Dark Tower

Dark Tower (1989)

In a city that never sleeps... this building is a nightmare.

An architect, a security chief, a parapsychologist and an exorcist face evil in a Barcelona skyscraper.

Date of release
1989-03-29
TMDB
3.9 / 10 (30)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Horror, Thriller, Mystery
Director
Freddie Francis, Ken Wiederhorn

Casting

Interesting facts

Dark Tower is a 1987 supernatural horror film directed by Freddie Francis and starring Michael Moriarty, Jenny Agutter, Theodore Bikel, Carol Lynley, Kevin McCarthy and Anne Lockhart. It centers on a high-rise building haunted by a malicious presence.

Production

Ken Wiederhorn's script for Dark Tower, from a story by Robert J. Avrech, was made as a film by producer Tom Fox using his production company Greenfox Films in collaboration with Howard International Pictures. Wiederhorn had been intended to direct, but lost the opportunity when financing took longer than expected to come through which coincided with Wiederhorn dealing with personal issues that also forced his withdrawal from the project.

Several online sources (including IMDb and Turner Classic Movies) claims Wiederhorn was the original director, and was replaced by Freddie Francis mid-shoot. However, Wiederhorn denied this in an interview with Flashback Files, stating that he was never on-set and had never seen the finished film. The film was shot on location in Barcelona.

Freddie Francis had become disillusioned with directing as he no longer wished to do cheap horror films and preferred working as a cinematographer on larger projects. Sandy Howard called Francis informing him they had lost Wiederhorn with production scheduled to begin in three weeks and after liking the script agreed to direct the film.

A number of plot aspects, such as the character of Dennis Randall (Michael Moriarty) suffering from recurring nightmares of being pushed from the top of a tall building and a climax involving Randall and Carolyn Page (Jenny Agutter) on the building's roof that would payoff the plot point, were altered after shooting had completed with the producer adding several new scenes and special effects sequences.

Due to his unhappiness with the quality of the film, Francis insisted his name be removed from the film with Howard choosing to replace it with the pseudonym Ken Barnett. Francis's dissatisfaction with the experience of making Dark Tower led to him returning to his primary role as a cinematographer. He never directed another feature film despite being offered directing jobs after Dark Tower.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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