The Conan Completist

SOURCES: Prevue.
AUDIO COMMENTARY: Yes.
NOVELIZATION: Yes.
COMIC BOOK: No.
FILMED?: No.
EXTRAS LAST UPDATE: ---

Chased by a pack of famished wolves, Conan finds refuge into an underground crypt which shelters the remainders of a very old civilization.

Milius: These are Atlanteans. This was an Atlantean general, who was put there with his harem, when he died. (...)
Schwarzenegger: Then one of the skeletons starts moving.
Milius: Yeah, that's the spirit of the general. The great Atlantean general who is watching. He is like 8 feet tall! (...)
Schwarzenegger: And then the guy, all of a sudden, moves, because his sword was taken off by someone else.
Milius: Yeah. And you don't know whether he really moves or whether it's just... [the vibration which knocks down his helmet].

Oddly, this scene did not appear in the original script by Oliver Stone (in whom the meeting with the Witch directly follows the episode of the wolves) [1]: it is Milius who inserted it [2], at the time of his multiple revisions (probably following L. Sprague De Camp's advice, who is listed as "technical adviser" in the end credits). As opposed to what one can often read here and there, the scene is not inspired from one of the original novellettes by Robert E. Howard, but from a pastiche written by Camp and Lin Carter, "The Thing In The Crypt" (published for the first time in 1967, in the "Conan" anthology). [3] [4]

In the text, the mummified skeleton comes to life and Conan must face it in single combat to be able to recover its sword. Did Milius ever considered, at a given moment, filming the scene this way? Difficult to say. Perhaps he didn't have of the necessary budget (or time)? Perhaps he did feel limited by the special effects of the time? It is known that he wanted to prevent at all costs that one compares his CONAN with a new HERCULES or SINBAD; however, to stage a fight opposing some human to a skeleton in 1981 almost inevitably meant to have recourse to stop-motion animation, popularized by Ray Harryhausen precisely in films such as the three SINBAD or JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS.

Ron Cobb : "John [Milius], Nick [Allder, who supervised the special effects] and myself made much to avoid having recourse to optical effects. Which means little blue screens and no animation. John wanted to see his work on the daily rushes, and not six months later, in a laboratory. We all hoped to be able to avoid the phoney side of the mattes, which I think we did not have time to realize anyway. Nick was able to carry out the majority of the special effects by means of mechanisms, like the giant snake."

If he ever considered it, Milius has, obviously, very quickly given up such sequence, well ahead of principal photography, preferring in the end to give a more realistic version (the one that one can see in the film), even if it meant to cause the anger of some purists (who reproached him thereafter for having a little too much neglected the "sorcery" side of the Howard stories).

Explanations from the Master, drawn from the interview by Jim Steranko :

PREVUE: Why did you de-emphasize sorcery in the story?
MILIUS: I wanted all the magic to be natural, so the audience won’t say, "Oh, a special effects sequence." I felt the magic should be another facet of life in Conan’s time. If somebody takes a snake and turns it into an arrow, no big deal! That’s simply part of the culture.
PREVUE: That doesn’t exactly track with Howard’s concept of Conan.
MILIUS: Sometimes it does. Whenever Howard wrote his big sorcery sequences, it was usually because he found no other way of resolving the story. In "Worms of the Earth", with Bran Mak Morn, Howard has to destroy the evil Romans, but he makes creatures come up from underground to do it. Until then, it’s a terrific story.
PREVUE: Won’t your approach draw fire from Conan purists?
MILIUS: No, because there’s plenty of sorcery in the movie, but it comes naturally from the action, it adds a very surrealistic mood that’s stranger and more mystical than anything else that’s ever been done.

In fact, the skeleton of the Atlantean general remains inanimate in the comic book movie adaptation. And if it comes again to life in the novelization, it is undoubtedly necessary not to see nothing more there than some deliberated "poetic licence" from its two authors... Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp!

ConanCompletist 2004