2024 was the year the world finally got a remake of The crow. This update of the 1990s’ most flamboyant gothic superhero stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric Draven, a tattoo enthusiast who is murdered along with his fiancée Shelly and then returns to life to “right the wrongs.”
The new Crow was directed by Rupert Sanders, but over the past 15 years, directors ranging from Stephen Norrington to Joan Carlos Fresnadillo and Corin Hardy have attempted to bring their own versions of the material to the screen. They all failed. But one director might have succeeded where others had not; a man who may have managed to direct (and star in!) his own thinly veiled and highly unauthorized take on The crow without anyone noticing.
His name is Tommy Wiseau. Your film is called The room.
Hear me out on this.
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Of course, I’m being a little hyperbolic. The room is not, strictly speaking, a remake of The crow. I know that. The latter is a superhero fantasy about an indestructible man who rises from his own grave to kill a bunch of Detroit underworld types. The first is… The room. The crow is hyper-stylized, set in a world of decaying urban rot and perpetual darkness. The room was shot simultaneously with side-by-side film and digital cameras because Wiseau was confused about the difference between the two formats and thought it might be informative to shoot a movie in two different ways at the same time. (This is not a joke; That’s what Wiseau said in his director’s interview in The room DVD.)
So they are very, very different films. But watching again The crow Recently, in anticipation of the remake, I was struck by some startling similarities to Wiseau’s famously disastrous domestic drama. Consider, for example, some of the images in the sequence embedded below, as the recently revived Eric Draven (played by the late Brandon Lee) recalls his life with his beloved Shelly before her murders.
What little we see of Eric and Shelly’s relationship takes place mostly in a single candlelit room. They laugh and hug. They tell each other how much they love each other. Then, suddenly, Sarah, a young, apparently parentless girl, friend of Eric and Shelly, is there. She admires Shelly in her wedding dress. She smells a bouquet of roses in slow motion.
Director Alex Proyas’ impressionistic montage combines romantic scenes with moments in which Eric, Shelly and Sarah act as a surrogate family. In one scene, Sarah and Shelly are having a pillow fight; in the next, Eric and Shelley are seductively spraying each other with shaving cream.
Compare this moment to one of the strangest elements of The room. Wiseau stars as Johnny, a banker madly in love with his girlfriend Lisa, who will eventually cheat on him and sleep with his best friend Mark. Johnny and Lisa have an inexplicable relationship with Denny, their neighbor, whose exact age is hazy at best. The actor looks like a mature adult, but the characters treat him like a minor – which makes it even more awkward when he interrupts Johnny and Lisa’s bedroom foreplay by inserting himself into the pillow fight. (Lisa later told her mother that Johnny “wanted to adopt Denny” because “it’s really a tragedy how many kids out there don’t have parents.” Kids in their 20s?)
The way these sequences are staged, filmed and edited is totally different, because one was done by Alex Proyas and the other by Tommy Wiseau. But if you look at them side by side, it’s hard not to notice similarities. All the same elements are there; until the curious fixation on roses. If you watched The crow while doing something else, and then decided to pay homage to it (or rip it off), and you were so unsure about the logistics of film production that you got confused about the difference between film and digital video, you might end up with the Johnny/Lisa/Denny scene from The room.
It certainly wouldn’t be strange for Wiseau to pay homage to (or steal from) films he admired. The roomMost famous moment – Wiseau howling “You’re destroying me, Lisa!” – it’s also the most famous moment in James Dean history Rebel without a causewhen he moans the same phrase (without the Lisa part) to his bickering parents.
Wiseau has long acknowledged his fandom for James Dean. (In The Disaster Artistthe fiction film about the making of The roomJames Franco’s Wiseau and his co-star and friend Greg (Dave Franco) visit the site of Dean’s fatal traffic accident to pay their respects.) Wiseau doesn’t look like Dean in The room. But With his long black hair and preference for shirts and jackets on his back, he he does looks a bit like Brandon Lee in The crow – Minus the black and white face paint, of course.
Again, the two films are clearly not 1:1. That said, both films are, at their core, tragic romances and fantastical tales of revenge. Both are set in extremely artificial realities; The crow takes place in Detroit, but you wouldn’t know it from the dark, art-directed sets, it feels like a fictional reality where the sun never shines and half the city is perpetually on fire. The roomThe location of is apparently San Francisco, but it was filmed on a dark green screen and some shabby sets in Los Angeles. It seems that Wiseau saw The crowliked it, absorbed some lost elements and threw them into the pot of melodramas and romances that he drew from when writing The room road map.
I looked around to see if Wiseau had ever mentioned being a fan of The crow. I didn’t discover anything, although I did find one Reddit page filled with illustrations of Tommy Wiseau as the Raven. That alone makes me feel like I’m on the right path. I’m going to go back and throw a football in the alley while I think about what this all means.
The Crow remake (starring Bill Skarsgård, not Tommy Wiseau) is set to hit theaters on August 23.
20 film remakes that got their own sequels
These successful movie remakes also had their own sequels.