What inspired Underworld

Director of Underworld

The inspiration to make Underworld was my love of the old Universal horror classics, The House of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. In those films you had the monster of legend going at it toe-to-toe.

However, thematically, the inspiration was a little more real, and I have to say more tragic. And that’s the experience I’ve had with interracial dating and different biracial children I had come in contact with over the years. It’s amazing the hatred that’s hurled at you because you may date someone from another race. It’s almost as though man has learned absolutely nothing about brotherhood in the past 50 years.

Bringing the concept to film was no small task. I remember it started out as a simple werewolf project for Columbia Pictures they were interested in developing, but even the guys at Columbia weren’t sure if it was going to work. So, since I had already written a script they liked, they called me one day and asked me what I thought about doing a werewolf movie.

My immediate reaction was "no." There had only been one or two decent werewolf movies to speak about and the "cheese factor" is so high. But after kicking the idea around a bit over the course of days I said, "What if we do a horror movie with a love story, like Romeo and Juliet? But instead of Montagues and Capulets we have werewolves on one side and vampires on the other. "

Underworld at its core is about a race war between two warring factions that are essentially the same, and the relationship that occurs when a woman from one side falls for a man on the other. Furthermore, there is an edict that the races should never "fraternize" in a sexual sense for fear of creating what we call the "hybrid." The hybrid is a fiercely powerful progeny of the union between lycan (werewolves) and vampires. We tore this aspect from the pages of real life racial hatred and fear that still exist in the world. In our film the fear is that biracial hybrids will one day take over and the races will cease to exist. It’s really funny, they’re both monsters yet they can’t see that. It’s the ultimate manifestation of "the pot calling the kettle black."

This material has the high potential to be corny or cheesy if not done properly. Face it, how many good vampire and werewolf movies have their been? What I wanted was a sense of history with this story. I wanted to go back in time and give an "origin" for these creatures of legend. How they came to be and how the war started. I have to tip the hat to Danny, because he took part of that history and took it even further and really made something special out of it. I poured over many a dusty tomb about folklore and legend looking for tidbits of information and history. I wanted to be as "authentic" in my research as I could be by going to the source of these legends.

What attracted me to the genre was really just the love of monster movies and the cool images I’ve been seeing since I was a kid. And by the way, I’ve always liked werewolves more than vampires!