The What Happened to This Horror Movie series looks back at Martin Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio
It’s always interesting to see big time directors go against type and into a genre we don’t necessarily associate them with. We have Mount Rushmore type horror directors like John Carpenter and Wes Craven giving us thoughtful entries into their catalogues like Starman and Music of the Heart. On the flip side of that, what happens when a director known for Oscar worthy drama, gangster, and period piece movies goes all in on a scary movie? How did that movie miss out on any major awards nominations even with it being considered prestige horror? How many different adaptations of Denis Lehane’s novel would we get? Take the boat over before the storm hits as we find out what happened to Shutter Island.
Denis Lehane is an American author who began writing in the early 1990s. While he had success with a series of novels with repeating characters early, he really hit it big in 2001 with his novel Mystic River. This would be adapted by Brian Helgeland for Clint Eastwood and not only be a massive success making 156 million on its 30-million-dollar budget, but it would also win 2 of the 6 academy awards it was nominated for. While Columbia Pictures would jump on and buy the rights to his next novel Shutter Island, the rights would lapse before a movie could be made and revert back to the author. Gone Baby Gone would come out when Shutter Island failed to materialize and would again get an Academy Award nomination. Lehane would get his rights sold again, this time to Phoenix Pictures who would commission writer Laeta Kalogridis to come up with a screenplay. Kalogridis was big at the time for her work on Nightwatch and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. She would later go on to write Alita: Battle Angel and Terminator: Genisys before creating the hit Netflix show Altered Carbon.
Two directors that were considered for the movie were David Fincher who was no stranger to dark themed movies and adaptations, and Wolfgang Peterson. The script for Peterson was much slower and more personal and would later be changed to give it the blockbuster thriller feel. The script also attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio who had already made 3 very successful movies together. At the time, the pair were working on making a movie that would eventually come out in 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street, but were unable to get the proper funding for that and instead opted for Shutter Island. While DiCaprio had made horror and thrillers before like Critters 3 and The Beach, the closest Martin Scorsese had gotten to the genre was with his remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear. While you can argue that the movie itself isn’t a horror movie per se, there are horrific themes, a dread inducing score, and even multiple jump scares throughout the runtime.
Casting the rest of the movie would be easy as everyone wanted to work with both DiCaprio and Scorsese. With Leo in the lead role of Teddy Daniels, the rest of the cast would be filled with Academy Award nominees and winners like Max Von Sydow, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson, and Mark Ruffalo. Smaller roles would be filled by reliable and fun character actors like Emily Mortimer, John Carrol Lynch, Ted Levine, and Elias Koteas. Ruffalo was cast for his part after sending a fan letter to Scorsese saying how much he liked his work and wanted to work with him. Before that letter though, DiCaprio and Scorsese kicked the tires on both Josh Brolin and Robert Downey Jr.
The movie is a very faithful adaptation of the book with DiCaprio playing Teddy Daniels, a Federal Marshal who is visiting Shutter Island with his new partner Chuck on a disappearance case. Shutter Island has particular interest to Daniels as an inmate named Andrew Laeddis is purportedly housed there and he was responsible for the death of Teddy’s wife. The patient that disappeared is Rachel Solando who was incarcerated for drowning her 3 children. We see Teddy get bad migraines and flashbacks to his time during WWII, specifically at the liberation of Dachau where he and his fellow soldiers find the horrors of war and eventually execute all of the remaining Nazi guards. Teddy gets lots of signs to not trust his new partner and is even told as much by some before separating with him in the forbidden C ward where the most dangerous inmates are kept.
Teddy eventually thinks that the doctors and staff have taken Chuck away to silence him but when he breaks into the lighthouse, he is confronted by both the head physician and his partner Chuck, who is actually Dr. Lester Sheehan. Sheehan is Teddy’s doctor, and Teddy isn’t Teddy at all. Everything we have seen during the movie was an elaborate treatment to get Teddy, really Andrew, to come to grips with the fact that his wife killed their three children. Andrew ignored the signs and when he returned from a trip, he found his children dead and killed his wife. While initially it seems that the therapy worked, Andrew slips back into Teddy and is taken away to be lobotomized, but not before giving signs to Dr. Sheehan that maybe he knows what’s going on and doesn’t want to live with it anymore.
