By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: American director Jack Sholder, who has helmed Alone In The Dark, The Hidden, A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and Renegades.
Now retired, director Jack Sholder was a minor player in the horror genre throughout most of his career, but it was a place that he seemed to land in almost by accident. “I never set out to be Wes Craven, I set out to be Jean Renoir,” the director once said. Sholder made some terrific films in the horror field, but his apparent reticence to wholeheartedly throw himself into the genre may have been what prevented him from really firing and staking his claim as a major horror filmmaker. With his talent for intense pacing, unconventional characterisation, and crafting genuine scares, the wholly under-celebrated Jack Sholder certainly had the ability to rise to the top, but he instead now claims his place as an Unsung Auteur.
Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Jack Sholder studied English literature, but his real interest was always in cinema. He made a number of short films while at college, with the most notable being 1973’s The Garden Party, which was based on the short story by Katherine Mansfield and starred Jessica Harper, Beatrice Straight, and Tracey Walter. “The Garden Party shows the director I wanted to be, instead of where fate has taken me,” Sholder revealingly told The Flashback Files in 2020.
After graduating college, Sholder moved to New York City, with the intention of becoming an editor. A mutual friend introduced Sholder to Robert Shaye, the boss of mini-major indie studio New Line Cinema, who gave him a job on the basis of his short films. Sholder was tasked with editing trailers, foreign films, and title sequences for New Line Cinema. With slasher flicks and horror opuses all the low-budget rage in the early 1980s, New Line Cinema wanted a piece of the action, and Sholder responded with a pitch for what would become his debut feature, 1982’s truly chilling Alone In The Dark. “Bob Shaye trusted me with the film, because I was an editor and he knew I would get all the pieces,” Sholder told The Flashback Files in 2020. “Whether the pieces would be any good, who knows? But at least he knew he would have a film.”
The pieces weren’t just good, they were very, very good. 1982’s Alone In The Dark is a profoundly unusual entry in the horror genre, with debutante Sholder boasting not just a stunning handle on violence and suspense, but also on weird humour and off-the-wall characters. Getting opportunistic during a blackout, mental asylum inmates Hawkes (Jack Palance), Preacher (Martin Landau), Fatty (Erland van Lidth), and The Bleeder (Phil Clark) break out and head immediately for the family home of their new doctor (Dwight Schultze), who the deranged quartet mistakenly believe has killed their previous, much-loved medico. A siege soon develops, which will ultimately test the mettle of all concerned.
Though violent, gory and jammed with jump-scares, there is also something strangely charming about Alone In The Dark. Sholder has an obvious affection for his oddball characters (both the good guys and the bad guys), and the whole film has a skewed, off-kilter feel that really marks it as something special. The performances are delightfully unhinged, and the film is incredibly well-cast. Alone In The Dark should, by rights, be a major cult film of the 1980s, but instead it today lays largely forgotten and rarely discussed, even in horror circles.
Bob Shaye liked Alone In The Dark, and gave Sholder the keys to New Line Cinema’s biggest money-maker when original director Wes Craven declined the offer to direct 1985’s A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Seemingly not by design, Sholder ended up crafting what has now largely been termed “the gayest horror movie ever made”, the production and legacy of which is discussed in-depth in the fascinating 2019 documentary Scream Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street.
Jack Sholder has always held that he never intended to dial up the “gayness” of the film’s closeted leading man, Mark Patton, with most of the responsibility for that seemingly taken by screenwriter David Chaskin, who in turn has blamed Mark Patton’s performance and acting decisions for the film’s popularity with gay audiences. Either way, Jack Sholder certainly responds to the weirdness of David Chaskin’s script with admirably wild abandon, and the film rates as one of the wackiest horror sequels of all time.
In 1987, Sholder delivered an equal to his highly impressive debut with the wholly winning sci-fi, horror, action, mismatched buddies mash-up The Hidden. Funny, exciting, electrically paced and incredibly involving, this minor cult fave follows a cop (Michael Nouri) and FBI agent (Kyle McLachlan) who are thrown together when normal, upstanding citizens suddenly and for no reason begin going on wild rampages of sex and violence. The perfectly cast Kyle McLachlan gives a performance of stunning originality (Michael Nouri is great too), and The Hidden ultimately rates as one of the better genre flicks of the 1980s.
Perverse and gripping, The Hidden is a true original and it should have a much, much bigger cult of fans, and is in desperate need of rediscovery. “It tested through the roof, like it was gonna be a huge hit,” Sholder said in 2020, “but the movie never broke through. Everybody in Hollywood loved it. I was a hot director for about six months. Then things started to cool down and I knew I had to do a movie.”
Rather than consolidating his horror cache, Sholder embraced his inner actioneer with 1989’s now almost completely forgotten Renegades, which reteamed the previous year’s Young Guns stars Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips. Despite its current orphan status, this is actually a rock-solid action buddy flick, as Sutherland’s undercover cop and Phillips’ Native American have to work together to retrieve an ancient ceremonial spear, resulting in both abundant action and reams of skilful character exposition. Though nowhere near as good as The Hidden, Renegades is another strong, if not exactly singular, piece of filmmaking from Jack Sholder.
Disappointingly, Renegades didn’t do much business at the box office, and Sholder moved sideways to the small screen, directing telemovies like 1990’s By Dawn’s Early Light, 1993’s 12:01, 1997’s Runaway Car and many more. Sholder directed two more features with 2001’s little-seen horror flick Arachnid and the 2002 thriller Beeper before retiring from filmmaking in 2004. “Horror suits me because it’s transgressive and I don’t always like to follow the rules,” the always slightly horror-recalcitrant Jack Sholder once said. “Plus, I have a slightly odd sense of humour, so it all fits.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
