A '70s Clint Eastwood Thriller Was One Of The Main Inspirations On Yellowjackets

The easy pitch for "Yellowjackets" — a soccer team gets stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash — is that it's "Lord of the Flies" but with teenage girls instead of little boys. The influences on the eclectic thriller show don't end there, though. 

The original "Yellowjackets" pitch deck, authored by co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, outlines some of those influences. One is "Lord of the Flies," but another is Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures," based on a real-life story of two New Zealand teenage girls (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet) whose intense friendship culminated in a murder. No surprise "Yellowjackets" cast Lynskey as its lead character, Shauna Sadecki née Shipman. 

Stephen King is another listed influence. The dual timeline of "Yellowjackets" — one following the main characters' horrifying adolescence, the other about them as adults reliving the past — evokes "It." Another more obscure influence is "The Beguiled," a 1971 thriller film starring Clint Eastwood, but not in his usual stoic gunslinger role.

Based on a 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan (and later remade in 2017 by director Sofia Coppola), "The Beguiled" is set during the American Civil War. After a battle in Mississippi, wounded Union soldier John McBurney (Eastwood) is found by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a young student at a girls' boarding school. Though they're Confederates, the sexually repressed faculty and students are all drawn to the handsome devil in their midst. McBurney, out of both his own lust and self-preservation, is happy to tempt them with romance.

The original pitch for "Yellowjackets" saw many changes along the way, but the influence of "The Beguiled" is still evident. Both stories explore how women form social structures when men aren't around. The character of Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) fills the role of McBurney on "Yellowjackets."

Eastwood's casting in "The Beguiled" is clever and subversive. He's a cinematic icon of masculinity, the kind who women do fawn over, but "The Beguiled" casts him in a more sinister light before the jealousy of those women tears him apart. Compare how that same year, in Eastwood's own directorial debut, "Play Misty for Me," he cast himself as a man stalked by a jealous lover (Jessica Walter). While Eastwood thinks his name attracted the wrong audience for "The Beguiled" (hence its box office failure), history has been kind to him playing against type.

In the third act of "The Beguiled," McBurney takes a nasty fall and headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) amputates his broken leg. It's a symbolic castration, one that punishes McBurney for rejecting Martha and cuts off his ability to escape the girls. In the end, he's murdered by them via poisonous mushrooms in his dinner. 

Ben's story goes a similar way in "Yellowjackets." In the plane crash, his right leg is pinned under debris, and Misty Quigley (Samantha Hanratty) amputates it. He spends the show injured and outnumbered by the girls, unable to stop their fall into cannibalism. He's also helpless against Misty, who has a crush on him and is not shy to push boundaries. (Ben's repulsed not just because she's his student, but because he's a closeted gay man.)

"Yellowjackets" season 3 subjects Ben to the same train of torture McBurney faced. He's tried and convicted for supposedly burning down the Yellowjackets' cabin refuge, has his remaining Achilles tendon slashed, and is ultimately given a mercy kill by his one friend, Natalie (Sophie Thatcher). The team "honors" their coach's death by carving up his corpse into a feast.

Ben's gruesome fate is part of a larger theme in "Yellowjackets" about feminine power's dark side. Across three seasons, most of the people whom the Yellowjackets have hunted and/or eaten are men. 

Their coach, Bill Martinez (Carlos Sanz), perishes in the plane crash. With the death of the patriarchy, the girls can create their own order. The women outnumber the three male survivors: Ben, plus Martinez's sons Travis (Kevin Alves) and Javi (Luciano Leroux). Jackie (Ella Purnell) jokes to Travis that he's living every teenage boy's dream by "being stranded with a bunch of babes." That's the same fantasy animating "The Beguiled," i.e., being the only man around with your pick of women. Like "The Beguiled," "Yellowjackets" gives that fantasy a "be careful what you wish for" spin.

In the episode "Doomcoming," most of the characters get high on psychedelic mushrooms. It spurs their first hunt, an omen of the far worse savagery to come. Some of the girls, led by Lottie (Courtney Eaton) and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), pin Travis to a chair, kiss him all over, and don't listen when he tells them to stop. 

Since Travis is high, he starts seeing the girl with the black eyes and razor-teeth of sharks. Notice how they tear his clothes off with those teeth; it looks less like an orgy, more like a pack of wolves ripping into a deer. The scene is the sort of fantasy a boy in Travis' shoes would have, a bunch of beautiful women throwing themselves at him, but it's a horrifying assault, not sexy. Women taking control of their sexuality can and do leave men frightened and repulsed.

As "Yellowjackets" closes out in season 4, fingers crossed it can top the terror of "Doomcoming."