Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 American psychological horror film directed by Adrian Lyne, produced by Alan Marshall and written by Bruce Joel Rubin. It stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, an American infantryman whose experiences during his military service in Vietnam result in bizarre hallucinations. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Peña and Danny Aiello.
Jacob's Ladder was produced by Carolco Pictures and released by Tri-Star Pictures on November 2, 1990, ten years after being written by Rubin. The film garnered a cult following, and its plot and special effects became a source of influence for various other works, such as the Silent Hill video game series. A remake was released in 2019.
Plot
On October 6, 1971, American infantryman Jacob Singer is with the 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, when his unit comes under attack. As many of Jacob's comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior with some suffering catatonia, convulsions, and seizures. Jacob flees into the jungle and is stabbed with a bayonet.
Jacob awakens on the New York City Subway and glimpses a tentacle protruding from a sleeping homeless person. When he finds the subway station exit locked, he crosses the tracks and is almost hit by a train. The year is 1975; Jacob is a postal worker and lives in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jezebel Pipkin. Jacob misses his old family and experiences visions of them, especially the youngest of his sons, Gabe, who had died in an accident before the war. Jacob is beset by disturbing experiences and apparitions, including glimpses of faceless vibrating figures, and narrowly escapes being run over by a pursuing car. He attempts to contact his regular doctor Carlson at the local VA hospital but is informed that there is no record of him ever being a patient there and that Dr. Carlson has died in a car explosion.
At a party thrown by friends, a psychic reads Jacob's palm and tells him that he is already dead, which Jacob dismisses as a joke. After declining to dance with her, he appears to witness an enormous creature dancing sexually with Jezebel before killing her; Jacob collapses. At home, Jacob experiences a dangerous fever, which Jezebel attempts to bring down with a painful ice bath. Jacob wakes up in another reality where he lives with his wife Sarah and sons, including Gabe. In Vietnam, a wounded Jacob is evacuated under fire in a helicopter, which is subsequently shot down.
One of Jacob's former platoon mates, Paul Gruneger, contacts him to reveal he is suffering from similar experiences. Shortly after, Paul is killed when his car explodes. Commiserating after the funeral, other surviving members of the platoon confess that they have all been experiencing horrifying hallucinations. Believing that they are suffering the effects of a military experiment performed on them without their knowledge or consent, they hire Geary, a lawyer, to investigate. However, Geary quits the case after reading military files documenting that the soldiers were never in combat and were discharged for psychological reasons. Jacob's comrades back down, while Jacob suspects they have been threatened into doing so. Jacob is then abducted by suited men, who attempt to intimidate him. Jacob fights them and escapes but is injured and nearly paralyzed in the process. He is taken to a nightmarish hospital, where he is told he has been killed and this is his home, but his chiropractor friend Louis Denardo comes to his rescue and heals him. Louis quotes the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, who said that one must make peace with death to realize that the "devils tearing your life away" are instead "angels, freeing you from the earth".
Jacob is approached by a distressed man who has been following him from a distance and who had dragged Jacob away from Paul's burning car. Introducing himself as Michael Newman, he tells a story of having been a chemist with the Army's chemical warfare division where he designed a drug he called the Ladder, which massively increased aggression. Michael claims that to test the drug's effectiveness, a dose was secretly given to Jacob's unit before the battle, causing some of them to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy. Michael's story triggers a vision of Jacob wounded in Vietnam, which shows his attacker as a fellow American soldier. Jacob returns to his family's home, where Gabe leads him up the staircase into a bright light. In a triage tent in 1971, military medics declare Jacob dead, saying that he had fought to stay alive but now looks peaceful.
Cast
Tim Robbins as Jacob "Professor" Singer Elizabeth Peña as Jezebel "Jezzie" Pipkin Danny Aiello as Louis "Louie" Denardo Matt Craven as Michael Newman Pruitt Taylor Vince as Paul Gruneger Jason Alexander as Mr. Geary Patricia Kalember as Sarah Singer S. Epatha Merkerson as Elsa Eriq La Salle as Frank Ving Rhames as George Brian Tarantina as Doug Suzanne Shepherd as Hospital Receptionist Lewis Black as Jacob's Doctor Macaulay Culkin as Gabriel "Gabe" Singer
Production
The title refers to the Biblical story of Jacob's Ladder, or the dream of a meeting place between Heaven and Earth (Genesis 28:12). The film's alternative title is Dante's Inferno, in a reference to Inferno by Dante Alighieri.John Flowers, Paul Frizler, Psychotherapists on Film, 1899-1999: A Worldwide Guide to Over 5000 Films, Volume 1, McFarland, 2004 (p.309).Pamela Jaye Smith, Inner Drives, Michael Wiese Productions, 2005 (p.217).Eric G. Wilson, Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film, Bloomsbury, 2006 (p.123). Screenwriter and co-producer Bruce Joel Rubin perceived the film as a modern interpretation of the Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Rubin said: "The inspiration in a sense is my entire spiritual upbringing. Once you have a meditative life you start to see that the world is really far different than what it appears to be. What appears to be finite is really couched in the infinite, and the infinite imbues everything in our lives."Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Volume 1, Buddhist Ray, 1991 (p.77). Before writing Jacob's Ladder and Ghost, also released in 1990, the Jewish-born Rubin spent two years in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal.Carrol Lee Fry, Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film, Associated University Presse, 2008 (p.77). Previously, he had also written the afterlife-themed films Brainstorm and Deadly Friend.
