9 / 10
Official trailer
Down Here, You’re On Your Own
The film opens over empty Texas highways and flat fields, and a lazy, drawling voice tells you that the world is full of complainers. Nothing comes with a guarantee.
Down here, you’re on your own. The voice belongs to Loren Visser, a private detective in a yellow suit and a cowboy hat, and he’s about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake in a sleeping bag.
Julian Marty owns a bar. His wife, Abby, is sleeping with Ray, one of his bartenders. Marty hires Visser to photograph them, then to kill them. Visser takes the money, fakes the photographs and shoots Marty instead, with Abby’s own gun, and leaves it at the scene. Then things really go wrong.
I adore this movie. It’s mean, patient and funny in a way that makes you feel a little guilty for laughing, and it has the nerve of filmmakers who already knew exactly what they wanted to do. Each time the plot tightens another notch, I find myself grinning and wincing at the same time.
Joel and Ethan Coen made this in 1984 on a shoestring, raising the money from investors with a short trailer they shot themselves. It was their first film, and it announced everything they’d go on to do: crime, black comedy, Texas, idiots and blood.
Everybody Gets It Wrong
The plot is a beauty. Ray walks into the bar, finds Marty’s body and Abby’s gun, and assumes Abby killed him. So he cleans up, loads the body into his car and drives it out to a field to bury it.
Except Marty isn’t quite dead. Ray has to finish the job himself, and he buries a man who’s still breathing.
Now Ray thinks Abby’s a murderer. Abby doesn’t know Marty’s dead and thinks Ray is acting strangely for no reason. Visser thinks he’s got away clean, until he realizes he left his lighter behind. Nobody tells anybody anything, everybody draws the wrong conclusion, and people keep dying because of it. The Coens hang a ridiculous amount of dread on that one little lighter, and I’m with them every inch of the way.
It’s a comedy of errors played for keeps, and it’s as funny as it is horrible. The Coens would use the same trick again and again, from Fargo to No Country for Old Men, but it’s never been sharper than here.
For Writers
Every character in Blood Simple acts on a wrong assumption. Ray thinks Abby killed Marty. Abby thinks Ray has gone strange. Nobody tells anyone the truth, and the plot runs on the gap between what each character believes and what happened.
Dramatic irony is a hell of a tool. When the reader knows something the characters don’t, every scene crackles with tension, because the reader can see the disaster coming. Build your plot so that different characters hold different pieces of the truth, and keep them from sharing.
Make a chart of who knows what at each stage of your story. Look for moments where a single conversation would solve everything, and make sure something stops that conversation from happening.
M. Emmet Walsh
Walsh plays Visser, and he steals the film. He’s sweaty, greasy and cheerful, with a hacking laugh and a folksy line of patter, and he’s the most dangerous man in Texas. He sits in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle, fanning himself, cheerfully planning murders like he’s ordering lunch.
No villain of the eighties is creepier, and Walsh makes it look effortless.
He doesn’t raise his voice or brandish a gun. He just smiles, and you know he’d kill you for twenty dollars and sleep fine afterward. That hacking laugh crawls under my skin, and Walsh is the single biggest reason this film sits at a 9 for me.
For Writers
Visser never raises his voice. He smiles, fans himself and plans murders like errands. His cheerfulness makes him terrifying.
Try writing your villain’s most threatening scene with no raised voices and no overt threats.
Let the menace come from what they don’t say, and from how comfortable they seem. Give them a mundane habit, fanning themselves, eating, checking a watch, and let them keep doing it while they talk about terrible things. The contrast between the ordinary gesture and the awful words will chill the reader far more than any snarl.
The most frightening villains are often the calmest. A villain who shouts is predictable. One who chats pleasantly about killing you is unsettling, because the reader can’t tell when the violence will come. If you want to go further, read Writing Heroes and Villains.
