When James O’Barr came up with the idea for The Crow in 1981, all he wanted it to achieve was emotional catharsis. He was a 21- year-old US Marine stationed in Berlin, still reeling from the death of his fiancée at the hands of a drunk driver a few years earlier while they were still in high school. He didn’t know if the comic he was writing and drawing would ever get published.
“It was just a way of getting it down on paper,” James told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, referring to the grief he still felt. “I had never done anything that personal before.”
The first issue of The Crow wouldn’t be published for another eight years, but this story of an undead avenger seeking retribution against the men who killed him and his fiancée took on a life of its own, thanks in large part to the 1994 movie adaptation. That film, directed by Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee as the title character, aka resurrected rock musician Eric Draven, became a cult hit.
With the tagline ‘Real love is forever’, its aesthetic influenced countless rock, metal and goth artists, while a brilliant soundtrack featuring everyone from The Cure and Nine Inch Nails to Rage Against The Machine and Rollins Band helped reshape the way Hollywood incorporated heavy and alternative music into big-budget movies.
Brandon Lee’s tragic on-set death didn’t stop the franchise continuing, with even a trio of underwhelming sequels failing to dent the character’s iconic status. A brand new remake, with It star Bill Skarsgård stepping into Brandon’s shoes as Eric Draven, will hit cinemas in late August, 30 years after the original movie. Like its title character, The Crow refuses to die.
“Eric was my hero,” says former Him vocalist turned solo star Ville Valo. “The film happened right after grunge broke and was really grungy in a cool way. There were a few darker films, but I don’t think there was anything considered ‘gothic’ coming out of Hollywood at the time, and it had a bit of rock’n’roll. Eric was carrying a crow and a guitar.”
Ville certainly isn’t the only musician to bow down before the original movie. Finnish goth-metallers The 69 Eyes released a song called Brandon Lee in 2000 in honour of the late actor, while members of Lacuna Coil and Motionless In White are confirmed fans. Rising synthgaze duo Zetra recently covered The Cure’s Burn, the opening song on The Crow soundtrack, while horror-obsessed metalcore outfit Ice Nine Kills essentially remade the film as a nine-minute short to accompany their 2018 single, A Grave Mistake.
“It’s one of those movies that will forever be a classic,” says Ice Nine Kills singer Spencer Charnas of The Crow. “And rightfully so - everything from the cinematography to the storyline to the music. It’s a special film.”
For all its influence today, The Crow’s ascent to iconic status was slow. The original comic came out via independent US publisher Caliber. James O’Barr didn’t make enough money from it to become a full-time artist; he was working for car manufacturer Ford when producers first tried to buy the film rights from him in the early 90s.
Brandon Lee’s death mid-filming – the freak result of being shot by a dummy bullet – meant that no studio wanted to release the finished movie. Jeff Most was co-producer and uncredited co-writer on The Crow. “[Original distributor] Paramount Pictures dropped it: ‘We just don’t think we can have this movie on our slate right now, given its very tumultuous history,’” he tells Hammer. “Every major studio turned it down.”
In the end, the movie was picked up by Miramax, the company founded by infamous producer Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob. It went on to gross $94 million, making it the 26th biggest movie of the year – respectable, but hardly blockbusting. But The Crow was already picking up a cult following. Ville Valo remembers hearing about it via word of mouth.
“I must have heard about it from Jyrki [69], who sings in The 69 Eyes, because he’s a movie buff,” he remembers. “It influenced me and affected me on all possible levels, music-wise and lifestyle-wise: ‘Oh, this is how it’s supposed to be!’” He adds that it gave HIM “the sonic palate, and the visual palate as well, for years and years to come”.
Stylistically, The Crow leaned hard into both goth and metal subcultures. Visually, it was dark and gloomy, while Brandon played the leather-clad Eric Draven as much as a rock star as he did a vengeful revenant (James O’Barr himself based the original character on Peter Murphy of goth pioneers Bauhaus, and Iggy Pop). Eric’s corpsepainted image – white face, scar-like black slashes running down over his eyes, Joker-style smile – have been picked up by more than one musician since.
Avatar’s facepainted ringleader Johannes Eckerström clearly draws upon The Crow’s visual style, although he has claimed that he was influenced as much by WCW wrestler Sting as the original character. “I liked The Crow, but also I liked the pro-wrestler who ripped off the look of The Crow even more!” Johannes said back in 2017.
Ville Valo took to the stage at one Him show at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2004 – the 10th anniversary of the movie - in full Eric Draven costume. “We invited our dear friend Paul Xavier, who’s a specialist in make-up and all sorts, to come over and bring all his gear,” says Ville. “I’m not sure if I was clever enough to have realised that it was the 10th anniversary! Ha ha!”
Other musicians have channelled their love of The Crow in less purely cosmetic ways. Like Ville, Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas first saw The Crow on an old-school VHS video and fell in love with its theme of bloodsoaked revenge. Years later, he based the nine-minute mini-movie for INK’s A Grave Mistake on the film.
“This couple is killed on the night before Halloween and he comes back,” he says. “If you read the lyrics for A Grave Mistake, it’s a story of revenge. You should never seek revenge on someone – I think living well is the best revenge – but music is escapism. Everyone has people in their lives that they feel have wronged them, and people that have been wronged enjoy singing songs and hearing lyrics that scratch that itch.”
