When I was in high school, I was infatuated with a girl who road my bus to and from school. Her name was Kylie. She had strawberry blonde hair, a button nose, the cutest freckles and the smile you could light your way in the darkness.

We had become friends on these 45-minute rides on the school bus that bookended the school day and be talked about silly little things that teenagers do. I remember we both liked Twin Peaks and other odd ball things like Tim Burton movies, black and white horror movies and the moody end of grudge music. It was the 1990s after all.

I wanted to tell her how I felt about her, to ask her out on a date. Mainly because that’s what the movie told me you did. But I was shy and awkward as many of us where at that age with the objects of our affection. But one day, um-ing and arh-ing to myself I suddenly sprang into action and leaped off the bus after her, a good four stops from my own. I told her I liked her, that I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and that I would like to ‘go out with her’. I said all this holding her hand.

After I had finished all this, stuttering worse than Hugh Grant in a romantic comedy, she pulled her hand away, told me I was an ugly loser and that if she went out with me, everyone would laugh at her. She turned and run home. I was dumb stuck. I couldn’t understand her reaction. Well, not then. My heart fell out of my chest and as I stuffed it into my backpack (littering has never been cool with me) and slowly shambled home like a condemned man being led to the hangman’s noose.

When I got home that devastating afternoon, my Mum asked me what was wrong. I had been teased a lot at school in previous years starting all with way back in Primary school and she knew it was a sore spot with me. So, I told her all the while crying. I told her everything. In a sentence I hadn’t expected her to utter, she said, “Let’s go get pizza and videos. Will that cheer you up?” To this day, I don’t know if this was because my mother knew what would bring me out of my funk or that she had no idea how to deal with this trouble kid, and she was just throwing ideas at the wall hoping that the emotionally volatile nutter wouldn’t go off. Well, it worked. I nodded and away the family went for pizza and movies. Now, this didn’t happen very often because for most of the 1990s, while my mother was raising four kids, me being the oldest and most annoying, there wasn’t a lot of money in the household.

We ended up renting 10 weekly movies of which I got to pick five. And I went to the sci-fi section first, then the comedy, I grabbed an action movie and then hit the horror section. And like I always did with the horror section I picked the movies with the best, most eye-catching cover art I could find. I was about to give up and go look at the anime section (which wasn’t that big in the early 90s), then I saw it. A cover with two running figures at the bottom running from a castle that was also the title of the film. All with a black background. It was eerie, dream-like, and a little confusing. I grabbed it instantly. The film was The Keep. And oh boy, did this film leave and impression.

The Keep was released in 1983 and was written for the screen and directed by Michael Mann. That’s right ‘that’ Michael Mann. The same guy that directed Heat, Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Collateral and Public Enemies. Hell, he even won an Academy Award.

While he has directed dark material in the past (Manhunter, anyone) The Keep is his only horror film in his filmography. It has a lot of Mann’s signature touches and images and while the film is a little muddled and feel incomplete, it is a story of good versus evil in a grey world and it leaves an impression of whoever watches it.

‘But what is it about?’ you ask. I’ll give you a quick rundown.

The story begins, well, at the beginning. The film opens with a group of German soldiers near the end of World War II arriving at a remote village on the mountain pass in the Romania. Their orders are to establish a base at the keep on the edge of the village and guard against partisans working against the German military. There they are met my Alexandru (W. Morgan Sheppard), the caretaker of the keep. Alexandru tell their leader Woermann (Jurgen Prochnow) that no one has ever stayed at the keep for very long as they are driven out by bad dreams. He also tells Woermann while giving him a tour of the keep that no one really knows when the keep was built and that there are 143 crosses made of nickel embedded in the walls of the keep and they are no to be touched. During the tour Woermann comments that the keep is built backwards with all the larger stone on the inside like it was built to keep something in, not out. Can we say foreshadowing?

Well, something is trapped in the keep as two German soldiers find out that night when thinking a cross in the centre of a large room is silver and try to remove it. They unleash and old evil being named Molasar, a demon like entity somewhere between a vampire and the myth of the Golem. Devise to say the two soldiers die and the haunted house/slasher games begin.

At the same time as this in Greece, a man named Glaeken (Scott Glenn) suddenly wakes up from a dreamless sleep, revealing purple eyes as strange insect like lights fall upon him signalling him to journey to the keep in Romania.  

Back in the keep, days have pasted and every night soldiers keep dying. Woermann has send a request to be removed due to the mysterious happenings. Instead of a message in reply, a special SS commando unit lead by Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) who is dead set on killing villagers everyday until the partisans killing the German soldiers is revealed. Words are found written on the walls of the keep and to stop Kaempffer from killing another villager, the village’s priest Father Fonescu (Robert Prosky) stays the only person who can read the words is Dr. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen), a Romanian Jew who has been sent to a concentration camp with her daughter Eva (Alberta Watson).