Frances McDormand
Blood Simple was Frances McDormand’s first film. She plays Abby with a skittish, nervy energy, a woman who’s leaving a bad marriage and finds herself in the middle of a killing spree she doesn’t even know is happening. McDormand later married Joel Coen and won an Oscar for Fargo, but she’s already terrific here.
Dan Hedaya plays Marty, sweaty, bitter and pathetic, and John Getz plays Ray, a decent enough guy who’s in over his head from the first scene. Neither of them has a clue what’s really going on, and that’s the tragedy and the joke.
Shot on Nothing
Barry Sonnenfeld shot the film, and he and the Coens make a tiny budget look stylish. The camera glides along the bar counter, hopping over a drunk passed out on the bar. It swoops low along roads and through rooms. Light pours through bullet holes in a wall in thin, dusty beams. It’s inventive, playful and completely assured for a first film.
Carter Burwell’s score, his first of many for the Coens, is simple and eerie, built around a spare piano theme. Nobody would guess how little money was behind it.
The Burial
The Coens never filmed anything more horrifying than Ray burying Marty. It goes on and on. Marty isn’t dead, and Ray, sobbing and shaking, can’t bring himself to shoot him again, so he finishes it with a shovel and buries him in a freshly ploughed field while he’s still moving.
There’s no music, no quick cutting, nothing to make it easier. It’s long and awful, and it tells you exactly what the film is about: ordinary people discovering how hard and how ugly it is to kill somebody, and how easy it is to believe the worst about the people you love. I can barely sit through it, and I wouldn’t trim a second of it.
For Writers
The burial goes on far longer than the audience wants it to. The Coens refuse to cut away, and the length makes it unbearable.
Find the most difficult scene in your story and slow it down. Add the physical details, the hesitations and the small failures. Then see whether it’s become the scene readers talk about. Slowing down is the hardest discipline in writing, because every instinct tells you to hurry past the ugly part.
When a scene is meant to be hard to watch or read, don’t rush it. Let it last longer than feels comfortable. Readers skim violence when it’s quick. They feel it when it’s slow, because every extra sentence forces them to stay in the moment. There’s more on this in my article on pacing.
Light Through the Bullet Holes
The final sequence, in Abby’s apartment at night, is where the Coens show off, and I think they deserve to. Visser comes to finish things, and Abby doesn’t know who’s attacking her. There’s a knife through a hand pinned to a windowsill, a gun fired through a wall and holes letting in light from the bathroom, and it’s as tense as anything in Hitchcock. That knife through the hand makes me flinch hard enough to feel it.
Abby, still believing her husband is alive and after her, tells the dying man on the floor she’s not afraid of Marty. Visser, bleeding under the sink, starts to laugh. The last joke in the film is that she still has no idea what happened. Nobody in this movie ever does.
Anything Wrong?
The pace in the middle is slow, and some of the performances, especially Getz’s, are a little flat. It’s also a very cold film, and anybody looking for a character to root for won’t find one.
A lean, brutal, blackly funny debut, Blood Simple already has everything the Coen brothers would become famous for, and M. Emmet Walsh’s Visser is a movie creep for the ages.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The entire plot of Blood Simple rests on misunderstanding. No character ever has the full picture, and every death happens because somebody believed something that wasn’t true. The audience, who sees everything, watches the disaster unfold with growing horror.
A story where the reader knows more than any character can create unbearable suspense, because the reader keeps wanting to shout a warning nobody can hear.
Give each of your main characters a different, incomplete piece of the truth. Then let them act on it, and let the reader watch the consequences pile up.
The Coens Arrive
It’s a 9 from me: the Coen brothers’ first film, a lean, nasty, darkly funny Texas noir built on a pile of fatal misunderstandings, with M. Emmet Walsh’s slimeball Visser grinning through all of it. The sagging middle and Getz’s flat stretches cost it the last point, and I’m happy to pay that price for a debut this sure of itself. It still feels fresh four decades later, and I’d put it ahead of plenty of the Coens’ bigger, glossier pictures.