For Spencer, the film carried extra emotional weight because of the death of its star. Brandon Lee was the son of late martial arts legend Bruce Lee, and The Crow was his first leading role. On March 31, 1993, Brandon was fatally shot on-set when a dummy bullet that had become lodged in a prop gun was inadvertently fired into his abdomen, rupturing a major blood vessel. Ironically, he was filming the scene where Eric Draven is shot and killed by the men assaulting his girlfriend. Brandon was just 28 years old, and had been due to marry his fiancée, Eliza Hutton, 17 days later. His death would become intertwined with the movie, amplifying its tragic edge.
“There was this cloak of sadness surrounding the movie, months and months before it was released,” says Spencer. “That horrible incident combined with the subject matter of the film, which was about a guy killed in the prime of his life, so there was just this real eeriness. It added a layer to the film that I don’t know if any other film put out by a major studio has ever had.”
Though Brandon and Eric subsequently became inextricably connected, Jeff Most says that the actor was nothing like the character he portrayed. “We spent months and months together developing the film before we went to location,” he recalls. “Brandon was a man who was just full of life. He loved practical jokes. He was always laughing, fun-filled and determined – a beacon of light.”
If the visual component of The Crow was a big part of the movie’s success, then so was its music. The soundtrack, released two months before the film went on general release, reflected the dark, rock’n’roll spirit of both the movie and James O’Barr’s original comic book, bringing together an array of big-name bands from the worlds of metal, goth, alt-rock and beyond.
“I wanted the music to be really evocative of what was coming from the screen, with everything from punk to metal to hard rap to a Joy Division cover,” says Jeff Most, who put together the soundtrack with music supervisor Jolene Cherry.
The soundtrack album was a Who’s Who of 90s rock, with previously unreleased contributions from The Cure (wired opener Burn), Rage Against The Machine (Darkness), Stone Temple Pilots (Big Empty) and more. Elsewhere, big-hitters Nine Inch Nails, Pantera and Rollins Band turned in memorable covers of songs by Joy Division (the hypnotic Dead Souls), US punk juggernauts Poison Idea (anti-cop diatribe The Badge) and electronic-punk provocateurs Suicide (Ghostrider) respectively.
Other names on the album included Helmet, indie rock mainstays The Jesus And Mary Chain, roots-punks Violent Femmes and long-forgotten alt rockers For Love Not Lisa. This was the perfect mid-90s alt rock playlist, years before Spotify. It certainly struck a chord, reaching No.1 on the Billboard album charts and going on to sell more than three million copies in the US.
It wasn’t the first movie to feature a rock soundtrack, but its success made Hollywood realise that hitching a bunch of loud bands to a blockbuster movie was a winning ticket – everything from pre-Marvel superhero flick Spawn to Tom Cruise blockbuster Mission: Impossible 2 followed The Crow’s playbook. Jeff Most couldn’t help noticing the trend: “In the wake of The Crow’s original soundtrack, so many films’ producers turned around and went, ‘We want [to recreate] that!’”
The death of Brandon Lee didn’t stop Jeff and co-producer Edward R. Pressman from attempting to replicate the movie’s success. A sequel, 1996’s The Crow: City Of Angels, featured Vincent Pérez as a new Crow (aka Ashe Corven), with original director Alex Proyas being replaced by maverick video director Tim Pope, most famous for his work with The Cure. It also spawned another great soundtrack, featuring Korn, White Zombie, Hole, Deftones, PJ Harvey and more.
Two more straight-to-video movies – 2000’s The Crow: Salvation and 2005’s The Crow: Wicked Prayer – followed, each with different lead characters and actors. None of the subsequent films were successful, critically or commercially. Nonetheless, Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas refuses to let the sequels sully his love for the 1994 original.
“I’m not one of those guys that thinks if there’s a great film and then sequels come out, that it soils the original,” he says. “Everyone has the right to look at the original as just that. If that’s what you want to see the movie as, don’t see the sequels. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to Brandon Lee, either. Had those films done well, it would have brought more attention to the first one and make it look even better!”
A similar debate has surrounded the remake. Reintroducing the character of Eric Draven for the first time since the original film, Game Of Thrones/Aquaman star Jason Momoa was originally set to play the main character before being replaced by Bill Skarsgård. Diehard fans were up in arms about the reimagining of the original’s goth aesthetics – the new version of Draven is heavily tattooed and short-haired, looking more like a SoundCloud rapper than a rock star. This issue of Metal Hammer went to print before the new movie was released, and advanced screenings weren’t available on time (sometimes a measure of a film’s quality, or lack of it, with studios wishing to avoid negative buzz).
But Alex Proyas, the director who originally brought The Crow to life on the big screen, made his views on the remake clear: “The Crow is not just a movie. Brandon Lee died making it, and it was finished as a testament to his lost brilliance and tragic loss. It is his legacy. That’s how it should remain.” He also threw shade at the new-look Crow: “Eric Draven’s having a bad hair day.”
Ville Valo is sceptical about whether the new version of The Crow will have the same enduring impact as the original. “The fairy-tale quality of the 90s material looks quite different from the new one,” says Ville. “It’s like [late rapper] Lil Peep being Eric Draven. It’s really weird. Bill Skarsgård is a great actor, but we’ll see if it retains the romance.”
Regardless of how the latest iteration of Eric Draven is received, The Crow remains an enduring cultural touchstone and a source of inspiration for generations of musicians. ‘Real love is forever’ read the original movie’s tagline. So, it seems, is The Crow itself.
The Crow remake is out in cinemas August 23
