while anxious astronaut John Lithgow executed a very long and dangerous spacewalk between two spacecraft. I was stunned and a little frightened by the recreation of the vast airless expanse of space near Jupiter. This was the first film I had ever seen starring Helen Mirren, whose Russian heritage made her ideal casting as a Soviet cosmonaut. Leaving the cinema that afternoon I felt like I had experienced as close as I would ever come to space travel.

Later that same day I went uptown to the Hyland Cinema at Yonge and St. Clair, where I saw the controversial adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. The Hyland was not as grand as the University, but with 790 seats it was still bigger than any cinema we had in my hometown. Still buzzing from my previous voyage into space, I was completely unprepared for this mind-blowing film. From its strikingly original production design and costumes, to its eclectic international cast of actors, Dune was a unique product that resulted from Dino De Laurentiis, a very commercial producer, hiring an idiosyncratic artistic filmmaking talent, writer-director David Lynch. With no points of reference for its singular world-building story, anyone watching the film who hadn’t read the book felt like they had been dropped in the ocean and told they had to swim to shore without any aid. At first, I felt overwhelmed by the detailed sci-fi mythology and unpronounceable names of characters. However, I very quickly decided to just let the film wash over me, keeping track of who and what I thought important while enjoying the other-worldly atmosphere created by the filmmaker’s imagination. I appreciate what Denis Villeneuve did with his version of Dune in 2021, but having survived this challenging film in 1984 has meant that Lynch’s vision will be what I measure all others by.

After my trip to Toronto, I enjoyed many other films during the holidays of 1984 including City Heat, the only film starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds; Starman, director John Carpenter’s sentimental sci-fi romance film; Runaway starring Tom Selleck as a cop in the future fighting evil robots and high tech weaponry; Johnny Dangerously an hilarious gangster comedy starring Michael Keaton; and finally A Passage to India, the multiple Oscar nominated last film of David (Lawrence of Arabia) Lean. None had the impact or sense of an event that I had sitting in those two now long forgotten cinemas.

1984 was a pretty good year for Hollywood movies, but I will remember it for my trip to Toronto, when I took a cinematic journey to the far reaches of space and beyond.

The Golden Years of Koepp

 

In Hollywood, screenwriters are one of lowest jobs on the creative totem pole. Since the beginning, producers and directors have used multiple screenwriters on any given project, often without credit. One of the most well-known names from this profession is David Koepp. He has been a successful working screenwriter for over 30 years. Koepp wrote or co-wrote some of the most memorable films of the 1990s and 2000s including: Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, Mission Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In the years 2025-26, Koepp has had his best years ever with five of his screenplays playing in cinemas. I loved them all, with my favourite being a project particularly close to his heart.

Koepp began his miracle year with the screenplay for Presence (2025), a haunting family drama directed by Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh uses a clever observational camera style to communicate the point of view of a ghost or presence in an average suburban American house after a new family has just moved in. Less interested in jump scares and cheap shocks, Koepp has fashioned an emotional chamber piece that uses the supernatural to deepen the resonances as he comments on the modern alienation of parents and their grown children. Due to its ghostly first-person narrative, Presence was a hard sell to audiences. Happily, it ended up as a significant financial success, mostly due to its low budget. Pay close attention, this is a film that gets better with a second viewing.

Koepp immediately teamed with Soderbergh for an encore, now switching genres and countries with the British espionage drama Black Bag (2025). Spotlighting the starring duo of Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as a cool pair of married spies, Koepp keeps the audience guessing with this smart and stylish exercise in paranoia by asking the question: “Can you trust your spouse if neither of you can be honest about your jobs?”. Soderbergh and Koepp are clearly enjoying themselves with their colourful cast of characters, including the tongue-in-cheek casting of 007 Daniel Craig’s Miss Moneypenny Naomie Harris, and ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan as a sardonic spy master. This is John Le Carre territory updated for a savvy post millennial tech generation. Despite good publicity and solid praise from the critics, Black Bag failed to connect with a wide audience. Hopefully it will feel more at home within the variety provided by streaming programming.

For his summer blockbuster of 2025, Koepp returned to the franchise that made his name. Jurassic Park Rebirth (2025) is not so much a re-boot as it is a “requel”, continuing the original legacy storyline while featuring new characters that can take the series in a different direction. An improvement on the previous Chris Pratt Jurassic trilogy, Rebirth introduces Scarlett Johansson as a tough mercenary, and Jonathan Bailey as a paleontologist leading a specimen recovery team to one of the experimental genetics islands now completely populated by mutant dinosaurs. Although slightly burdened by the second longest running time in the series, this is a very entertaining late entry that benefits from Koepp’s extensive knowledge of the subject matter as well as his confident staging of the suspense scenes. If the franchise were to continue, it needed the kind of assured script that Koepp has delivered.

In 2019 David Koepp published his first novel Cold Storage, a sci-fi horror story that had started as an outline for a movie. Koepp has said he enjoyed the new medium of a longer narrative, taking advantage of the opportunity to deepen the backstories of his characters in a way that a shorter film script cannot. With its sterling pedigree and popular genre ingredients the novel was sold a film project almost immediately. Not surprisingly, Koepp was hired to adapt his own work, and he wasn’t afraid to alter the satirical tone of the book to a more comedic blend of gore and laughs. The resulting film of Cold Storage (2026) has to be one of the most affectionate recent homages to the horror comedies of the 1980s. Extra value is provided by two bona fide horror heroes: Joe Keery, one of the stars of the retro 80s Netflix series Stranger Things, and Brit scream queen Georgina Campbell, highly praised for her role in Barbarian (2022). Fresh from his hilarious turn in The Naked Gun (2025), Liam Neeson gives another facetious performance as a bioterror operative who suffers from chronic back pain at the most inconvenient times. Shot in 2023, this European production sat on the shelf for over a year before being dumped into cinemas in February 2026 where it received little advance publicity. Sadly, despite strong reviews, cinema goers only had a week to see it before it disappeared. Hopefully this labour of love will its audience on streaming.

Koepp soon had another project opening in the summer blockbuster season of 2026. One that came with high expectations as he re-united with his War of the Worlds (2005) director Steven Spielberg for another alien invasion epic tantalizingly entitled Disclosure Day. Thankfully this was a welcome return to the era when Spielberg was the most popular and talented filmmaker working in Hollywood. Koepp and Spielberg acknowledge that Disclosure Day is meant to be the third part of an alien encounter trilogy beginning with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and followed by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). The story idea was developed by Spielberg and Koepp after researching the many recent alien spacecraft sightings that have re-ignited interest in the subject. Ever the showman, Spielberg can’t resist giving the audience the rollercoaster ride that it craves. With an infallible instinct where to put the camera, he effortlessly whips up a pleasing blend of suspense, emotional drama and action thrills. It is a solid piece of entertainment, although far from completely original. For example, keen cinephiles might nit pick his inspirations, including a villain obviously influenced by his friend and fellow film director Brian De Palma’s 1978 sci-fi/thriller The Fury. It is Spielberg’s most satisfying piece of genre filmmaking in nearly 20 years and it is all thanks to David Koepp – the screenwriter with the golden touch.