The Opening Shot and Music: Jesus in the Snow

Though I'll admit the movie has some flaws, I find The Hateful Eight one of QT's best films, mesmerizing in its own special way -- apart from his other films.

Part of this is not entirely his doing, but certainly his desire. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, working with the 70mm experts of Panavision, makes The Hateful Eight one of the great visual experiences in movie history -- which is pretty damn ironic given that QT is famous for his long, long, LONG and catchy sequences of dialogue.

People gonna talk, talk, talk all through The Hateful Eight, but they talk amidst wide-screen snowy vistas of the Rocky Mountains in the outdoor scenes, and they talk in a richly developed crystalline cabin(actually Minnie's Haberdashery, a "truck stop" of sorts for stagecoachs) of deep blues and rich golds in the indoor scenes...a treat for the eyes at all times.

But it is at the very beginning of the film that Robert Richardson's cinematography, QT's sense of mood and -- wonderfully -- Ennio Morricone's decades-old sense of movie music, come together in a way that launches this QT movie better than any other movie he ever made.

And there is no dialogue at all.

After some initial moody and cold wide-screen shots of the Rockies in snowy winter and bleak, stripped trees, we get the kind of tabloid-esque titles we expect from QT: "The Eight Film From Quentin Tarantino"(auteurism up front) and (in weirdly clunky lettering) "The Hateful Eight."

And then the opening shot begins and the main theme kicks in. Its great.

Close-up on a face etched in wood: Jesus, head tilted down in pain and defeat. The camera will now move away from that close-up (without a cut) and take in the entire wooden statue, and frankly, its pretty creepy.

Jesus is dead or dying on the cross, and he's rather a "horror movie Jesus," with his skeletal ribs showing through and his crucifixation presented as something of brutal horror.

As the statue is revealed "in full," we see that it is covered in snow in many places, and we see that around it...there is nothing but white snow in all directions. It is as if Jesus has died again for our sins in the middle of a white void.

The visuals of the long travelling shot are great enough -- but Morricone's music sends things into the creepy stratosphere, as the notes build and build in ominous power and then in the "final third" explode into full, powerful orchestration. We don't hear much of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" in this music, but we hear a lot of Morricone's epic 1987 score for "The Untouchables" -- which helps link QT here to one of his muses, Untouchables director Brian DePalma, who was, in turn, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock -- whose movies are well conjured in this intricate opening camera move with Morricone's ominous score summoning some memories of Bernard Herrmann in his Psycho/Vertigo mode.

This opening shot, and Morricone's opening music, prepare us very well for what is coming: a Western that really isn't a Western; a "closed room" Agatha Christie-style whodunit; and a "trapped room" horror experience on the order of the John Carpenter version of "The Thing," which starred Kurt Russell(as this film) will, and which had music not terribly unlike what Morricone gives us here.

Eventually, Jesus is joined in the shot by a stagecoach far in the background that comes closer and closer and traverses the screen, setting up some spectacular footage of the horses galloping onward which again creates a great mood in The Hateful Eight even before a word is said.

And we get the first chapter sign, and the movie begins. But never is it as haunting and compelling as in this opening shot and music.

A note: much later in the film, QT flashbacks his story to "Earlier that morning" and we see the Jesus statue against a clear blue sky -- within only hours, it would be flooded with clouds and mist as in the opening shot. A SECOND -- but EARLIER -- stagecoach traverses the road past the Jesus statue and we get what used to be called "the Hitchcock rhyme" -- a shot that summons up another shot. QT could borrow with the best of them.