The Ghost and the Darkness was the Beast movie of the 1990s

Idris Elba: The New Movie BeastThis is an efficient, propulsive, creature-feature that’s lean and lean. It’s the type of man-versus-nature horror tale that lays on the terrors but wraps up before it gets too conceited. Elba portrays a father and widower who must protect his two children from an aggressive man-eating Lion in South Africa. It’s a comparatively small, intimate movie in scope and character, more like CrawlOder Prey than like the Jurassic Park films it’s openly referencing.

If you prefer to watch your lion-gone-rogue tales (and Steven Spielberg tributes) unfold on a larger, more ambitious scale, BeastThis is a great reminder to go back and revisit 1996’s adventure thriller The Ghost and DarknessAnother story in which the intellect of humans is not as powerful as the strength of big veldt predators. This is a scary story. The Ghost and DarknessIt is very bloody and tense. But as a character study that actually invests in its characters as people, rather than leaving them as tick marks on a “death by numbers” checklist, it’s particularly well-crafted, in a way that’s familiar from a completely different Spielberg blockbuster.

The Ghost and DarknessThis historical epic is nominally based on real events from 1898 Kenya where two lions terrorized an American railroad camp along the Tsavo River, killing many workers. British Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson — played in the film version by Val Kilmer — eventually wrote a book about the events, Tsavo’s Man-EatersHe stated that the lions killed over 130 people during his visit to the camp. But, later, it was highly disputed. What isn’t disputed is that the lions were uncharacteristically bold, working together to hunt, and raiding the camp during the daytime — all unusual behavior for male lions, who normally leave the hunting to their pride’s females.

Image: Paramount Pictures

William Goldman, Screenwriter (The Princess Bride) takes plenty of dramatic advantage of the anomalies in the lions’ behavior, and plenty of historical license with the story, all in the interest of bigger and more colorful action. Robert Beaumont sent Patterson to Kenya to be a brutal colonialist and aristocrat (played by Tom Wilkinson with mustache-twirling evil joy) who wants to outsmart other countries when it comes to building the railway trade routes through east Africa. Patterson has previous experience in India overseeing bridge construction and believes that he is capable of bridging Tsavo. He confidently says goodbye to his pregnant wife, Helena (Emily Mortimer, giving a small role her full energy), certain he’ll be back home in time to see his child born.

From the start, Patterson is a game and winning protagonist, willing to listen to and learn from his Kenyan camp overseer Samuel (John Kani, who went on to play Black Panther’s father T’Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), and boyishly excited by African wildlife. When he reaches the camp, he’s immediately beset by problems: tensions between the Hindu and Muslim workers imported from India, tensions between his bright young evangelical aide de camp Angus (Brian McCardie) and the cynical local doctor, Hawthorne (Bernard Hill). Then the first lion attacks occur, and both the African and Indian workers are unable to stop looking at him, the white man who is in charge.

The Ghost and Darkness isn’t a movie about race, but it’s far franker than most adventure movies about the cost of British colonialism and the entirely reasonable class and cultural resentment underlying the railway project. And it isn’t a movie about manhood and masculinity, but Goldman’s script finds familiar threads in these characters — the need to prove themselves and make names for themselves, the jockeying for dominance that relaxes into unspoken trust or distrust, the way shared peril becomes a bonding experience. That is the key point. The Ghost and Darkness is one of the best character pieces of its type since Spielberg’s Jaws.

Goldman opensly accepts Jaws as a structural model, with many of the story’s basic beats mimicking Spielberg’s masterpiece: the series of escalating deaths perpetrated by a barely seen creature, the killing of an unrelated beast that’s taken as a sign that the threat is over, the late-night drinking-and-bonding session marked by a grim monologue and undercut by equally grim humor. Which? JawsIntroduces Quint (Robert Shaw), the shark expert who is hired to handle the situation when it gets serious. The Ghost and DarknessCharles Remington, a legendary hunter, is brought in by Michael Douglas in an identical role. He gets a dramatic and memorable intro.

Image: Paramount Pictures

There are many movies that have copied this technique. JawsOver the years they have copied the attacks of the animals and left out memorable characters dynamics. The Ghost and DarknessThis movie is among the few that actually gets alchemy right. Remington is a tragic obsessive who doesn’t enjoy killing, but finds his services in demand because he’s so good at it. Patterson is an idealist who truly believes in his work — “What better job in all the world than build a bridge?” he says at one point, watching the labor under way. Samuel is a pragmatist caught between the white outsiders’ ambition and the camp he manages. Even Angus, Hawthorne and minor characters like Abdullah, the proud Indian overseeing official (Om Puri), and Mahina, his African counterpart (Henry Cele), are given important roles.

But all this character work would feel dry and literary without the movie’s pulp-thriller energy, which lays a visceral, urgent feel atop the Bridge across the River KwaiLiterary ambitions in the ’60s. Stephen Hopkins makes use of real lions when possible. With the exception of some gimmicky scenes using dummies for dramatic effect, their interaction with delicate human bodies looks realistic and graphic. They’re genuinely intimidating, even if Hopkins and Goldman do fall into the familiar man-versus-nature movie trap (also seen, frankly, in Jaws) of giving their animals human-level cunning and malice, to the point where the railroad workers’ belief that the lions are actually demons starts to make some sense.

Image: Paramount Pictures

All the historic epic quality in The Ghost and the Darkness — Vilmos Zsigmond’s majestic shots of skies and fields, the focus on a packed camp full of teeming human endeavor, Jerry Goldsmith’s pounding score — the film also embraces purely corny horror-movie tropes, from a ludicrous fake-out dream sequence to first-person POV shots of what it’s like to be killed by a lion.

And for the most part, they’re efficient and effective filmmaking. It is important to have some support for the more extreme aspects of this movie. Historians believe that Patterson was an exaggerator who feared the lions in order to preserve his legacy. This film, however, goes further into fantasy territory to tell its story. It plays up the natives’ superstitions about the lions as a malevolent force, but as much as anything else, it’s a movie about a 19th-century white man’s superstitions about Africa, and a 20th-century audience’s imagination about what it’s like to be prey.

It’s also a sly and effective thriller, though, one that uses a huge cast, practical effects, and Val Kilmer’s ’90s Boy Scout charm to ground what could be another trashy when-animals-attack movie in the realm of Shark NightOder Lake Placid. The Ghost and DarknessThis movie has been underrated and overlooked over the years. However, in an age that values pulp cinema’s gleefully cheesy qualities, it represents a rare marriage of lowbrow creature features and historical epics. It has a lot more texture than a lot of modern beast-on-the-loose thrillers — and a lot more teeth, too.

The Ghost and Darkness Digital rental available Amazon, VuduYou can also use other digital services. Some On Demand services offer it.