It Can’t Rain All the Time: 30 Years of The Crow
Goth subculture was having a big moment in the ‘90s, emerging from the underground in the previous decade to become part of the mainstream thanks to Tim Burton’s Batman and Edward Scissorhands. Then came The Crow, regarded by many as the ultimate goth movie, and one that has left an enduring mark on cinema and music.
The story is simple. Handsome rock musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and his fiancee Shelley Webster (Sofia Shinas) are all geared up for a very gothic wedding – who else gets married on Halloween? But their happiness is brutally cut short on Devil’s Night as fires burn across the crime-ridden city of Detroit. A gang of cackling hoodlums attack them in their apartment, leaving Eric dead on the pavement below and Shelly succumbing to her injuries in hospital.
One year later, Eric is summoned from his grave by a mysterious crow to avenge their deaths. As the opening narration by street kid Sarah (Rochelle Davis) tells us, sometimes emotions are so strong that they prevent people from crossing over to the other side. Now Eric is back to take down the goons and their crime boss Top Dollar (Michael Wincott).
It’s a revenge thriller set-up more akin to something like Death Wish or even Robocop than the standard hero’s journey that we’ve become accustomed to with the ever-expanding universes of Marvel and DC. The Robocop comparison is especially apt – both films are set in a scum-ridden Detroit where Eric Draven and Alex Murphy are resurrected and target the villains who killed them in the first place. Poignantly, they both come to realise that they can never return to their old lives.
It’s hard to overstate the difference in the superhero movie landscape 30 years ago compared to today. We had Batman and Superman, but otherwise the concept of a cinematic universe set in the worlds of Marvel and DC Comics would have been an outlandishly ambitious and potentially disastrous prospect at the time. From the Marvel stable, even good old Captain America (1990) went straight to video and Fantastic Four (1994) was pulled from release.
Beyond that, the superheroes who made it to the screen tended to be more left-field picks. We had The Rocketeer, The Shadow, Tank Girl, The Mask, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Among a limited field, The Crow stood out as something different, far darker than the Superman of Christopher Reeve and more melancholy and empathetic than Burton’s Batman. From its opening moments, Alex Proyas’ film carries a mournful atmosphere of tangible grief and loss with no affectation. Brandon Lee’s undead avenger was born from a sorry tale of love cut short in real life and became synonymous with tragedy after its star died during production.
Detroit-born comic artist James O’Barr was just 18 years old when his fiancée was killed by a drunk driver. He enlisted in the Marines in the hope of coping with his loss and started working out his grief and anger in a comic strip called The Crow in the early ‘80s. He also took inspiration from a newspaper article about a young couple murdered for a $20 engagement ring, a plot point that would feature heavily in the story.
With the two elements combined, O’Barr had the basis of the tragic tale of Eric and Shelley. In interviews, O’Barr has stated that rather than help purge his anger, working on the strip only exacerbated his negative feelings and left him more “fucked up” than before. It shows; the comic is stark black-and-white and mean-spirited in its violence. Our protagonist, with his face paint reminiscent of Alice Cooper or KISS, is tormented by memories of his deceased loved one and lacks much of the tenderness of Brand Lee’s screen version.
Although O’Barr initially worked on the project for himself and said that he didn’t really care whether it was published or not, The Crow made it into print in 1989 and became an underground cult classic. That was the year that Batman became a global event, and it is hard to imagine O’Barr’s comic making it to the screen without the gothic stylings that Tim Burton brought to the Caped Crusader.
The Crow started its journey to the big screen with producer Jeff Most and screenwriter John Shirley, a former rocker who had written lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and other bands. They were looking for another comic book formula to develop into a movie in the wake of Burton’s blockbuster, and found their way to O’Barr’s work. They really bought into the artist’s style and dark iconography but were dismayed to learn that O’Barr had received an offer from New Line Cinema, who wanted to turn The Crow into a PG-13 crowd-pleaser.
Luckily, O’Barr turned the studio down flat, leaving Most and Shirley to begin working on a more appropriately R-rated movie that would do the source material justice. Nevertheless, The Crow still proved a hard sell and they received many rejections before producer Ed Pressman came onboard and the green light was given. Aussie director Alex Proyas, who only had the indie sci-fi Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds under his belt at that point, was brought in to direct on the strength of his dark noirish style.
Casting Eric Draven was naturally make-or-break for the film’s success. One studio O’Barr spoke to previously had suggested Michael Jackson for the part, causing the author to walk away. I can see his point, but perhaps that idea isn’t as ridiculous as it first seems. The King of Pop had the frame, the physicality, the charisma, and he always commanded the screen in his huge event music videos like Thriller, Bad, and Smooth Criminal. He was also beginning to display a certain rage in his songwriting from his experiences with paparazzi which might have fed well into the character of Draven.
Other names like Johnny Depp and Christian Slater were also considered briefly, but Brandon Lee was always first choice for the producers. His performance is key to the success of the film and it would have no doubt been his major breakthrough in Hollywood. Aged 28 when he landed the role, Lee was just beginning to emerge from the shadow of his legendary father Bruce, who had died just four years older in 1973.
His dad had started him out on martial arts when he was a little boy and, after graduating, he took an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. In the mid-’80s, Brandon brought the two strands together, landing his first acting role in Kung Fu: The Movie, a TV production based on the popular show that his father claimed he had conceived. At that point, Brandon was reluctant to follow the martial arts route to screen stardom like Bruce, although he still took roles in Legacy of Rage and Laser Mission, two action movies made in Hong Kong and West Germany respectively.
