The Hidden (1987)

Screenwriter Jim Kouf came up with the plot of The Hidden after was musing about the escalating reports of random acts of violence he watched on the evening news. Often the perpetrator is described by his neighbors as a quiet person who they never suspected capable of doing something so horrible. Kouf had an inspired notion of a body-snatcher scenario where these people were actually good people whose bodies were used for a bit by a malevolent being who made them do despicable things until they could no longer be used, the being moving to the next host undetected. Kouf liked the idea of the villain not being a specific person, and that it could be anyone, and proceeded forward with a story about an alien parasite that gets into a person’s body to control them and use them for its perverse pleasure.

In addition to being an established screenwriter, Kouf had a passion to direct. While he was writing what was then called Hidden, he strongly felt he had the vision to bring this to life as its director. However, it was not to be. Nearly every studio turned Hidden down except Heron Communications, who produced the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. Heron was in a partnership with New Line Cinema, who bought the script but had no intention of letting Kouf direct. Kouf’s debut feature as a director, a misfire comedy from 1986 called Miracles, was deemed a mediocre effort at best. New Line felt that Kouf as not having the adequate skill set to make Hidden a success. Kouf spent one day with New Line before he decided he didn’t want to stick around, choosing instead to put his days in on the set of Stakeout, another film he wrote the screenplay to as well as serving as a co-producer, the first effort from his new contract with Disney’s Touchstone division.

After so many studio rejections, Kouf found himself in a situation where he had to choose between letting someone else direct his movie or having it not made at all. Kouf okayed the sale but if New Line didn’t want him to lead, he didn’t want to stick around for the inevitable rewrites to his original screenplay. He changed his name in the credits to Bob Hunt, a pseudonym he used once before on a prior horror/sci-fi effort in 1981 called The Boogens. He used that name, which came from the name he gave to the main character of his first effort (a Canadian film called Utilities made in 1980 but not released until 1983), to avoid being typecast early on as a writer of horror. Now he’d use it to protest what would likely be a butchering of a screenplay he valued very highly. New Line also decided to change the title from Hidden to The Hidden because they felt horror movies often had the word “The” before the title.

During this time, New Line Cinema was negotiating with Jack Sholder, director of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge to direct Nightmare 3. Sholder turned it down because he wasn’t a horror fan and didn’t want to further cement his reputation as only a horror film director. He felt the curse, as horror vehicles were all he was being offered in terms of scripts, nearly all of them terrible.  New Line’s head of production, Sarah Risher, had worked with Sholder since New Line’s days as a distributor cutting trailers together. Risher determined to find something Sholder might be the right fit to do. She sent him the Kouf script for Hidden, a cop movie with science fiction elements, to see what he thought. Sholder loved the writing and premise, a real breath of fresh air – he thought it was like The Terminator but with a unique twist.

There was one snag: New Line already had a director semi-slotted for Hidden, someone Sholder considered to be a total hack. Sholder couldn’t believe such a great script would be given to someone who lacked the skills to handle anything more than action sequences. This other guy was also a friend of producer Robert Shaye, a tough-minded exec who Sholder worked with on his first two features. Sholder pitched his vision and Shaye was impressed enough to turn it over to him with a budget of $5 million, the most expensive New Line production to date.

Sholder didn’t like the horror genre but it provided the quickest avenue to becoming a Hollywood director.  Unlike Wes Craven, who expressed himself through horror, Sholder had to find ways to express himself despite it. Sholder says he was influenced by the humanism of his favorite director, Jean Renoir, and tried to bring some of that emotion into the cheap and bleak movies he had been assigned to create.

Although Sholder thought Kouf’s script was enough to make a good movie out of as a cop thriller, he felt it lacked the soul to be great. A deeper emotional theme could be further underscored, particularly on what it means to be human. If the bad alien was attracted to humanity at its worst (selfishness), the good alien should learn about humanity at its best (selflessness). Sholder also wanted the two heroes to bond in their limited conversations. In Kouf’s script, Beck’s only family was his wife and their relationship was jokey and superficial. Sholder wanted Beck’s home life to be full of love and warmth, adding more personality to his wife’s character and adding a daughter. The connection to bind the men came by giving Gallagher a backstory that he lost a lifemate and child that he cherished just as much, and the bad alien is what killed them. Beck’s daughter would also be highly perceptive to Gallagher’s true nature, so that, in the end, she willingly accepts what happens, something that would be very important to the character arc of Gallagher.

The plot: LAPD detective Tom Beck takes down a bank robber gone berserk in one of the bloodiest shootouts in department history.  What Beck doesn’t know is that the culprit is actually being controlled by a parasite within his body that loves danger, money, speeding, and hard rock. This alien parasite can’t be killed by normal means, and moves from host to host whenever the body it is in is about to expire.  Enter FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher, on assignment from Seattle to help apprehend the perpetrator(s) on a killing spree the likes of which have the LA cops stymied.  Gallagher seems to hold the key as to why normally good people are going bad all of a sudden, but he’s not letting on why.