They are found and brought to the keep and told to translate the word written on the walls and to research the keep to find out what is killing the Germans. To cut this rundown short, Dr. Cuza makes a deal with Molasar to rid the world of the Nazis if Cuza takes out of the keep the mystical relic keeping him there. Molasar even cures Cuza’s paralysing illness to better aid his mission of removing the relic from the keep to free Molasar. Glaeken shows up after freaking out some German soldiers, has an affair with Eva and does battle with Molasar. The SS commander cannot be trusted and things go to hell.

Honestly, that is not giving the story its due. The story has so much more to it, some many ideas, concepts, visuals and performances contained within its 1h 36mins runtime it would be hard to cover it all without boring the pants off all but the most hardcore of horror film geeks.

The film was based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson and was the first in a series of novels featuring vampires. And while the author didn’t like what the director and the studio did with the film, even going so far as to create a character in a later book of a director who is attacked via voodoo for the filmed treatment of an author’s work, the film didn’t limit itself with anything that had come before or strictly adhering to the source material. But instead altering for the screen story and building on the ideas presented in the novel. And what we get is a dark and twisted fairy-tale that taps into the logic of dreams and the horrors of a Europe in the middle of a world war.

And when I say ‘logic of dreams’, I mean it. The film has a vividness and colour that is almost beyond reality itself. Brightly lit scenes or scenes in daylight give way to darker scenes full of shadow. Seemingly jumping from day to night, sometimes in the same shot. Muted colour pallets give way to bright and vivid colour out of nowhere and visa vera.

The story elements of changing the vampire of the book into a hulking supernatural entity and having it evolve as it kills the German soldiers, first appearing as a truly remarkable smoke effect (seriously, I can’t figure out how they did that one), to a skinless creature to a seven-foot monsters seemly made out of marble with glowing red eyes. Molasar become both a familiar evil and an unknow quantity within the same narrative.  The use of back lighting and slow motion in scenes, not only build tension, but coupled it with the musical score by Tangerine Dream, it becomes like a scenario you have yourself experienced in the dream world. The cinematic equivalent to running to for from something in a dream and seemingly running on the spot.

Sometimes it does have a somewhat jarring effect with the audience thrusted into the middle of important scenes and many subplots not fleshed out or dropped completely. This most likely comes from the fact that the studio, Paramount Pictures, not only forced Mann to shot multiple endings but decided to take the director’s cut of the film and cut it themselves, rearranging scenes and cutting 30 mins from the original two hour cut of the film. But I think this does add to the dream like nature of the story. The more you try to figure out the story, decipher it you will, the more like an image of a dream it becomes. Enough of the original intention of the director is left on screen for the audience to delve into the supernatural dreamscape and discover a true gem of one of cinemas great unrealised visions.

After the film was released, Michael Mann was held solely responsible for the film’s failure at the US box office. And has since disowned the film that he was so passionate about when he made it. So much so, he rarely talks about the film at all. In the 1990s it did receive a Laserdisc release, but until 2019-2020, it hadn’t received a DVD release despite it massive cult following. This also had a little to do with the legal trouble concerning rights in other countries, rights issues over the score and other legal odds and ends. It was made worse by the director not helping in the fight to restore and preserve the film.

I don’t know if you know this but many directors, like a lot of artists, often regret decisions they made when working on a film. A great filmmaker once said “Films aren’t finished, only abandoned.” And this doesn’t sit right with some filmmakers like George Lucas or Ridley Scott who feel the need to revisited the films they have made with sequels and prequels or to go back to these ‘abandoned’ films and fix them with the aid of new technologies. But it seems Michael Mann isn’t one of these directors. He seems reticent to revisit The Keep after being burned by the studio and critics back in 1983. Which is a shame for such an imaginative film full if trippy visuals, dripping with blood and atmosphere and full of great performances from some of the greatest actors who have ever stepped in front of the camera. And its not like Mann wasted his time on the film. Many techniques he first used in this film he used in others to great effect. The dream like visions the character of Francis Dollarhyde has in Mann’s follow up film Manhunter are a direct call back to The Keep. And I double dare you to say otherwise

Mann’s attitude towards the film can seem justified in many ways, but if an artist makes something full of heart, soul and imagination and put in out in the world, it will find an audience. And when it does, that ‘thing’ you created is no longer yours. Be then belongs to the audience, the collective ‘we’ who consume it, enjoy it, adore it and have a connection to it. Once your film is discovered it is your job, for better or worse, to support it and embrace what people love about it, even if you disagree with them. And I don’t think anyone really cares if you can to a better job now. In that moment in time when someone watched the film caused a sense of joy, of wonderment and an attachment with the film was formed. It’s the magic of the movies that everyone talks about. It may not be a perfect movie by any stretch. But it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be memorable and entertaining. And many films are not.

I found this movie at a time in my development as a person and as a film geek learning the language of life and cinema, and if affected me in way I couldn’t imagine at the time. I will be forever grateful to Michael Mann, the actors and the crew who filmed this strange little film in Wales for the experience I still love to this day. And also to introducing me to the novels of F. Paul Wilson. Wow, that one kind of got away from me a little. But screw it, I enjoyed writing it. Hope you all liked it.