Horror has always been an avenue taken by young directors hoping to get a foot in the door of the movie industry. If you look into the careers of many prominent filmmakers, there’s a decent chance you’re going to see the genre peppered throughout their early days. There are listicles all over the internet that document this phenomenon, usually featuring the likes of Peter Jackson (Bad Taste, Braindead), Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark), and James Cameron (Piranha 2: The Spawning), among others.
One name that doesn’t normally appear in these articles is John McTiernan. Though primarily known for his run of dominance in the action film arena (he revolutionized the genre with hits like Predator, Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October), his debut picture was also rooted firmly in horror. Critically maligned upon its release, Nomads would nonetheless lead to the director’s eventual big break in Hollywood. Today, it stands as a criminally underrated oddity of the 1980s that continues to find its audience 40 years after its release.
As anyone who’s seen it can attest, Nomads can be a difficult film to wrap your head around and even harder to summarize. It follows ER doctor Eileen Flax (Lesley-Anne Down), whose life is changed forever one faithful night when a dying French anthropologist named Jean Charles Pommier (Pierce Brosnan) lands in her hospital’s emergency room. During the man’s final moments, he passes to her his essence, which then begins to give her a sort of psychic play-by-play of the events that have led to his demise. She soon learns that he had made the discovery of a group of supernatural beings that operate unseen within the reality we inhabit. These nomads (wink) cause havoc wherever they go and destroy the lives of whoever is unlucky enough to cross their paths. With their existence now revealed to her, the doctor must find a way to avoid the horrible fate that has befallen so many others…or something like that.
McTiernan wrote Nomads while pursuing his Master’s at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He had been in L.A. for about three years by then, and the city looms large in his script, both as a setting and thematic device. He chose to anchor the tale in the realm of the supernatural due to the genre’s simplicity, stating in an interview that “the structure of a story is easiest to understand in the horror genre.” It also provided McTiernan the opportunity to be more creative visually with his camerawork, thanks to horror’s tendency towards misdirection and general weirdness.
The film was made on a budget of $1 million (a paltry sum even at the time), which resulted in more than a few instances of guerrilla filmmaking. For example, many of the night scenes that take place throughout the city were done without obtaining permits. And the house that Pommier and his wife moved into, which was a real home that was rented out for the production, was legitimately destroyed during the movie’s climactic siege. The damage would be repaired, but the owners were none too pleased regardless.
While the producers had originally wanted French actor Gérard Depardieu for Pommier, Pierce Brosnan (known at the time for the television series Remington Steele) was brought in for the role, giving him his first major part in a motion picture. Lesley-Anne Down was cast as Dr. Flax, which, according to the actress, caused some friction between her and McTiernan. “It was one of those situations where I was forced upon him, and I don’t think he ever really got over that,” she revealed on the Scream Factory release while speaking of the gruff way in which she was treated (McTiernan, for his part, would go on to apologize for his behaviour, though he had no recollection of the events transpiring).
Brosnan’s experience working with the director was better than Down’s, though he did acknowledge that the young filmmaker could be a little moody. “He had a kind of Celtic darkness to him that can be like a great big cloud hanging over,” he said via Treasured Film‘s Blu-ray decades later. “I would try to break that cloud every day.”
Nomads made its world debut at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival in January of 1986 before hitting domestic theatres in March of that same year. Its box office was fairly dismal, taking in a little over $2.2 million worldwide. Critically, its reception was tepid at best. The New York Times’ Walter Goodman deemed its title villains “as menacing as the chorus from ‘West Side Story,’” while Roger Ebert deemed the film nearly inexplicable in his 1 1⁄2 star review for the Chicago Sun-Times. The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott, however, found Nomads effective despite its flaws, praising the movie’s “sharply unpredictable editing” and McTiernan’s “staggeringly resourceful technique.”
However, Scott was not the only one who enjoyed the film. Impressed by his confident direction and ability to produce great-looking work with a low budget, Arnold Schwarzenegger decided that John McTiernan was just the guy to helm the actor’s next project, a sci-fi action flick called Predator. “What set [Nomads] apart was the tension McTiernan maintained,” Schwarzenegger would write in his 2012 autobiography, Total Recall. “We felt that if he could create that kind of atmosphere with so little money, he must be very talented.” It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and it would launch the 36-year-old filmmaker’s career into the stratosphere.
Most defenders of Nomads are quick to admit that it is not a perfect film. Brosnan’s performance is good but a bit too spirited at times, with the actor saying years later that he would have told his younger self to take it down a notch or two (we’re not going to get into the low-hanging fruit that is his attempt at a French accent). Meanwhile, though the casting of Brosnan and Down was right on the money, the group of supernatural wanderers that terrorizes the two leads lacks the edge to make them truly scary. Mary Woronov and Hector Mercado both sport the “damned” visage McTiernan wanted for his nomads, but Adam Ant and Josie Cotton are a little too angelic-looking to be taken seriously. Of course, there’s the movie’s climactic scene, which lands like a wet fart simply due to the inexplicable fact that it takes place during the day rather than at night.
Despite these warts, Nomads is still a beauty to many. There’s a boldness to the way McTiernan took to the plate during his first time at bat as a director. He was unafraid to put something on the screen that was fiercely individual. During a time when the slasher reigned supreme, here was a supernatural thriller that was light on blood and heavy on ambiguity, that emphasized atmosphere over jump scares, and utilized the camera with a frenetic urgency that’s still surprisingly effective.
What’s more, Nomads feels like a film that has something to say, even if that statement becomes a little muddled at times. Pommier is equal parts repelled by and obsessed with the vagabonds that haunt him. They live outside of society, choosing to shun an average existence for a place on the edge. For an individual whose life is contained in the bubble of academia, that anarchic lifestyle offers a freedom that’s both terrifying and deeply seductive. In an interview last year, Pierce Brosnan stated that what initially attracted him to the project after reading the script was that the film “was very much about L.A.,” which is an apt observation.
It’s a city full of uprooted dreamers pursuing a life they can see in their mind’s eye. That chase requires risk, and the gamble can lead you down some very dark streets indeed. If Nomads shows us anything, though, it’s that you won’t walk those streets alone.
For better or worse.
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