Twixt: Val Kilmer and Horror

Val Kilmer didn’t have a lot of horror in his filmography, but he did have the Francis Ford Coppola movie Twixt

We lost one of the all-time greats this month. Val Kilmer could and did do it all, from stage to writing to acting to producing, directing, and even singing on more than just The Doors movie soundtrack. Tyler Nichols recently released a wonderfully thoughtful list of his top 10 performances and while we can argue on the order depending on when and how you saw him first, you can’t argue with all the entries being great watches. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same about Kilmer’s horror output. While he had some genuinely fun horror adjacent titles like Red Planet, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Ghost of Darkness – which, I kid you not, can be looked at as a slasher movie starring lions – much of his horror was straight to video. One that wasn’t straight to video and has a more interesting story about its making than what was on screen is Twixt. Later called B’Twixt Now and Sunrise, it also stars an Oscar nominated legend and was written, produced, and directed by one of cinema’s most prolific directors, who has as many classics as he does hot messes. Let’s look at the journey of Val Kilmer and one of horror’s more strange entries in Twixt.

On the outside looking in, Twixt is a weird mish-mash of genres and styles that never really mesh together. I remember renting it in ’09 when it came to my blockbuster and not really feeling it and now watching the definitive cut that came out a couple years ago… well… I feel the same. I see what was attempted, and knowing how the movie was envisioned, I see what could have been, but the final product is still a mess. It’s a very personal and heartfelt mess, but a mess nonetheless. Twixt has a narrator played by Tom Waits, who is reuniting with Coppola from their Dracula collaboration, giving us the rundown of the story, but he never comes back. Hall Baltimore, who is described by other characters as a low rent Stephen King, is traveling on a book tour and finds himself in a small town to promote. This town is so small that the bookstore is also the hardware store, and Baltimore finds himself drinking early and often while trying to make money. He is known for a specific thing and is trying to make something for himself rather than just sell books. He is haunted by a tragedy with the death of his daughter and is at odds with his wife about his drinking, his career, and their very strained relationship.

He is approached by the town sheriff, played by a scenery chewing Bruce Dern, who is also a part time writer of course. Sheriff LaGrange shows him a corpse with a stake through her heart and explains about the history of the town as well as the gang of roving teens across the water that he “old man shakes a fist at the sky” raves about. LaGrange wants to collaborate on a story with Hall and Hall goes into a drunken bender that also gives him vivid dreams and the town is dreamlike even when he is awake. He meets eccentric locals, vampire pre-teens, and has conversations with Edgar Allan Poe, who stayed in the town and invades his dreams to discuss writing and despair. Of the 12 storylines that appear in the movie it’s hard to latch onto or care about any one of them. The final cut at least does a good job of keeping the movie grounded.

While the original cut has Baltimore realizing and admitting he has guilt over the death of his daughter and writing another bestseller before visiting the morgue and seeing that the victim with the stake is actually 12-year-old V, played by Elle Fanning, that he has been talking to through much of the movie, the final cut knows when to stop. The movie ends where it should have with an emotional Baltimore admitting his guilt and letting the sadness out before the credits roll and a very haunting score closes out the film. We don’t know if he ever wakes up or passes in his sleep peacefully after letting his demons go. There is no profit to be made off of his sorrow, just sleep and personal absolution.

Much of the movie is kind of low rent looking and silly at points, but the three principle leads all do well. Dern is doing what he’s done for much of his career, especially late in his life with a crotchety but believable town sheriff, while Elle Fanning is charismatic and tragic as V, who is self-conscious and unsure of life, or afterlife in this case. The movie belongs to Kilmer though. He plays the character straight no matter what’s going on, does great impressions of Brando and James Mason while his character is drunk, and the emotions he displays at the end are almost worth the price of admission… almost. The movie isn’t great, but I did mention it has a backstory and that does give the project more soul than you’d expect.

One of the interesting aspects, and unfortunately maybe why the movie is kind of the mess that it is, is the editing style – or experiment, rather – that director Coppola wanted to try with it. He called the style Live Editing and envisioned himself as somewhat of a conductor during screenings of the film where he would implement a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure angle to the film and shorten or lengthen scenes based on audience reaction. This, of course, was impractical, but this is the same guy that would try another gimmick a couple decades later with Megalopolis. William Castle would have been proud. The final cut that was made incorporated different versions of all of the scenes and at a paltry 80ish minutes, it just doesn’t work. That frenzied change probably stems from what the film was made for in the first place. An apology and forgiveness.

Hall Baltimore in the film is most haunted by the death of his child which he feels responsible for and wants to do something just for him instead of just continuing to put out the witch novels that he is known for. Francis Ford Coppola felt guilty over the death of his son in a boating accident, just like the accident in the film, and wanted to make a more personal film, a film for him instead of stuff like Apocalypse Now or the Godfather trilogy. The pain that Kilmer puts out with Baltimore coming to terms with his guilt and sadness is a direct avatar for Coppola and his own guilt and sadness. Hopefully Coppola could finally forgive himself like Hall does at the end of his journey. Twixt had a budget of $7 million dollars and while it only made back a little over a million of that at the box office, which was mostly international until that new cut, and had generally negative reviews. None of that matters. This movie wasn’t for the critics or even the fans. It was for Francis Ford Coppola and Val Kilmer knew exactly what that meant. Doing this movie was just the kind of guy Val was and the outpouring from former colleagues on social media confirms that, particularly a post from Coppola himself. who first saw Val when he was 14 and knew what we would get for nearly 4 decades.

Val Kilmer didn’t do horror often, really only in straight to video affairs, but there’s a solid chance he was great in all of them. While I can’t speak to the merits of things like the TV movie Murders in the Rue Morgue or straight to video and streaming flicks The Thaw, 7 Below, The Super, or the much maligned The Snowman, I’d wager a guess that he was at least entertaining in them and at most a reason to watch the film. What I can vouch for is that he gave us great fictional characters like Gay Perry in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iceman in Top Gun, Simon Templar in The Saint, Chris from Heat, and Nick Rivers from Top Secret. Furthermore, he didn’t just play but BECAME Doc Holliday, Jim Morrison, and John Holmes. I can’t name everything he was in, or this would just become a list of movies, but pick your favorite. While the horror genre eluded Val Kilmer for the most part, or maybe it was the other way around, he had the ability to make any movie worth a spin, regardless of what category it fell in. He is truly the type of actor that made immortal characters that will be enjoyed for generations and even gave real life or existing fictional characters some of their most defining on-screen portrayals. When I think of him, I’ll forever think of the Kinks song Celluloid Heroes. Val Kilmer and his roles will be forever eternal because Celluloid Heroes never feel any pain and Celluloid Heroes never really die. Thanks, Val.