Rubin began work in 1980, inspired by a nightmare in which he dreamt about being trapped in a New York City Subway station. For several years, he failed to sell the script. He was given offers from studios specializing in low-budget horror productions, but waited for better funded studios and directors. The script began attracting attention after American Film named it as one of the top ten unproduced screenplays. Thom Mount of Universal Pictures said he "loved it, but it was not for his studio". Directors Michael Apted, Sidney Lumet and Ridley Scott all expressed an interest, but still no major studio was ready to invest in Rubin's "too metaphysical" stories as "Hollywood does not make ghost movies". Eventually, after Deadly Friend was filmed by Wes Craven in 1986, Rubin's screenplays for Jacob's Ladder and Ghost were picked by Paramount Pictures.
In 1988, Adrian Lyne, who described the script as one of the best he had read, decided to direct Jacob's Ladder instead of an adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities as he had originally planned. The project was canceled following ownership and policy changes at Paramount; the executives had doubts about the ending and the scenes in Vietnam. The independent film studio Carolco Pictures took over the production, giving Lyne a greater creative control and a budget of $25 million. Rubin became the co-producer, along with Mario Kassar, Alan Marshall and Andrew G. Vajna.
Lyne, who downplayed Rubin's "intimidating" Old Testament themes,Tom Ruffles, Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife, McFarland, 2004 (p.192). prepared by watching documentary films about the war in Vietnam and reading chronicles of near-death experiences. The plot device of a long period of subjective time passing in an instant was inspired by Robert Enrico's 1962 short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,Bruce Joel Rubin, Jacob's Ladder, Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1990. one of Lyne's favorite films. Lyne said Jacob's Ladder depicted "a man's dying process ... while he remembers his wife and kid and while he imagines a life with Jezzie that he's never had. So it's his memory and imagination and essentially the whole film is just in his mind." The cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball based the dream sequences on the art of Francis Bacon.
Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Peña were among the first to audition for the roles of Jacob Singer and Jezzie Pipkin but Carolco Pictures demanded more established stars. Dustin Hoffman, Richard Gere and Al Pacino were considered for Jacob, while Andie MacDowell, Julia Roberts, Demi Moore and Madonna were considered for Jezzie. Lyne cast Robbins and Peña anyway. Robbins said the film presented for him "a great opportunity to go in a different direction. I love doing comedy, but I know I can do other things as well."
Filming began in New York City on September 11, 1989, on location in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn. Jacob and Jezzie's apartment was filmed on a soundstage on West 23rd Street, while the subway dream sequences were shot on an abandoned level of Bergen Street station. The Seaview Hospital of Staten Island; the Essex County Veterans Courthouse of Newark, New Jersey; and Madison Square Garden were also used. The military advisor was Vietnam veteran Captain Dale Dye,Almar Haflidason, Dale Dye: Part 2 - Stop Whining at Me! , BBC, October 2003. who provided a five-day boot camp training for the actors playing soldiers in the Vietnam storyline (including Robbins, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Eriq La Salle and Ving Rhames). The war scenes were filmed in the jungles near Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, featuring the UH-1 helicopters provided by the Puerto Rico National Guard. Filming concluded at Tortuguero Lagoon in January 1990 with a $40 million budget.
The special effect sequences were filmed in camera, without post-production effects. In several scenes, Lyne used a body horror technique in which an actor is recorded shaking his head around at a low frame rate, resulting in horrifically fast motion when played back. Lyne said he was inspired by the art of the painter Francis Bacon when developing the effect. In his screenplay, Rubin used traditional imagery of demons and Hell. However, Lyne decided to use images similar to thalidomide deformities to achieve a greater shock effect. After many heated arguments, Lyne persuaded Rubin. Lyne and Rubin were influenced by the work by the artist H. R. Giger, the photographers Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin, and the Brothers Quay's 1986 stop motion short film Street of Crocodiles.
At the end of the film, a message is displayed saying the Pentagon denied that the Army tested BZ, a hallucinogen, on its soldiers during the Vietnam War. Lyne said a part of the inspiration for this motif was Martin A. Lee's book Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and Sixties Rebellion, but noted that "nothing in the book suggests that the drug BZ ... was used on U.S. troops". According to Lyne's audio commentary, test audiences found the first version of the film overwhelming, and so about 20 minutes of disturbing scenes, mostly from the last third of the film, were removed.Special Edition DVD.
Release Theatrical release