From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn exists because of a $1,500 handshake. In 1990, the KNB EFX Group — the makeup-effects shop — paid a pre-fame Quentin Tarantino fifteen hundred dollars to write a vampire script from an idea by KNB's Robert Kurtzman, in a deal that also got KNB the effects job on Reservoir Dogs. It was Tarantino's first paid writing assignment. By the time the film shot, Tarantino was the hottest name in Hollywood, his friend Robert Rodriguez directed, and the cast was absurd: George Clooney — mid-ER, in his first major film lead — and Tarantino himself as the Gecko brothers, Harvey Keitel as a preacher losing his faith, Juliette Lewis, Salma Hayek, Danny Trejo, effects legend Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, and Cheech Marin in three separate roles.

The movie's signature is its bait-and-switch. Released in January 1996, it spends its first half as a tense Tarantino crime picture — bank robbers, a motel, a kidnapped family, a border crossing — until the Geckos hole up in the Titty Twister, a truckers' bar in the Mexican desert, and Salma Hayek's Santanico Pandemonium performs her dance. Then the entire staff turns out to be vampires and the film detonates into a full KNB splatter siege, crime thriller to monster movie in a single cut. Critics in 1996 didn't quite know what to do with it (reviews were mixed; it made $59 million worldwide on a $19 million budget — a solid, unspectacular run), but video-store word of mouth did: you rented it for Clooney and got the greatest genre sucker punch of the decade.

Its afterlife has been pure cult. Two direct-to-video follow-ups (Texas Blood Money, and the prequel The Hangman's Daughter) came and went at the decade's turn, and Rodriguez later expanded the story into a From Dusk Till Dawn TV series on his El Rey network from 2014 to 2016. The original, meanwhile, settled into its rightful place: the movie you show someone without telling them what it is, just to watch their face at the halfway mark.