A Beloved Horror Director Was Responsible For Some Of Indiana Jones' Best Adventures

Great horror directors tend to excel at making superhero movies. We've seen proof of this time and time again by now, with the likes of Sam Raimi, Scott Derrickson, James Wan, and James Gunn having all delivered top-tier films involving do-gooders in spandex. Then again, given that horror is arguably the most flexible genre out there, perhaps it's to be expected that those who specialize in scaring people's socks off would be equally adept at crafting thrills in general, and not just of the superhero variety.

Take Steven Spielberg, who's maybe the greatest horror director that nobody really thinks of as a "horror director." While he's yet to helm an honest-to-goodness superhero picture, his "Indiana Jones" movies seamlessly blend spectacular set pieces with white-knuckle sequences and moments of pure, unadulterated pulp horror whenever there's an evildoer (preferably a Nazi) in need of a good face-melting. Really, it just doesn't feel like a proper Indiana Jones adventure without some truly horrifying stuff in the mix, which is why /Film's Bill Bria (correctly) declared that "The Nun II" and "The Pope's Exorcist" share the mutual honor of being 2023's "best 'Indiana Jones' movie" shortly after director James Mangold's otherwise decent "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" hit the big screen.

Indeed, when "Indiana Jones" creator George Lucas set to work on his "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" TV series in the early 1990s, he similarly wound up recruiting a cavalcade of folks renowned for their ability to give viewers a jolt to work on its individual episodes. But while that lineup included directors like Nicolas Roeg ("Don't Look Now," "The Witches") and Joe Johnston ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," "Jurassic Park III"), few of them contributed as much to the spin-off/prequel as Frank Darabont.

Given the man's oeuvre, we all probably should've seen Darabont's gut-wrenching adaptation of Stephen King's "The Mist" coming. He was, after all, the same guy who gave us several chilling moments of prisoners being viciously assaulted in "The Shawshank Redemption," as well as the similarly devastating scene where Michael Clarke Duncan's gentle convict John Coffey reveals who really committed the horrendous crime he was accused of doing in "The Green Mile." Going even further back, of course, Darabont had already earned his horror bonafides by penning both "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" and the deeply disgusting (complimentary) 1988 version of "The Blob."

Unfortunately, Darabont's career was eventually upended when his acclaimed run as the original showrunner on another horror project, "The Walking Dead," reached a premature end partway into the uber-hit zombie series' second season. (He was so well-liked that certain "Walking Dead" actors exited soon after in solidarity.) Thankfully, however, his earlier venture into television with "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" went far better, as he ended up writing a sizable chunk of the well-received series. That includes "Travels with Father," an installment focusing on Indy and his dad that made our list of essential "Young Indiana Jones" episodes, and fairly so, as it fleshes out the duo's complicated relationship, lending more emotional weight to their odd couple antics in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" in the process.

Really, Darabont seems to have a firm grasp on what makes the "Indiana Jones" franchise tick as a whole, as evidenced by his unused script for what became "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." His draft, which I've read and is titled "City of Gods," had both some of the good stuff from that movie (like Indy being a hero out of time in the early Cold War era) and the bad (like, yes, the nuke-the-fridge scene) but also made Indy's old flame Marion a more active player in the plot, featured ex-Nazis as the main threat instead of Communists, and, best of all, didn't include Indy's son Mutt at all!

Darabont has long maintained that it was Lucas who put the kibosh on his "City of Gods" script, and honestly? Even as someone who's defended "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" as being better than you remember, I agree that Lucas should've trusted his old pal Frank and let him work his magic on the man in the fedora once more.