This Day in Horror History: Rutger Hauer Creature Feature SPLIT SECOND Hit in 1992
Mike Sprague
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On this day in horror history, The Burning director Tony Maylam and Ian Sharp’s American-British buddy cop sci-fi horror film Split Second with Rutger Hauer, Kim Cattrall, and Pete Postlethwaite was unleashed in 1992.
Set in the near-future of 2008 (natch), it centers on Hauer’s burnt-out detective Harley Stone (awesome name) obsessively hunting down a murderous monster terrorizing the streets of London, leaving heartless corpses behind.
Here’s the trailer.
The film also features Alastair Neil Duncan, Ian Dury, and Alun Armstrong.
Gary Scott Thompson (The Fast and the Furious, Hollow Man, 88 Minutes) wrote the original script – dubbed Pentagram – in 1988. It took place in modern-day Los Angeles and included a ritualistic serial killer. Changes were made because it was too similar to Robert Resnikoff’s The First Power with Lou Diamond Phillips.
Thompson changed the script to Black Tide, which Laura Gregory and Susan Nicoletti discovered and hired Tony Maylam to direct. Thompson originally wrote the script with Harrison Ford in mind but was happy Hauer was cast.
Blade director Stephen Norrington was the Creature Effects Designer and Visual Effects Supervisor. He had only three weeks to design the creature, which looks like a badass mixture of Venom, the xenomorph from Alien, and Predator.
Budgeted at $7 million, the movie was filmed in eight weeks, between June and August of 1991. Pre-production lasted only three weeks. Due to all the stress during production, Maylam stepped away and Ian Sharp finished it.
Wendy Carlos (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining), was hired as the composer, but her score was rejected. Francis Haines and Stephen W. Parsons replaced her.
Rated R for gore and language, it was re-titled again to Split Second and despite a killer ad campaign and solid word-of-mouth, it was released during the Los Angeles riots and underperformed at the box office.
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