Jacob's Ladder (1990 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 psychological horror film starring Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, an American infantryman whose experiences in Vietnam trigger bizarre hallucinations. On the subway one night, he catches a glimpse of something impossible, a tentacle protruding from a sleeping homeless man. At a party later, a psychic takes his palm and tells him, without ceremony, that he is already dead. Jacob laughs it off as a joke. Directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, the film suspends Jacob between two lives. One is a quiet routine in Brooklyn with his girlfriend Jezebel. The other is a secret buried somewhere in his Army unit's past. Doctors have no record of ever treating him. A dead son keeps appearing in his visions. Who is trying to kill Jacob, and why do his surviving war buddies keep dying in violent, unexplained ways?

• 2. Descending Into Two Realities

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  On the 6th of October 1971, Jacob is deployed with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in a village in Vietnam's Mekong Delta when his unit comes under attack. Comrades are killed or wounded around him while others collapse into catatonia, convulsions, and seizures. Jacob flees into the jungle and is stabbed with a bayonet. The scene cuts without warning to the New York City Subway, where he finds the station exit locked and nearly steps into the path of a train while crossing the tracks.

  By 1975, Jacob is a postal worker living with Jezebel in a rundown apartment, tormented by visions of the family he left behind, especially his youngest son Gabe, who died in an accident before the war. Faceless, vibrating figures intrude on ordinary moments, and a car nearly runs him down as he tries to escape it. When he tries to reach his regular doctor at the local VA hospital, staff tell him there is no record he was ever a patient there, and that the doctor died in a car explosion.

  At the same party, Jacob refuses to dance with the psychic and then appears to watch an enormous creature dance sexually with Jezebel before killing her; he collapses in shock. Back home, a dangerous fever grips him, and Jezebel tries to break it with a painful ice bath. He wakes into an entirely different version of his life, living at home with his wife and sons, Gabe included. In Vietnam, a wounded Jacob is evacuated under fire by helicopter, only for the helicopter to be shot down. A former platoon mate named Paul is about to tell Jacob he is living through the exact same waking nightmare.

• 3. The Conspiracy Unravels

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  Paul, one of Jacob's former platoon mates, contacts him to say he is suffering the same disturbing hallucinations. He is killed soon afterward when his car explodes. At the funeral, other surviving members of the platoon admit they have all endured similar horrifying visions.

  A lawyer hired to investigate quits the case after reading military files that describe the soldiers as never having been in combat, discharged instead for psychological reasons. The group had believed they were victims of an unauthorized military experiment; now Jacob's old comrades back down one by one, though he suspects they were threatened into silence. Suited men soon abduct Jacob and try to intimidate him. He fights back and escapes, but is injured and nearly paralyzed in the process.

  Jacob is taken to a nightmarish hospital and told that he is dead and this is his home. His chiropractor friend Louis arrives to rescue and heal him, quoting the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, who said that making peace with death reveals the 'devils tearing your life away' to actually be 'angels, freeing you from the earth.'

  A distressed man who has been following Jacob, and who had earlier dragged him from Paul's burning car, introduces himself as Michael Newman. He says he was a chemist in the Army's chemical warfare division, where he designed an aggression-inducing drug he called the Ladder. Michael claims a secret dose was given to Jacob's unit before the battle, turning some soldiers on each other in a homicidal frenzy. The claim triggers a vision confirming that Jacob's attacker in Vietnam was a fellow American soldier.

  Jacob returns to his family's home, where Gabe leads him up the staircase into a bright light. In a triage tent in 1971, military medics declare him dead, remarking that he had fought hard to stay alive but now looks peaceful. The medics' verdict closes Jacob's story on screen, but the screenplay itself would take ten years to reach a screen at all.

• 4. A Decade Circling The Drain

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  Bruce Joel Rubin began writing the screenplay in 1980, inspired by a nightmare in which he was trapped in a New York City Subway station. For several years he failed to sell the script, turning down offers from studios that specialized in low-budget horror in favor of holding out for a better-financed home. Recognition arrived when American Film named the screenplay one of Hollywood's ten best unproduced screenplays in 1983. Thom Mount of Universal Pictures said he 'loved it, but it was not for his studio.'

  Directors Michael Apted, Sidney Lumet, and Ridley Scott all expressed interest, but studios still would not gamble on Rubin's 'too metaphysical' stories, since, in the industry's own words, 'Hollywood does not make ghost movies.' After Wes Craven filmed Deadly Friend, an earlier Rubin screenplay, in 1986, Paramount Pictures picked up both Jacob's Ladder and another script called Ghost.

