When you think of Michael Mann, the first thing that comes to mind are the hard-boiled and relentlessly intense crime thrillers that deservedly saw the four-time Academy Award nominee lauded as one of the modern era’s finest directorial talents – with Heat, The Insider, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies all singing from a similar stylistic songbook. However, Mann’s second feature was a straight-up supernatural horror, and yet nobody ever seems to mention The Keep when talking up his back catalogue.
After making his feature-length debut on 1981’s Thief (which was a noir-infused heist thriller in a sign of things to come), Mann’s sophomore effort from behind the camera changed things up dramatically. Adapted from the novel of the same name, the World War II story finds Nazi troops setting up camp in a dilapidated fortress in Romania, only for an evil supernatural force to be awakened.
The Keep may have flopped at the box office after failing to recoup its $6 million budget from theaters, and reviews at the time were less than stellar, so it hasn’t exactly been unfairly overlooked. In the decades since, though, it’s gone on to find itself reappraised and reevaluated as an unsung cult favorite, with fans still wondering why the obvious outlier in Mann’s filmography remains in the shadows.
A tortured production that saw reshoots and several freshly-added endings extend production nine weeks longer than anticipated no doubt soured his enthusiasm, never mind the death of visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers in the midst of post-production that saw Mann forced to step in and complete over 250 VFX shots himself, or the fact his preferred 210-minute cut was hacked to pieces and whittled down to a mere 96 by the time The Keep was unleashed upon the world.
It’s not exactly a work of art, but for fans of both Mann’s oeuvre and supernatural shenanigans, there’s a lot to love about The Keep – even if we’ll likely never see anything approaching the originally-intended vision for the finished product.