According to Kouf, he named the alien character Gallagher after actor Clu Gulager because he liked the name. Coincidentally, Sholder cast Gulager in The Hidden as the police captain, having worked with him for Nightmare 2.

Michael Nouri originally auditioned to play Gallagher. However, Sholder didn’t take him very seriously and also already had someone in mind for Gallagher by the time he came in. Rather than have some casting director or other assistant read lines in an ineffective manner, Sholder got the idea to have Nouri read the lines opposite Jeff Fahey, the actor he wanted for Gallagher.  Nouri did very well reading Beck’s lines so he stuck. However, Fahey ceased to be available, leaving the Gallagher role open again. They cycled through as many actors as available to audition prior to filming. It came down to Kyle Maclachlan and (fittingly) Peter Gallagher.  The studio suggested Maclachlan looked too slight and Peter Gallagher had a physical presence, but Sholder liked Maclachlan’s performance in Blue Velvet and he convinced New Line that Maclachlan’s vulnerability was an asset for what he wanted to do with the film.

During the filming, Sholder worried that Nouri’s strong performance was dominating the film and that Maclachlan was perhaps the wrong choice. However, he edited the movie together, he appreciated Maclachlan’s understated performance and the subtle things he did to bring Gallagher to life. In many ways, Maclachlan made the film his own and gave the perfect performance. Sholder says Kyle Maclachlan is the best actor he’s worked with – extremely easy to direct and delivers a solid performance.

In contrast, Sholder considered Nouri a royal a-hole. Whatever Sholder asked him to do, Nouri argued to do something different. Sholder felt Nouri either didn’t trust him as a director or he grew resentful about not being able to capitalize on Flashdance‘s success, stuck in a b-movie directed by someone whose only notable credit was A Nightmare on Elm Street 2.  Regardless of motive, Sholder thought Nouri deliberately undermined his authority to make him look like an idiot in front of everyone else. It required a great deal of Sholder’s mental energy and occasional reverse psychology to get Nouri to do what he wanted. So toxic was Nouri to the vibe on the set that, on the last day of filming, when, traditionally, everyone comes by to congratulate him for a job well done, no one said anything. Everyone walked away and Nouri saw himself out without a word.

Sholder decided to make other script changes to keep the concentration on the main themes. One was to reduce the number of cop characters by half, not only for budgetary reasons but to make the narrative more straightforward. He hired former LAPD detective Richard Whitaker as a consultant to shape the police dialogue so that it would sound authentic. Sholder saw it as a Sydney Lumet-style cop movie primarily, rather than mainly sci-fi or horror.

Sholder felt that the six actors (and the trained dog) hosting the alien should play as the same character. He called together the host actors to work on character uniformity throughout the movie. They developed mutual behavior like stiffness, awkwardness, and limited vocabulary. Robert Shaye also wanted one physical tic they could all perform that the dog could do. The dog’s trainer mentioned he stuck out his tongue when getting aggressive, so the humans adopted showing their tongue to clue the audience that they were under alien control.

Claudia Christian (pre-“Babylon 5”) had to be crafty to audition for the role of Brenda the stripper, her first movie role. The script described Brenda as “big-busted,” which she was not. At the audition, Christian stuffed her bra with her socks and as many tissues as she could find. When she was called back to show them her physique in a bikini, she created fake boobs using a mix of shoulder pads and electrical tape. When it came time to show her body, she decided to draw their attention away from the fake chest by ripping open her dress, quickly spinning around, and walking out. She was offered the part within the hour.

Jack Sholder was unhappy that Christian’s deception, so the costume designer devised a set of prosthetic breasts that could be worn under a cut-off t-shirt. This meant Christian couldn’t go topless as intended, so they decided to accentuate her backside. Christian determined she’d have to lose weight to look good. She went to a clinic that put her on a 500-calorie-a-day diet mixed with vitamin shots and a substance containing the urine of a pregnant horse.

Christian loved the experience except for a minor injury one of the squibs blew a piece of her metallic jacket into her eye. Although not permanently harmed, she lost the ability to shoot prop weapons without a blinking reflex kicking in.

The worst part of her experience came afterward. Christian gained a stalker who had seen The Hidden and believed she was an alien who brought AIDS to the human population. The stalker followed her in his car, masturbating in front of her house.  The police said they couldn’t do anything (this was prior to the Rebecca Shaeffer anti-stalking laws). One cop suggested she invite him inside, shoot him, then claim he broke in. Making matters worse, it was the stalker that got her arrested. She got into a car accident trying to lose him, then ran from her vehicle when she saw him get out of his car and approach. He vanished when a crowd formed and the cops didn’t believe her story on why she fled the scene of an accident. Christian was slapped with six months of community service, baking cookies for a playhouse. She hated doing this, so she made a deal to pay for the theater’s roof repairs if they signed off on her service.

