Dark Blood

Dark Blood (2012)

Filmed in 1993 but never completed due to River Phoenix's death, Dark Blood tells the story of Boy, a young widower living on a nuclear testing site in the desert. Boy is waiting for the end of the world and carves Katchina dolls that supposedly contain magical powers. Boy's solitude is interrupted when a Hollywood jet-set couple who are travelling across the desert become stranded after their car breaks down. The couple are rescued by Boy, who then holds them prisoner because of his desire for the woman and his ambition to create a better world with her.

Date of release
2012-09-27
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 26m
Genres
Thriller
Director
George Sluizer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: New Mexico, Torrey, Los Angeles, and Gallup

Dark Blood is a 2012 American-Dutch thriller film directed by George Sluizer, written by Jim Barton, and starring River Phoenix, Judy Davis, and Jonathan Pryce. Production on the film was halted due to the death of Phoenix in 1993, shortly before the end of the project and remained unfinished for 19 years. It was the last film to feature River Phoenix and the only film in which Phoenix portrayed a villain.

Production

Dark Blood began shooting on September 21, 1993, and consisted of roughly five weeks of on location shooting in Torrey, Utah and was scheduled to complete three weeks of filming interior scenes in Los Angeles, California on a sound stage. Parts of the film were also shot in Gallup, New Mexico. There is a scene shot at Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado. The film had a budget of under $10 million.

It was revealed in October 2011 that director George Sluizer had held onto the footage, fearing it would be destroyed, and that he had reedited the material and believed that with some adjustments a completed film could be released in 2012. In 1999, the insurance company that owned the negatives wanted to stop paying storage costs, so they considered having the film destroyed.

On May 18, 2012, a trailer for the film and an interview with Sluizer were released on YouTube. The film premiered to an invited audience on September 27, 2012, at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands. It had its international premiere out of competition at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.

A region-free DVD (in English with optional German subtitles) was released in Germany in January 2018 by Missing Films.

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

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