Flasz On Film

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) was first published in April 1985. It was McCarthy’s fifth novel after The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree. As far as I can tell, it didn’t ruffle too many feathers at the time of its publication, though its prowess was noted in literary and critical circles. McCarthy would have to wait until 1992 and the publication of All the Pretty Horses to enjoy what you might call mainstream success and recognition though graded on a curve, with an understanding that success in literary terms may still offer relatively modest rewards.  

Thus, only later in life McCarthy, who had spent most of his life in abject squalor as a consequence of committing wholesale to writing what and how he wanted as opposed to what mainstream readership would likely enjoy, would see his works re-discovered and critically appraised. Though it is fair to say that there were some who knew about Blood Meridian in the mid-80s—before it was cool, so to speak—it was only after All the Pretty Horses when McCarthy’s revisionist odyssey of violence attempting an intellectual analysis of the nature of evil began to be seen as his magnum opus. This is also when Hollywood filmmakers took interest in this novel and—one by one—bowed out without ever getting an adaptation off the ground. Tommy Lee Jones (who was McCarthy’s personal friend) tried it in the 90s. Ridley Scott wanted to have a crack at it, too. So did Todd Field and James Franco. The latter got as far as shooting thirty minutes of test footage, but he could never convince anyone to back the full-scale production. He’d go on to adapt a different, much slimmer yet still expectedly dark novel written by McCarthy, Child of God. 

Only when John Hillcoat (who had directed a formidable adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road) was tapped in 2023 as the man to take a crack at Blood Meridian the idea of adapting McCarthy’s magnum opus took a more definable shape and offered a promise to break the curse. After all, Blood Meridian had long been seen as a completely unadaptable book. Its arduous struggle in development hell persisted on the lips of Hollywood insiders as a mythical folk tale and trickled into the mainstream of film enthusiasts as an oft-repeated news item reinforcing the many beliefs as to why Blood Meridian remains a completely elusive movie to make.  

Even a cursory browse through numerous articles about the upcoming adaptation and the many failed attempts in the past will lead you to comprehend at least the most obvious reasons as to why Blood Meridian is considered unfilmable. First and foremost, the book is incredibly violent and includes numerous scenes of carnage, sodomy, pedophilia, torture and rape. What is more, the most commonly seen explanation as to why violence itself is enough of a reason to stop this movie from happening has to do with the fact that violence in McCarthy’s world has very little justification and exists as a tool to supplement a moral quandary relating to human nature, the genesis of evil and how the complete absence of moral values from the world of The Old West likely shaped it into a true dog-eat-dog universe where survival of the fittest was synonymous with survival of the most ruthless. There are no good guys in this world and carnage is way more palatable when the good guys win at the end. 

Another frequently repeated reason as to why McCarthy’s book is such a tough nut to crack relates to the fact the book doesn’t really have a main character we could follow and through whose eyes we could witness the many despicable events the author portrayed. It technically follows “The Kid,” a teenage runaway from Tennessee who joins the infamous John Glanton and his gang of scalp hunters on what can only be described as a single-ticket journey to hell. However, The Kid quickly fades into the background and only resurfaces occasionally in the story, while we are most often drawn to follow and take notice of the infamous Judge Holden, a completely bald giant of a man with a penchant for soliloquys and with the moral compass of Satan himself; a magnetic yet sinister presence. Thus, the reader is almost permanently left in limbo, having to impotently observe the many heinous acts perpetrated by the book’s protagonists, hear their righteous divagations and vicariously indulge in their truly detestable indifference towards the crimes they perpetrate or witness. 

Lastly, it’s McCarthy’s prose itself that stands as a reason why Blood Meridian would be incredibly challenging to translate into the language of cinema. McCarthy’s Faulknerian language nearly devoid of all punctuation yet resplendent with nigh-on poetic vocabulary makes the experience of reading Blood Meridian akin to reading The Old Testament. It’s a book you purposefully read slowly, pore over the words and immerse yourself in the grim and detestable mood the author so effortlessly crafts. Understandably, transcribing such poetry into visuals is a risky endeavor and would require the screenwriter to nail the tone and author’s intent perfectly. Furthermore, McCarthy never spares a single word to describe the inner emotional states of his characters either, which is where characterizations would be naturally derived. We see what the characters see, how they act and how they interact with the world around them. Unless they open their mouths—and apart from Holden who speaks with great flourish most characters remain stoic and mute and communicate monosyllabically—you will never know what’s going through their heads.  

Hence, the combination of unchecked and morally unjustifiable carnage pouring from the pages of the book, the lavish and biblical prose void of any inner monologue yet inherently lyrical and elevated, and the meanderingly episodic structure of the novel without any identifiable lead character stand as reasons why Blood Meridian has been considered unadaptable and why the most recent attempt by Hillcoat, joined last year by John Logan who wrote Skyfall among others remains followed so closely. Fingers crossed, come 2026 the myth of Blood Meridian being unfilmable will be put to bed because, to be completely frank, now may be the only time to do it.  

And that’s because I don’t personally see Blood Meridian as unadaptable or impossible to turn into a movie. In fact, you can find plenty of examples of movies that had to navigate similar issues and somehow got made in the end. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a fantastic movie to use as a comparative case study, as it was also based on a book (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) that defied conventional narrative wisdom. It transplanted the episodic odyssey up the river Congo into a treaty on Vietnam with lyrical underpinnings. To be frank, it probably remains the closest to Blood Meridian in spirit and perhaps McCarthy might have watched the movie before writing his novel because Judge Holden and Colonel Kurtz are very much alike.  

