Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic epic, The Odyssey, has now hit theaters and is already breaking records worldwide. The film has been praised by audiences and critics alike for a multitude of different reasons, but chief among them is Nolan’s unexpected use of horror influences throughout the film. Homer’s Odyssey, the source material upon which the film is based, undoubtedly has its fair share of horrific moments, but few expected Nolan to lean as heavily into these genre elements as he does in the final film.
While the filmmaker has dabbled in more horrific beats within his films before (the Scarecrow sequences in Batman Begins, the found footage Joker scenes in The Dark Knight, the titular character seeing the ghosts of his deeds in Oppenheimer, and any of the tension-fueled dread in Dunkirk), he isn’t widely known as a horror filmmaker. Though he has recently made comments suggesting that could change in the near future, it’s also worth noting that The Odyssey has a secret weapon that contributes immensely to many of these horror-filled sequences, and it is cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema.
Nolan’s take on The Odyssey leans all the way into the awe-inducing terror of some of its source material’s most infamous scenes, such as the Cyclops encounter, the Laestrygonians battle, the Scylla attack, and Odysseus and his soldiers’ communion with Circe. A huge component at play in all of these scenes is the IMAX frame itself and the ways in which Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema utilize this large-canvas frame in vast and varied ways.
IMAX is not something generally associated with horror. More often than not, these cameras and projectors have been reserved for A-list prestige pictures, while horror has thrived in the margins, on low budgets, and through turning limitations into virtues, such as this year’s own horror hits, Obsession or Backrooms. However, in recent years, IMAX has been utilized by a couple of key figures within the horror genre in innovative and inspiring ways. Specifically in the form of Jordan Peele’s Nope in 2022 and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in 2025. Both of these films had key set pieces filmed entirely in IMAX and utilized the form in fascinating ways.
Take, for example, Nope. Rather than use IMAX to capture grand-scale action or scenic vistas, Peele utilized the large-scale frame in a much more subjective way. He stuck it right next to the performers searching the unending night sky for the monstrous creature that lurked somewhere within it and allowed the audience to feel the vastness of it in palpable fashion. This was a kind of new application for IMAX, one that eschewed traditional methodologies and instead remolded the form for the genre’s express purposes in deeply articulate ways. And the cinematographer behind the use of IMAX on Nope? None other than Hoyte van Hoytema.
This is far from van Hoytema’s only experience with the genre either. The film that initially garnered him such acclaim as a cinematographer and ultimately brought him to Hollywood was Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In back in 2008. That film was a much more small-scale horror affair, but one that more than demonstrated the cinematographer’s gifts at utilizing lighting, framing, and scale to amplify dread and suspense.
There are very notable similarities in Nope’s use of the IMAX frame and the ways in which Nolan utilizes it to mine horror in The Odyssey, specifically when it comes to the Cyclops setpiece. Just as with Peele’s use of the frame, Nolan turns the wide-scale image into a much more subjective, immersive, and guttural experience, putting audiences into the unending dark of the cave right alongside Odysseus and his men as the creature stalks them down. It’s a genuinely phenomenal sequence, in which you can feel Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema tapping into some of these same ideas about how to turn the IMAX experience from one for sweeping epics into one for invasive horror works.
There are countless elements at play in any one sequence in The Odyssey; it is a massive work that took the combined efforts of Christopher Nolan and his whole team to turn into a reality over the course of years. But for those surprised by just how effective the horror-driven setpieces in the film are, consider that the journey to realizing them has been even longer and more arduous. These scenes are nothing less than the sum total of several decades of work experimenting in the genre, with The Odyssey serving as a remarkable culmination of it all.
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