Before the Prestige, There Was Pure Paranoia
Christopher Nolan didn't start with IMAX cameras or A-list casts. He started with borrowed gear, 8mm film, and spiders—lots of spiders.
At just 19, Nolan co-directed Tarantella, a five-minute horror short that vanished for over 30 years. Now, like a cursed reel from The Ring, it's back—quietly uploaded to a barely-noticed YouTube channel called The Great Cinema. No ads, no fanfare, just one upload and 22 subscribers. And it might disappear again any second.
So why should anyone care?
Because Tarantella is a raw glimpse into the filmmaker Nolan would become—before Memento made your head hurt and Oppenheimer made it explode.
Skinamarink Vibes on a Student Budget
If Skinamarink was your kind of arthouse fever dream, Tarantella is its grainy grand-uncle. The film follows a sleepless young man haunted by spiderlike figures and demonic shapes crawling through shadowy corridors. There's no dialogue—just a droning soundscape that might've been recorded in the basement of a haunted radio station. It's all jittery edits, creepy silence, and analog dread.
It feels Lynchian. But not in that “let's throw around the word Lynchian for clout” way—Tarantella genuinely channels that claustrophobic, senseless terror Eraserhead fans live for. The quick cuts. The atmosphere. The feeling that nothing makes sense, and it's all your fault.
And if you squint past the lo-fi haze, you'll catch early traces of Nolan's future obsessions: fragmented time, unreliable perspective, and a relentless curiosity about the human mind under pressure.
How It Was Lost—and Why It Matters Now
Following may be Nolan's official debut, but Tarantella is where his cinematic language started forming, brick by jagged brick. He shot it alongside childhood friend Roko Belic (later Oscar-nominated for his doc Genghis Blues) and featured his brother Jonathan Nolan—yes, Westworld Jonathan—in the cast.
The short faded into obscurity after its original late-'80s screening. Then, in 2021, collector Henry Adams uploaded a version that was almost instantly removed for copyright reasons. Now it's resurfaced in ghost-form once more—unauthorized, maybe, but impossible to ignore.
Hollywood loves a rediscovered gem. Think Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, finally released in 2018. But Tarantella isn't a lost masterpiece—it's something more valuable: unfiltered creativity. The kind that hasn't been smoothed out by budgets, deadlines, or expectations.
Why You Should Watch—Right Now
This isn't polished. It's not meant to be. It's raw and weird and crawling with the kind of instinctive invention you only get when you're too young to care about the rules. You can practically smell the cheap plastic of the camcorder and hear the static of a student film soundtrack. But beneath that lo-fi texture? Pure, uncut Nolan.
It's five minutes. That's shorter than the Oppenheimer credits. But if you want to understand where one of the most meticulous directors alive began—watch it. Fast.
Because Tarantella doesn't just fade away. It scuttles. And it might be gone again before you even finish this sentence.
