Forty years old this year, the neo-noir Blood Simple marked the debut of Joel and Ethan Coen, and remains a captivating example of low-budget filmmaking.
To date, Joel and Ethan Coen haven’t made a pure horror film (though they’ve talked about it). Blood Simple, their 1984 debut, undoubtedly comes close. A neo-noir shot on a low budget, it shows that the writer-director brothers had their style down right from the beginning of their careers. Its script is witty and terse; its photography is fluid and stylish; its characters and tone are somehow both mundane and off-beat. Like so many of their later film, Blood Simple also defies easy categorisation; it’s a neo-noir, it’s a black comedy, and in several visceral scenes, dips gleefully into horror.
Much like Fargo or The Big Lebowski or any other thriller-infused Coen brothers film you could name, there are no criminal masterminds in Blood Simple – just ordinary, slightly naive people blundering into lives of violence and then frantically trying to cover up the results.
It’s the bleakly cynical tale of a young wife, her bartender lover, her jealous, sleazy husband and the even sleazier private detective whom the husband hires to kill the wife. From this quadrangle of unremarkable characters emerges a lean, suspenseful debut that rattles along to its grimly inevitable, blackly comic conclusion.
Frances McDormand stars (in her movie debut) as Abby, a young housewife who provokes the jealous rage of her wealthy, bar-owning husband Julian (Dan Hedaya) when she has an affair with modest barkeeper Ray (John Getz). Driving the narrative along, and evidently having a grand old time as he does so, is M Emmet Walsh’s oily private detective, Loren Visser. With his cowboy hat, beaten-up old VW Beetle and derisive cackle, he’s the most recognisably Coen-esque character among the small cast.
In fact, Blood Simple could even be described as Loren’s movie; he’s given the story’s opening narration (“The world is full of complainers…”), most of its memorable lines, and the film’s final shot is from his point of view. Like Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) in Barton Fink or The Stranger (Sam Elliott) in The Big Lebowski, Loren has a presence that looms over the entire film.
Shot for just $1.5m, Blood Simple followed the same financing template set down by The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi’s own debut film from 1981. Ethan Coen had worked as an assistant editor on Raimi’s horror, and the latter filmmaker had provided some useful advice for getting the money together for Blood Simple: make a trailer. In 1982, the Coens hired a young Barry Sonnenfeld, then an NYU graduate, to help them shoot their promo – the idea being to use it as a tool to coax investors into contributing to the $1.5m budget they needed to make the full movie.
Raimi had done the same thing a few years earlier: before The Evil Dead, there was Within The Woods, an 32-minute short film made for just $1,600. Featuring Bruce Cambell and a bunch of Raimi’s other friends, the cabin-in-the-woods horror became the proof of concept for Raimi’s debut.
The Coens’ trailer (also featuring Bruce Campbell, though you can barely see him), was hawked around the homes of various wealthy people, including dentists, lawyers and even a millionaire inventor. Incredibly, the Coens actually lugged a 16mm projector and their reel of film to each house in order to show off the footage – little wonder that it took about a year to get the $1.5m together.
Interestingly, the Coens’ fundraising trailer hints at something even more horror-infused than the finished film. Its prowling shots of a car on a lonely road, a shovel being scraped across tarmac, light shining through bullet holes – all of which appeared in the feature itself – feel remarkably like Raimi’s work.
Raimi was clearly an influence on the Coens, particularly when it came to pulling off bold camera moves on a minimal budget. There’s a scene in the finished Blood Simple in which Julian drags Abby out of Ray’s house, and the camera comes hurtling across the front lawn towards the two figures, lit by the rising sun. It’s uncannily like the demonic POV shots of The Evil Dead, and Joel Coen readily admitted in a 2020 interview that “something that we learned from Sam Raimi, who used it quite a lot in The Evil Dead.”
Because the production couldn’t afford a proper Steadycam, they instead attached a regular camera to a plank of wood, had two people hold it on either end, and simply run up the lawn towards the actors. The use of a wide angle lens helped eliminate much of the camera shake, Coen explained.
It’s an example of just how inventive the Coens – and Sonnenfeld – were given the budget they had to work with. The Coens consciously wrote the most lean story they could, with a minimal number of characters and only a handful of locations. They shot in real (somewhat claustrophobic) locations in Texas to save money: the apartment Abby rents out was situated above a busy working restaurant.
The Coens made the most of their meagre finances by storyboarding everything in advance, devising some expressive shots – the camera gliding across a bar; McDormand seemingly swooning backwards from one location to another – that anticipated the fluid direction seen in their later work. (The Coens used the same plank of wood technique – which they dubbed ‘Shakycam’ – in their second film, Raising Arizona.)
Just as the Coens were spurred on by their friend Sam Raimi’s DIY approach, Blood Simple itself prompted other aspiring filmmakers to write a script or pick up a camera. In 2013, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier wrote a pared-back, blackly comic revenge thriller called Blue Ruin.
Like the Coens, Saulnier crafted the story around what he had available: he cast his close friend Macon Blair as an unlikely avenging angel who lives in decaying Pontiac not unlike Loren’s rusty VW Beetle. He shot the film in and around houses and property belonging to friends and family (“The home invasion sequence was shot at Jeremy’s mom’s house,” Blair told The New York Times in 2014), and started financing the film via savings and credit cards.
When funds began to run low, Saulnier turned to Kickstarter and crowdfunded the remaining $35,000 he needed to finish the project. The result was an independent sensation: debuting at Cannes, it received glowing reviews and transformed both Saulnier and Blair’s careers. Critics noted the parallels between Blue Ruin and Blood Simple, and Saulnier also cited the Coens as an influence.
In a 2020 reunion video, the Coens and Sonnenfeld good-naturedly picked apart their debut, noting the overly-tight close-ups, lighting errors or out-of-focus shots of John Getz. They’re remarkably self-effacing, given what a cult film it eventually became and how much it changed their careers.
After Blood Simple, Frances McDormand and Joel Coen married, and McDormand became an acclaimed, multi-award winning actor in both the Coens’ films and beyond. Composer Carter Burwell, who wrote Blood Simple’s brooding score in his own feature debut, is one of America’s best-known composers, and still works with the Coens 40 years later. Barry Sonnenfeld worked as a cinematographer on two more Coen movies (Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing) before moving to directing with the hugely successful Addams Family in 1991.
(Editor Roderick Jaynes also went on to have a long and successful career – though that’s because he’s actually the Coens, working under a pseudonym.)
Blood Simple may have its faults, as ruthlessly laid out by the filmmakers themselves, but it remains a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking 40 years on. As Sonnenfeld put it, “If we re-shot Blood Simple now, we could do it for 10 times the amount and it wouldn’t be any better.”
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