The earliest concept for Inception was to make it into a horror movie. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins raised the cinematic side of the Dark Knight franchise from the grave. The series stalled thanks to the universal slating that greeted 1997’s Batman And Robin, and Warner Bros had a tough time figuring out how to revive it. Batman Begins not only proved there was life in the character yet, but it was entirely possible to make a more relatable Batman adventure. In between making his Dark Knight movie trilogy, Warner’s funded two other Nolan projects: 2006’s The Prestige and 2010’s Inception.

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The latter was the rarest of beasts, as it was a major blockbuster with a name cast that was also an original concept that wasn’t based on a book or comic. Inception cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb a thief who specializes in extracting secret information from people in their dreams. Making a heist movie inside the dreamscape turned out to be an inspired choice, and helped make Inception one of the biggest films of Nolan’s career. It’s still one of his most popular projects too, including its cryptic final scene and the many memes and fan theories it inspired.

Christopher Nolan is a horror movie fan himself, though he has yet to helm a genre project. There have been touches of horror throughout his work, including the “fear gas” scenes from Batman Begins or even the Joker from The Dark Knight, showing he has a feel for the genre. Inception is a concept he (pun intended) had been dreaming of since his teen years but had trouble cracking the core story behind it. In fact, his very first treatment for Inception in the early 2000s was a straight-ahead horror movie.

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According to an interview with The Telegraph from 2010, Nolan penned an 80-page treatment involving dream stealers. Nolan found the idea of people invading the space of someone’s lucid dream and literally stealing an idea compelling, but like the final version, the dreams themselves would have been portrayed as grounded and real. This horror movie Inception – which may be linked to Interstellar and Tenet – also would have been a smaller budget idea, but Nolan eventually moved away from it, feeling he didn’t have the experience to do the idea justice and that it loaned itself to a bigger scale.

In the years that followed, Inception moved from the horror genre to become a heist movie. Considering it involved the stealing of ideas, this genre made it a natural fit, and it was also useful for exposition purposes. A horror take on Inception is a fascinating “what if” scenario, but in constructing the project, Nolan was more inspired by sci-fi movies like Dark City or The Matrix than he was movies like A Nightmare On Elm Street, so the choice to switch genres was the right call.

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Padraig Cotter
(3507 Articles Published)

It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

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He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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