Shutter Island was filmed over 4 months in Massachusetts with various parts of the state being used for parts of the island, the hospital, and the flashbacks to Dachau. The now abandoned Medfield State Hospital was used for multiple locations and the production crew utilized tricks to make everything look different on film. They shone lights in from the outside to simulate daylight and painted over brick to make it look like plywood and that helped to also block the general production from the outside world. Lehane wrote the story with an idea of it feeling like a pulp novel, a B-Movie, and an old Gothic picture all rolled into one. The hospital setting itself was based off one in Long Island that he visited with his family during a snowstorm in the late 70s.
Scorsese was in the right mindset for the feel of the movie and how Lehane wrote the book as he envisioned Shutter Island with the same vibe that the old Val Lewton productions of the 1940s had like Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie. To that end, he screened two movies for the entire cast: Out of the Past from 1947 and Vertigo from 1958. He even saw the main character of Teddy as a version of Detective Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews from the film Laura. Some critics felt the movie was very similar plot wise to both The Ninth Configuration and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. One outlet considered it a wonderful mix of Film Noir, Horror, and Fantasy. The ending sparked debate similar to another Leo movie from 2010, Inception. In the Christopher Nolan movie, the audience eagerly watches the top spin to see if it will fall or not and signify if what is on screen is reality or the dream world. In Shutter Island, the ending suggests that Andrew has fallen back into his Teddy persona but there is a look, a suggestion that maybe he knows what he is doing.
The line “which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” does not come directly from the book and Professor James Gilligan, who was the psychiatric advisor for the film, certainly feels that Andrew/Teddy fully accepted what happens and just doesn’t want to live with that knowledge anymore. Lehane has another take on it however, believing Teddy to have a momentary flash of sanity before going back into the character he chooses to be.
The movie was a huge success. It opened #1 in February of 2010 and would go on to make 294 million on its 80-million-dollar budget. That 294 million would also be the most money that a Martin Scorsese film would make until… Wolf of Wall Street, the movie the pair was planning on making when they ended up doing Shutter Island. While it was also liked by critics and loved by fans (it sits at #138 on IMDB’s top 250, for what that’s worth), it would be the only movie collaboration between DiCaprio and Scorsese to not receive any Oscars. This could be due to the film being released in early February. While some movies can overcome that, A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once was released early in the year and went on to win a ton of major awards, this isn’t often the case. Most studio Oscar hopefuls are released towards the back half of the year to garner the most attention before nominees and this was the plan for Shutter Island, to be released at the end of 2009.
Paramount had planned for the prestige release window but ran into a couple problems. First, it couldn’t come up with the proper budget to push for awards season, something that would have cost the studio upwards of 60 million, and second, its star was unavailable at that time to promote it. While the studio hoped that a February release would pique the interest of movie goers during a month that traditionally lacked heavy hitters, it didn’t see how that would handicap its awards run. While financially the move worked, it may have also killed its Oscar buzz before it even began.
A blockbuster movie wasn’t the only adaptation the novel got either. Shutter Island was turned into a graphic novel from Tokyo Pop and William Morrow and also somehow turned into a forgotten video game. Shutter Island: The Adventure Game was released on PC and Mac the same week as the movie to try and cash in but is utterly forgotten. It did so poorly that a planned Nintendo DS port was canceled and is now abandon ware that you can get easily from just a quick search. It was marketed as a point and click adventure game in the same vein as Maniac Mansion or Kings Quest but its actually one of the thousands of hidden object games that you can still buy on CD-ROM at Target.
Shutter Island is the first, and to date last, horror flick that mega director Martin Scorsese has made. Even if he never visits the genre again, Shutter Island will continue to be a fan favorite of the director’s catalogue. While Teddy may never fully understand the mystery he set out to solve, at least we know what happened to Shutter Island.
A couple of the previous episodes of What Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
