Before his ground-breaking masterpieces like Memento, The Dark Knight, and his Oscar-winning epic, Oppenheimer, a 19‑year‑old Christopher Nolan
spent his weekends in the late‑1980s shooting an eerie, 8 mm horror short called Tarantella that would not have been out of place in the library of David Lynch’s most unsettling movies. For more than three decades, the five‑minute film was considered lost until it was uploaded to YouTube in 2021 – and very quickly taken down for copyright reasons. Now the film has crept back onto the video sharing site via The Great Cinema’s channel, and fans should really check it out while they can.
For those who were freaked out by the micro-budgeted viral sensation Skinamarink, and don’t like their on-screen nightmares to make a lot of sense in favor of being more experimental, Nolan’s early exploration of how it was possible to do a lot with very little is a must-watch, and a world away from the mega-budget blockbusters he has gone on to be part of.
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Running just under five minutes, Tarantella follows a sleepless young man tormented by visions of giant spiders and demonic shapes skittering across darkened hallways. The unsettling short is made even more atmospheric thanks to the grainy 8mm photography and rapid‑fire cutting that makes it feel like you are inside someone’s fever-dream, and this is what gives the whole thing the feeling of a Lynchian head‑trip. While there is no dialogue, the constant droning of sound is both ambient and ominous at the same time, while Nolan’s decision to use some jarring cuts in what is a fractured piece of storytelling is something that has become part of his calling card for movies like Memento and Inception.
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Christopher Nolan co‑directed the project with high school friend Roko Belic, who went on to have his own Oscar nominated career in documentary filmmaking. Belic stars in the movie, alongside the other famous Nolan, Christopher’s brother Jonathan. The small team worked on the movie sporadically in their spare time, using borrowed cameras and sound equipment, but after being viewed in a limited capacity at the end of the 1980s, the short vanished, like so many do.
However, according to the details shared on the YouTube video’s description, collector Henry Adams found an original tape in 2021 and briefly shared it online before it was removed due to copyright claims. This latest sharing of the film is on a YouTube channel with only 22 subscribers, and Tarantella as its sole upload. This means you will probably have to be quick if you want to watch it yourself, as it likely won’t be around for long.
While Tarantella isn’t the kind of polished production Nolan makes now, it was never intended to be. It was a raw, creative piece by the young man who would go on to become one of the most revered filmmakers in the world, and it is a real insight into some of the early filmmaking decisions Nolan would go on to incorporate into his professional work over the years. For that reason alone, Tarantella is worth five minutes of your time while it has crawled back into the light, but you will need to be quick to catch it before it scuttles into the shadows again.
Source: YouTube
