Quentin Tarantino Wants to Make a 1930s Gangster Movie or a ‘Really, Really Scary Horror Film’

Quentin Tarantino has promised (threatened?) on more than one occasion to end his directing career after 10 films, and with The Hateful Eight appropriately serving as his eighth, that means we may only have two more Tarantino movies in our future. The director has had a few projects kicking around in his head — notably a third Kill Bill installment and the Inglorious Basterds-adjacent Killer Crow — and while nothing has been officially set as his follow-up to The Hateful Eight, he does have a couple of possibilities. Or not — you never know with this guy, you know?

Tarantino’s films have incorporated many genres and settings, from crime to western to World War II and the Civil War, but there are a couple of genres he hasn’t tried his hand at just yet, and though he may never get around to it, he tells Time Out about the kinds of movies he’d love to make if he had the time:

There is not a genre left where I have that same burning desire I had to do a World War II–movie or a martial-arts movie. I think maybe the one genre left might be a 1930s-gangster movie, that kind of John Dillinger thing. I’m interested in doing something contemporary, where I can have a character who gets in a car and turns on the radio, so I can have a cool driving montage. And if I had all the time in the world, I would love to make a really, really scary horror film, like The Exorcist. But I don’t know if me taking my sense of humor and putting it in the backseat just to hit a tone of dread from beginning to end is the best use of my talents or my time.

As Tarantino goes on to note, The Hateful Eight is the closest he’s come to a horror film, as it blends elements of the western films he loves with John Carpenter’s The Thing, even borrowing that film’s composer (Ennio Morricone) and star (Kurt Russell). But as Tarantino himself admits, he may not be the best director for a straight horror film; the last time he tried his hand at the genre, we got Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, co-starring and written by Tarantino, resulting in a film far more humorous than terrifying.

The director has flirted with many projects over the last couple of decades, including a Vega brothers spinoff inspired by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol. 3, a Harvey Weinstein documentary, the previously mentioned 1930s-set gangster film and Killer Crow — the latter of which was meant to be created from an entire subplot scrapped from Inglourious Basterds.

More recently, Tarantino has been revisiting the idea of adapting Elmore Leonard’s 40 Lashes Less One, though perhaps as a TV miniseries…which means it wouldn’t contradict his plan to retire after 10 films.