Brandon moved Stateside for Showdown in Little Tokyo, pairing up with Dolph Lundgren. The movie performed poorly at the box office but critics singled out Lee for praise in otherwise middling-to-negative reviews. Just three films into his career, it was the last movie released while Lee was still alive.
Once he signed up for the lead in The Crow, Lee committed fully to preparing for the part, losing 20 pounds to make him the gaunt figure of Draven and working closely with the stunt crew for action set pieces. O’Barr wasn’t convinced by Lee at first, but they later became close friends.
Lee’s performance makes the film, backed up by a solid supporting cast including Ernie Hudson as a sympathetic cop, Michael Wincott as the chief bad guy, and cult icons Tony Todd (Candyman) and David Patrick Kelly (The Warriors) as two of the deranged thugs. While Lee might not have had the greatest range, there is such an appealing openness and empathy to his portrayal of Draven. As the avenging Crow, he is just as adept veering suddenly from irreverent gallows humour to genuine menace as he taunts his targets before dispatching them. If he hadn’t died while making the film, it is easy to imagine his career following a similar trajectory to Keanu Reeves.
On 31st March 1993, Lee was performing the key early scene where Draven is shot by Funboy in the apartment. Unknown to the actor Michael Massee, part of a dummy bullet used in an earlier scene for a close-up on the gun was still lodged in the barrel. The weapon was loaded with a dummy cartridge, which contained a primer but no gunpowder. Even so, the discharge was still powerful enough to propel the fragment with enough force to pierce Lee’s abdomen and strike his spine. He died in hospital from the injury hours later. Tragically, it was revealed that Lee declined a flak jacket as a precaution because he felt it would be visible beneath his figure-hugging costume.
Lee was laid to rest next to his father and the producers had a tough decision to make. Paramount Pictures, who initially wanted to distribute the film theatrically, backed out because they felt that the violent content would be inappropriate in the wake of the star’s death. However, Lee had completed most of his scenes and had only three days’ of scheduled shooting left, and the cast and crew were still on set at the studio in Wilmington.
Miramax swooped in, perhaps sensing that the tragedy would generate more interest in the film, and provided extra funds to complete the picture. The script was re-jigged and Lee’s remaining scenes were filmed with his stunt double, Chad Stahelski. To complete the illusion, Lee’s face was grafted onto Stahelski’s body using the latest digital technology.
The studio was hit with a modest fine of $55,000 and Massee was fully exonerated, although he later stated that he never got over his part in the accident. The tragedy was evoked again in 2021 during the production of Rust when a revolver fired by Alec Baldwin killed the cinematographer and injured the director, postponing the production while lawsuits were filed and investigations conducted.
The death of Lee completed The Crow’s eerie connection with its real-life inception and the sad demise of his character. O’Barr took it especially hard, stating that it was like losing his fiancee all over again, although he also said that finally seeing the completed film on the big screen helped him find some closure to both tragedies.
The Crow opened at number one at the US box office, Miramax’s biggest debut at that point, and it racked up $94 million against a budget of $23 million. Critics were mostly positive, although some found it impossible to separate Lee’s death from the overall mournful tone of the movie. The difficult question is whether it would have been so successful or proven so poignant without the fatal accident attached to it. That’s impossible to answer, but there is no denying that the death lends the film a weight and haunting quality that it might have otherwise lacked.
I think this is why people respond so well to The Crow. As grim and shrouded in tragedy as it undoubtedly is, the film comes from a place of genuine pain and grief. Sure, Draven’s back story isn’t a world away from that of Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker, but it is told with an honesty that feels far more sincere than most other superhero movies. Despite its fantasy violence and supernatural elements, it is a film that strikes many viewers on an emotional level.
It also operates on a far more intimate scale. The events are limited to a few blocks of a rain-lashed Detroit and just a handful of characters, which seems almost refreshing in retrospect after the overkill of city-trashing alien invasions and Thanos’s mass universe-spanning extermination in the DCU and MCU. The characters may be rather thin but they are relatable, and the moments of humour are tastefully deployed without any of the glib patter we’ve come to expect from Iron Man and the gang.
The Crow is still a very stylish movie and less monochrome than I remembered, and its influence can be seen in many other high-profile movies of the ‘90s and 2000s. You can see it in the perpetually rainy city of Seven and in the costuming and visual flair of Blade, Spawn, and The Matrix.
The success of Proyas’s film meant that sequels were inevitable. It is perhaps a testament to the power and resonance of the original that the drop-off in quality with the sequels is even more pronounced than usual. The Crow: City of Angels arrived in 1996; TV series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven in 1998; The Crow: Salvation in 2000; and The Crow: Wicked Prayer in 2005. Now we have a reboot starring Bill Skarsgård, because who else are you going to get playing a dark superhero wearing clown makeup these days? To add to the negative reviews, Alex Proyas has even called the latter a “cynical cash-grab.”
30 years on, The Crow seems even more like an outlier than it did when it was first released. It has a mystique and no doubt it will continue to gain fans in future, drawn by its dark legacy and captivated by the haunting presence of Brandon Lee at its core. Life is fleeting and death can strike at any moment but, as Eric tells Sarah, there is no point letting it get you down when there is also love and goodness in the world. It can’t rain all the time.
So there you have it, our retrospective on The Crow. How does it hold up for you 30 years later, and how does it compare to all the other superhero movies out there? Let us know!