  Rubin, who is Jewish-born, had spent two years in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal before writing Jacob's Ladder and Ghost, both released in 1990. He saw Jacob's Ladder as a modern retelling of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, formally titled the Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. 'The inspiration in a sense is my entire spiritual upbringing,' Rubin said. 'Once you have a meditative life you start to see that the world is really far different than what it appears to be. What appears to be finite is really couched in the infinite, and the infinite imbues everything in our lives.'

  The film's title refers to the Biblical story of Jacob's Ladder, envisioned in Genesis 28:12 as a dream of a meeting place between Heaven and Earth. Its alternative title, Dante's Inferno, nods to the Inferno of Dante Alighieri. Rubin had already written two other afterlife-themed scripts, Brainstorm and Deadly Friend, before turning his full attention to Jacob's Ladder. By 1988, one director would finally commit to putting Rubin's decade-old vision on screen.

• 5. Lyne Steps In

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  In 1988, Adrian Lyne called the script one of the best he had read. He chose to direct Jacob's Ladder instead of an adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities he had originally planned.

  The project was canceled after ownership and policy changes at Paramount left executives doubtful about the ending and the Vietnam scenes. Carolco Pictures, an independent studio, then took over production, handing Lyne greater creative control along with a $25 million budget. Rubin became co-producer alongside Mario Kassar, Alan Marshall, and Andrew G. Vajna.

  Lyne downplayed what he called Rubin's 'intimidating' Old Testament themes, preparing instead by watching documentaries about the Vietnam War and reading accounts of near-death experiences. He borrowed the plot device of a long stretch of subjective time collapsing into an instant from Robert Enrico's 1962 short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, one of his favorites. Lyne described the film as portraying 'a man's dying process' while Jacob remembers his wife and kids and imagines a life with Jezzie he never had, adding, 'So it's his memory and imagination and essentially the whole film is just in his mind.'

  Cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball based the film's dream sequences on the paintings of Francis Bacon.

  Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Peña were among the first actors to audition for Jacob and Jezzie, but Carolco Pictures pushed for more established stars. Dustin Hoffman, Richard Gere, and Al Pacino were considered for Jacob, while Andie MacDowell, Julia Roberts, Demi Moore, and Madonna were in the running for Jezzie. Lyne cast Robbins and Peña anyway. 'I love doing comedy, but I know I can do other things as well,' Robbins said, calling the role 'a great opportunity to go in a different direction.' Cameras were set to roll in New York City that September.

• 6. Building The Nightmare

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  Filming began in New York City on the 11th of September 1989, with locations in Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. Jacob and Jezzie's apartment was built on a soundstage on West 23rd Street, while the subway dream sequences were shot on an abandoned level of Bergen Street station. The production also used the Seaview Hospital of Staten Island, the Essex County Veterans Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, and Madison Square Garden.

  Vietnam veteran Captain Dale Dye served as military advisor, running a five-day boot camp for the actors playing soldiers, including Robbins, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Eriq La Salle, and Ving Rhames. The war scenes were filmed in jungles near Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, using UH-1 helicopters supplied by the Puerto Rico National Guard. Filming wrapped at Tortuguero Lagoon in January 1990, with the completed budget reaching $40 million.

  Every effects sequence was captured in camera, with no post-production work added. For the film's body horror moments, Lyne filmed actors shaking their heads at a low frame rate, producing a horrifyingly fast blur when played back at normal speed. Rubin's original screenplay leaned on traditional imagery of demons and Hell, but Lyne pushed instead for visuals resembling thalidomide-related deformities to heighten the shock, winning out only after repeated heated arguments with Rubin. Lyne and Rubin drew further inspiration from the artist H. R. Giger, the photographers Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin, and the Brothers Quay's 1986 stop-motion short film Street of Crocodiles.

  A closing title card notes that the Pentagon denied the Army ever tested BZ, a hallucinogen, on its own soldiers during the Vietnam War. Lyne said part of the inspiration came from Martin A. Lee's book Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and Sixties Rebellion, though he noted that 'nothing in the book suggests that the drug BZ... was used on U.S. troops.' By Lyne's own account, test audiences found an early cut overwhelming, leading the studio to remove roughly 20 minutes of disturbing footage, mostly from the film's last third. How audiences and critics would react to what remained was still very much in question.

• 7. Release And Reception

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  Jacob's Ladder opened on the 2nd of November 1990, distributed by TriStar Pictures. Its soundtrack, composed by Maurice Jarre, was released by Varèse Sarabande in 1993 and reissued on a single LP by Waxwork Records in March 2020. Rubin's companion book, published by Applause Theater Book Publishers the same day as the film, included a final draft of the screenplay along with his essay on making it.

