Retrospective Film Review

From Dusk till Dawn (1996) • 25 Years Later

Two criminals and their hostages unknowingly seek refuge in a truck stop populated by vampires, with chaotic results.

Quentin Tarantino exploded onto the scene with his low-budget crime thriller Reservoir Dogs (1992), but while audiences and critics were kneeling at his altar by the time Pulp Fiction (1994) was nominated for numerous Academy Awards (winning ‘Best Original Screenplay’), it was From Dusk till Dawn that sealed the deal for me. And that’s despite the fact Tarantino himself wasn’t behind the camera, as his friend Robert Rodriguez (Desperado) directed his screenplay’s strange mix of crime and horror.

Robert Kurtzman (a writer, director, producer, make-up artist of some repute) hired Tarantino to write From Dusk till Dawn as his first paid writing assignment, based on Kurtzman’s own rough outline and premise. This was around the time when QT was selling scripts (Natural Born Killers, True Romance) and polishing others (Crimson Tide), and Universal Pictures made it known they wanted to produce From Dusk till Dawn as a sequel…