As speculation around Quentin Tarantino’s final movie continues, a horror movie has been suggested by fans as his 10th film, but Tarantino has already made a horror movie… and it didn’t go well. Quentin Tarantino has earned the respect of critics, viewers, and fellow filmmakers thanks to his mastery of writing dialogue, his unique visual narrative, and engaging stories and characters, though he’s also a controversial filmmaker due to the big doses of blood and violence in his movies. As a result, there’s always a lot of expectation around his projects, and now more so than ever.

For years, Tarantino has stated that he will retire after making 10 movies, and given the way he counts his movies (as he considered both Kill Bill movies as one), he has one more project to go. Tarantino’s final movie was going to be The Movie Critic, but he ended up scrapping the project. It’s now unclear what Tarantino’s final movie could be, but there’s a lot of speculation around it and many suggestions from the audience, among them a horror movie – but Tarantino already made one, and it became his worst movie.

Death Proof Is Quentin Tarantino’s Only Horror Movie, But It Failed

Death Proof Is Part Of The Grindhouse Project

Back in 2007, Tarantino brought Death Proof, his contribution to the Grindhouse double feature, along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. As the Grindhouse project paid homage to exploitation films from the 1970s, Tarantino made something different from his past movies but with his trademark visual and narrative style. Death Proof, then, is an action-slasher movie that follows Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), who kills women with his death-proof car and makes them look like accidents. However, one day he targets a group of women who know how to stand up for themselves and fight back.

Tarantino got inspiration from his fascination with stuntmen and the “death-proof” cars they use for their stunts, leading him to create a slasher movie. However, he realized he couldn’t do a “straight slasher film” because he found the genre to be quite “rigid”, so he took the structure of a slasher and “just do what I do” (via Rolling Stone). Still, Death Proof is a slasher movie, thus making it Tarantino’s first and so far only horror movie, but, unfortunately, it didn’t match the success of his past movies, and it’s widely regarded as his worst movie.

There are many reasons why Death Proof failed, among them the different pace between the first and second part of the movie, the underdevelopment of its characters, and its underwhelming ending. Despite getting praise for his style of dialogue, Death Proof brought out a weakness of Tarantino and showed he isn’t that good at writing dialogue for female characters, which contributed to its failure.

Could Tarantino’s 10th & Final Film Be Another Horror Movie?

Quentin Tarantino Could Redeem Himself In The Horror Genre

With The Movie Critic no longer being Tarantino’s 10th and final movie, speculation about what his final project will be about has been reignited. Tarantino scrapping The Movie Critic has revived hope for his final movie being a horror movie, despite having already tried the slasher genre with Death Proof. Surely, Death Proof is often not recognized as a horror movie and Tarantino could do a completely different type of horror movie if he wanted to, but he hasn’t expressed interest in his final movie being a horror one.

However, Tarantino is unpredictable, and as seen with what happened with The Movie Critic (and many others of his unmade and canceled projects), he can change his mind at any moment and could surprise the world with a full-on horror movie. The future of Quentin Tarantino’s final movie remains unknown, but if he doesn’t make a horror movie, fans can rest assured that they already have an example of what a Tarantino horror movie would have been like thanks to Death Proof.

Source: Rolling Stone.