  Artisan Entertainment released a Special Edition DVD on the 14th of July 1998, featuring three deleted scenes titled 'Jezzie's Transformation,' 'The Antidote,' and 'The Train Station,' along with an audio commentary by Lyne and a 26-minute making-of documentary called 'Building Jacob's Ladder.' Lions Gate Entertainment issued the film on Blu-ray Disc on the 14th of September 2010, keeping every DVD extra except a TV spot while adding two promotional trailers.

  At the box office, the film took the number one spot in North America its opening weekend, earning $7.5 million from 1,052 screens. Attendance then dropped fast, leaving a final domestic total of just $26,118,851.

  On Rotten Tomatoes, 72% of 68 reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.6 out of 10; the site's consensus calls it 'an engrossing, nerve-shattering experience' despite its 'disorienting leaps of logic and structure.' Metacritic gives it a score of 62 out of 100 based on 20 critics, rating it 'generally favorable,' while audiences polled by CinemaScore graded it a 'C-' on an A+ to F scale.

  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film left him 'reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair.' He called it 'a thoroughly painful and depressing experience' that was nonetheless 'powerfully written, directed and acted.' Ebert awarded it three and a half out of four stars. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it 'both quaint and devastating.' She praised a 'slick, riveting, viscerally scary film' about an otherwise unsalable subject: death.

  Not every critic agreed. Desson Thomson of The Washington Post found the film 'ultimately flat on its surrealistic face, the victim of too many fake-art sequences.' Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that by then 'it's hard to care whether the Orwellian image is a hallucination or not.' 'You just want out,' he said. Kim Newman called the film 'effectively the blunt remake' of Carnival of Souls, while IGN's 2004 review of the DVD called it 'still a great film,' and its 2010 Blu-ray review called it 'an emotionally poignant, creepy horror masterpiece.' Slant Magazine described it as 'a bizarrely cohesive hybrid of war movie, character study, art film, and horror flick.' John Kenneth Muir called its hospital scene 'one of the most terrifying moments in all of 1990s horror cinema' and wrote that after a screening, viewers will 'immediately want to hug the people you love.' None of that reception explains why a modestly seen 1990 horror film kept resurfacing in other people's work for decades afterward.

• 8. Honors And Legacy

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  In 1991, Jacob's Ladder was nominated at Horror Hall of Fame II for best horror film of the year. It lost to The Silence of the Lambs. The film later appeared in Bravo's 2004 documentary miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments and in the 2009 book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. In 2013, Jacob Burns Film Center projectionist Andrew Robinson named it his favorite scary film, and LA Weekly has classified it within the vetsploitation subgenre.

  Jacob's Ladder became a foundational influence on the Silent Hill horror franchise, including Christophe Gans's 2006 film adaptation. Ryan Murphy, writer of the 2011 series American Horror Story: Asylum, and Shinji Mikami, creator of the Resident Evil series and director of the 2014 game The Evil Within, both acknowledged its influence on their work. Kim Manners prepared to direct The X-Files episode 'Grotesque' by listening to the film's score, and Christopher Nolan has said its abstract imagery influenced his 2023 film Oppenheimer.

  Silent Hill 2, released in 2001, reuses the film's head-twitching visual effect throughout the series, and its protagonist James Sunderland wears an M-1965 field jacket nearly identical to Jacob's. Gans said his Silent Hill film 'tells the same story' as Jacob's Ladder, since 'everything happens in the last glimpse of consciousness,' and he hid further references inside his own adaptation. The 2010 music video for Avenged Sevenfold's 'Nightmare,' directed by Wayne Isham, pays homage to the film's hospital scene in memory of the band's late drummer, The Rev, who was a fan.

  Other tributes include dialogue references in a 2002 Twilight Zone episode and a 2010 Simpsons episode, plus a bayonet flashback in Rick and Morty's 2020 episode 'Never Ricking Morty.' Musicians have sampled the film directly, from Claytown Troupe's 1991 track 'Rainbow's Edge' to Nevermore's 1996 sample of Jacob's cry 'Stop it, you're killing me!' on 'Next in Line,' and VNV Nation's and IVardensphere's use of the Meister Eckhart quotation on their own tracks.

  On the podcast How Did This Get Made?, Jacob's Ladder is a running gag, with someone regularly suggesting that week's film might be 'a Jacob's Ladder situation.' A 2019 remake, directed by David M. Rosenthal and starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, and Nicole Beharie, met with negative reviews, a reminder that the original's peculiar mixture of war story, ghost story, and grief was never easy to repeat.