Sholder was excited to direct his first car chase. Robert Shaye told him not to bother because modern audiences found car chases routine and Sholder had no experience to make one. But Sholder determined to make something special.  Sholder’s assistant pulled clips of great cinematic car chases to study what made them exciting. For The French Connection, the excitement was that the action went car to car, including putting us in the car looking out at the road in front, rather than observing from the outside. Sholder had three cameras placed on the car, mounted on the front bumper, a driver’s POV, and over the driver’s shoulder. For exterior shots, wide-angle cameras were placed where the cars were going by. Stunt drivers got close to the cameras as possible to give the appearance of high speeds.

What Sholder also found interesting was that the alien would control humans knowing it couldn’t be killed. Usually, the goal of the person being chased is to find a way to survive and get away. In The Hidden, the driver didn’t care about personal safety because it couldn’t be killed in an accident and had no care about innocent bystanders killed along the way.

New Line removed a scene where Beck finds a prior victim’s body and then the bank robbery because they were unnecessary and expensive. Sholder opened with the bad guy walking out of the bank but the studio felt it needed more, so Sholder filmed a title sequence in the bank with a mock surveillance camera showing a murder in the bank and the bad guy smiling as he blows the camera away.  In Kouf’s script, the politician who hosts the parasite was the vice president of the United States. This was changed by Sholder to being a US Senator running for the presidency because he wanted the alien to say the line, “I want to be president.” Sholder added the flamethrower to the picture as a means to coax out the bad alien. In the original script, the alien gets away, boarding a plane back to Washington in the vice president’s body, implying it intends become the most powerful entity on Earth.

In addition to the script changes, one other tactic was suggested by one of the production designers. The color blue was considered too comfortable to audiences. To keep things unsettling, as much blue as possible was removed from all sets and wardrobe.

When preview screenings met with an overwhelmingly positive response, New Line felt they had a bonafide hit. They invested $5 million more into a national advertising campaign. Despite the push, The Hidden only managed to hit #6 in the US in its debut week in Halloween weekend in 1987, losing publicity to the red-hot Fatal Attraction, and competing against John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Overall, the film took in less than $10 million domestically.

One of the better b-movie treats of the 1980s, The Hidden lives up to its name by becoming a hidden gem for genre aficionados.  While not among the seminal classics of its era, like The Terminator and Aliens, this is just as fun, with solid laughs, terrific action, and an interesting storyline to follow.  Looking at it today, it feels like a precursor to the smash-hit “Grand Theft Auto” line of videogames, glorifying the insidious love of fast cars, loose women, hot music, explosive weaponry, and unbridled hedonism.  It may be low in budget, but it’s high in fast-paced action, proving to be influential in its own right in sci-fi/horror buddy cop movies for years to come.

The action comes at a fever pitch, never letting you have a second to question some of the film’s more implausible moments before moving on to the next locale and set of wild circumstances.  This is possibly the best work in director Jack Sholder’s erratic career and he considers it his favorite of his films.

Also impressive is the chemistry of the two leads, with Michael Nouri making for an effective hothead cop, and MacLachlan perfect in his role as the unemotional and mysterious stranger. Their interactions are funny, gutsy, and keep the momentum of the story going between the action.

Horror fans will find enough gory moments to keep their attention, sci-fi junkies will love it, and those looking for action will be absolutely ecstatic, as The Hidden is one fun scene after another, with moments of intelligence and thoughtfulness that is rare to find in what should have been just another z-grade knock-off.  Screenwriter Jim Kouf has made quite a career for himself scripting two of the hippest buddy cop films in Stakeout and Rush Hour, but The Hidden gets the comedy and thrills mixture better than both. The Hidden is worth finding.

• Followed by a direct-to-video sequel in 1994, The Hidden II, mostly made by people who had nothing to do with the original film.
• At some point, they considered making the film into a TV series with a different body for the bad alien week after week.
• New Line/Heron sued the makers of the NBC TV miniseries “Something is Out There” in 1988 for copyright infringement due to similarities in their story.
• The film Fallen takes a similar plot but with a demon instead of an alien causing the mayhem. Also, Species with Natasha Henstridge.

Qwipster’s rating: A-

MPAA Rated: R for strong violence, gore, sexuality, and language
Running Time: 96 min.

Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, Ed O’Ross, Clarence Felder, Clu Gulager, William Boyett, Claudia Christian, Katherine Cannon, Chris Mulkey, Richard Brooks, Larry Cedar, Lin Shaye
Director: Jack Sholder
Screenplay: Jim Kouf (as Bob Hunt)