What hides beneath the term “unfilmable”—and Apocalypse Now helps to narrow it down too—pertains to the movie’s ability to become a mainstream box office success. Coppola’s film made its money back, but it surely brought its financial backers to the brink with its myriad problems, delays, reshoots, incidents and the like. As far as Coppola was concerned, the movie was not about Vietnam but it was Vietnam. And this is where the problem truly is because you can definitely list movies that are just as violent, gory and despicable as Blood Meridian would surely need to be. Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects or Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers would probably come close, in their own way, to capturing the requisite episodic structure combined with complete lack of restraint when it comes to graphic violence. It’s doable and studios have in the past bankrolled movies like that.  

However, the difference is the money required to do McCarthy justice is not the same money Rob Zombie needed when he was following up The House of 1000 Corpses. Consequently, even an extreme horror like a Saw sequel or Malignant can be a financial juggernaut as long as they can be appropriately cheap to make. After all, a movie with a hard-R or even an NC-17 rating will be seen by fewer people and if it costs a fortune to make, it will undoubtedly fail to make its budget back.  

That’s mostly why Blood Meridian is seen as unadaptable. The movie it would have to be turned into will be unlikely to become a box office smash because (1) it will have to be rated for “adults only,” and (2) it will require a budget of a class-A blockbuster to have a fighting chance of looking respectable. An epic western with real horses, people in costumes, multiple locations and frequent set pieces involving graphic violence (which means make-up and special effects) will not be made for ten million dollars. It’ll simply be a movie that will never make money at the box office because there aren’t enough people in the world willing to go to the cinema and subject themselves to snuff-level carnage, regardless of how cathartic and lyrical it might be.  

Further still, a movie like Blood Meridian is unlikely to be classically entertaining because of its despicable central characters and episodic nature. I don’t think McCarthy’s language is a problem here by the way, because it lends itself to moody transcription to cinematic format, as proven by No Country for Old Men, nor do I see any issues with Judge Holden’s extended speeches for which the narrative infrequently pauses. I could honestly imagine a lot of those highfalutin sermons on the human hunger for violence and power to function in a way some would call Malickian, as an off-screen narration partially or completely detached from the imagery, which would then be given yet more degrees of freedom to meander. Which—again—shows you that the movie Blood Meridian would need to be would most likely be seen as indulgent by some viewers.  

In essence, McCarthy’s magnum opus is seen as unfilmable because it would have to be a massively expensive arthouse western mood piece positioned somewhere in between Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, all with a penchant for gruesome violence matching the combined energy of Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. This is doable. It would be almost a religious experience for the viewer willing to submit themselves to it and with the right casting in place and the tone matching McCarthy’s lyrically biblical mood, a film adaptation of Blood Meridian could easily be a cathartic experience. It’s not one of those “unadaptable” novels that truly defy the norms of storytelling, like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. McCarthy’s opus is only considered unfilmable because it would be mathematically impossible for it to be a great movie, be faithful to the source material, and be financially successful all at the same time.  

And the problem is that moviemaking of the kind Blood Meridian would most assuredly require is a money-making business trained to entertain mass audiences… which is exactly why big Hollywood studios continued to eschew the prospect of transposing McCarthy’s prose into a movie destined for the global box office. Fortunately, we live at a time when streaming platforms have come of age and attracted many filmmakers to their stables with promises of blank cheques and complete artistic freedom. In a regular studio environment, Martin Scorsese would have been unlikely to put together The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon because these stories did not promise sufficient returns and required the scale of a massive blockbuster. Zack Snyder wouldn’t have been able to direct his Rebel Moon movies if it hadn’t been for Netflix. Ridley Scott needed Apple to help him get Napoleon off the ground. 

On the other hand, Michael Mann needed to go cap in hand to so many financiers in order to finally make his long-gestating passion project Ferrari that the time it takes for all the production logos to finish before the movie could start was a seriously non-negligible amount of time nobody in the audience ever got back. And, to top it all off, Francis Ford Coppola—the man who once fooled a massive studio to bankroll his dream of adapting Joseph Conrad—ended up paying for his pet movie Megalopolis out of his own pocket.  

But… all these movies do exist while even ten years ago they would have remained pipe dreams. Opportunities to secure funding for movies that simply do not have box office potential—and which in the 1970s would have been bankrolled because studio heads believed that some movies just needed to exist and trusted in the genius of their New Hollywood directors—remain plentiful even though this window of opportunity seems to be slowly closing. Although from what I understand the Blood Meridian adaptation with John Hillcoat at the helm is being developed by New Regency, the money and freedom offered by such houses as Netflix of Apple who are still on the hunt for critical clout would surely go a long way. After all, who wouldn’t want to go down in history as the studio that allowed that unfilmable masterpiece of American literature to become a movie?

I’m sure there are people on the inside of the moviemaking machine who understand that a movie like Blood Meridian has the potential to be seen as a spiritual descendant of Apocalypse Now and become one of the truly iconic films of the twenty-first century. It needs artistic freedom to do the book justice on behalf of the director and writer, as well as courage and determination to be shown by people putting up the money to produce it. This cannot be a bean-counting exercise or a tax write-off. It has to be tackled by fearless minds and resilient hearts. Blood Meridian was written by an iconic novelist and a masterpiece of this calibre requires those who choose to adapt it to abandon their fear of failure. Otherwise, it will remain forever unadaptable.