Christopher Nolan Says There’s One Genre Left He’s Desperate to Conquer after ‘The Odyssey’
Christopher Nolan has spent the past two decades bending genres to his will, from the noir puzzle box of ‘Memento’ to the war epic grit of ‘Dunkirk’ and the courtroom tension of ‘Oppenheimer.’ His filmography reads like a director systematically working his way through every corner of cinema, always finding a new structure to bend around his obsessions with time, memory, and morality.
That restless curiosity is exactly why fans have spent years wondering which genre Nolan hasn’t touched yet. He has done heist films, war films, superhero films, and now, with ‘The Odyssey,’ a full-blown mythological epic.
As it turns out, there is still one that has eluded him entirely, and Nolan just confirmed it himself. Speaking with Fred Asquith while promoting ‘The Odyssey,’ Nolan admitted horror is the genre still sitting on his wish list.
“I’d love to do a horror movie,” Nolan said during the conversation. He explained that the missing piece has never been interest; it has been the right story.
He went further, breaking down exactly what draws him to horror as a filmmaker. “It’s all about the idea. It’s all about whether there is a story that really compels you,” he added, describing the search for a premise strong enough to justify the leap.
Nolan also pointed out that horror has quietly threaded through his work for years without ever taking center stage. He specifically brought up ‘Oppenheimer’ as the closest he has come, calling its subject matter something that required the audience to sit with genuinely unsettling material for a long stretch of time.
“There’s a sense in which Oppenheimer is a horror movie,” he said, pointing to how the film asked viewers to absorb “very dark material to engage with for that long.”
For Nolan, horror is less about jump scares and more about a specific kind of audience relationship. He described the genre as fundamentally about putting viewers inside a character’s skin rather than simply watching from a distance.
“It’s one where you’re really trying to give the audience a feeling of what the characters are experiencing,” he noted, tying that idea directly back to the kind of immersive filmmaking he has built his entire career around.
The timing of the comments is notable given where Nolan is right now in his career. ‘The Odyssey’ had its world premiere in London on July 6, and the film is already being described by early reactions as his most emotionally intimate large scale production yet, filled with monsters, gods, and a decade long journey home for Matt Damon’s Odysseus.
Universal Pictures will release ‘The Odyssey’ in theaters across the United States and the United Kingdom on July 17, putting it in direct competition with a stacked summer slate. That means Nolan’s next move, horror or otherwise, is still likely a long way off, but this is the clearest signal yet of where his mind wanders when the cameras stop rolling.
It is also worth remembering that Nolan has flirted with horror-adjacent territory before, even if he has never made a straightforward entry in the genre. Between the psychological dread of ‘Memento,’ the sleep-deprived paranoia of ‘Insomnia,’ and the suffocating tension Hans Zimmer’s score brings to ‘Dunkirk,’ the director has clearly never been afraid of discomfort as a storytelling tool.
Christopher Nolan says he'd love to direct a horror movie. Would you watch it?
What remains unclear is what kind of premise could finally push him to make the leap official. Nolan has built a reputation on demanding original, structurally ambitious ideas, and horror is a genre that lives or dies on its central hook.
For now, fans will have to settle for reading between the lines of interviews like this one, and for enjoying whatever glimpses of horror sensibility sneak into ‘The Odyssey’ when it finally reaches theaters.
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