It’s not often that the remake of a classic turns out to be as worth watching as the original. In the case of Willard (2003), director Glen Morgan succeeded in capturing the sensibilities and moods from the classic horror film, Willard (1971). The 1971 version may seem like an obscure horror film, unwatchable by many, because vermin is just too real to be appreciated as an escape into horror. It happens to be a film worth seeing over and over.
From a story-telling perspective, Willard is a character journey that takes the human protagonist through a coming of age, and thoroughly explains his fall with circumstances viewed through the lens of a failure. This is where Morgan showcases his love of the original film while also offering nods to the original source material, Ratman’s Notebooks, a novella written by Stephen Gilbert.
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It’s been eighteen years since Glen Morgan’s version of Willard was released. It’s easy to see the heavy influence from Gilbert’s original short novel, but he pays special attention to honoring the 1971 film version. On the surface, Morgan’s 2003 film resembles the original so closely that one might think it was a direct copy, and hardly worth calling a remake rather than an update.
Beginning with the opening line, “Willard!,” the protagonist is nagged by his boss, played by Ernest Borgnine in the original; and nagged again in the remake thirty-two years later, perhaps more appropriately by his mother, played by Jackie Burroughs. I say more appropriately because despite the great Elsa Lanchester being cast in the original role of Mrs. Stiles, it is Burroughs’ depiction and Morgan’s script that shows the horrific person Willard’s mother really is.
The protagonist in Ratman’s Notebooks is never named. His anonymity is an important part of the lore, lending mystery to a character whose innermost thoughts are otherwise expressed on every page. He’s openly disturbed, and in dire need of intervention, but his personal paranoia restricts his moral growth. To this end, neither version of Willard gets it all right. We don’t get to see the progression of Ratman’s downward spiral from awkward social outcast into criminally insane loser.
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Crispin Glover plays Willard well enough on both ends, but we don’t get to understand the mind of Willard the way Stephen Gilbert laid it out. Instead, we see only the result. Willard has a screw loose, and he can’t handle stress. In this way, Glover was perfectly cast. But Willard is an innocent loser who just never had a chance to grow as a person. He was stunted by an overbearing and emotionally abusive mother. In this way, Bruce Davison was perfectly cast in the original. You never get a sense Willard was capable of becoming a murderer in the original, and you never get a sense that Willard was ever anything other than insane throughout his life in the remake.
The most important character arcs to follow are those of the main two rats. Morgan borrows the white rat and black rat metaphor from the original, which makes perfect sense. It would have been next to impossible to show the difference in their characters with the physical differences Gilbert described. In the novella, the rats Ratman trusts most for their smarts are the fuzzy-tailed rats like Socrates. The rats that are nothing but soldiers like Ben have scaly tails. The only way this fails cinematically is the lack of seeing the majority changing over time as Ben takes the role of rat leader after Socrates is killed.
In both movies, Socrates is the only white rat, but in the book, he is not the only fuzzy-tailed rat. This transition is essential if you are to understand the momentum of change in Willard/Ratman because the arcs of the rat leaders are directly connected to Ratman/Willard’s own arc. In the murder of Mr. Martin (Mr. Jones in the book), most, if not all of the rats resemble Ben. This is because at this point, Ratman is resigned to the rats having their will. He likes to pretend its not his own, but he enjoys all the fruits of their efforts. He justifies the murder in various ways, the most important being that he’s not directly doing the killing.
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Ratman has few qualms about taking what he thinks he deserves (from Ratman’s Notebooks: “Nothing but fear, or prudence, kept me from being a criminal. This thought didn’t make me ashamed in any way. On the contrary, I felt as if a door had suddenly been opened for me.”), but Ratman had initially intended to use his rats for petty theft and mischief.
In both film versions, Willard suffers money woes throughout. His money woes justified his actions in all versions. The greed of the world is what motivates him to take action. Crispin Glover’s depiction in a pivotal scene (when he learns he owes taxes on the house that his mother has left to him) is the film’s turning point. His breakdown in this crisis is a bit over the top. We expect a frustrated reaction since he’s being confronted about it at his mother’s funeral, but Glover turns the tense response up to eleven at the drop of a hat. You can see how this was meant to be his change over, but for viewers, it’s just an excuse for Willard to go completely postal from there on out.
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Since it is a horror movie, it is half-implied Willard unconsciously allowed his mother to die of fright seeing the swarm of rats, but Willard’s first true victim is Scully, the cat (Chloe in the original film). This is the first fall for Willard in the 2003 version. It’s a cheap death that never occurs in the 1971 version (or the book for that matter). In fact, Chloe is left in the hands of a stranger in the original, and never exists in the book.
Ratman has a love of animals, and could never find it in his heart to allow one to be harmed. It’s the very reason the rats are drawn to him in the first place. When his mother orders him to kill them, he pretends to do it, and ultimately rescues them from his own trap. His inability to allow an animal to be killed is illustrated in the novella through the scene with the small dog. He tosses the dog into his rat bag when it incessantly barks at him during one of his mischievous raids.
This scene is absent in the 1971 version (the cat being dropped off is probably the shortcut variant on the moment), but Glen Morgan’s 2003 version depicts the scene beat-for-beat. Ratman/Willard acts in frustration at first, but has a change of heart when he thinks about what he’s doing. He removes the dog from the bag, and it scampers away unharmed (Physically. There’s no telling what nightmares Mr. Woofles will suffer through).
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This scene specifically draws Ratman/Willard’s line. He will steal, but he will not kill. Not yet, anyway. Technically, Willard didn’t kill the cat, the rats did. That had to be Morgan’s reasoning. What’s a horror movie without as much death as possible? I’m guessing back in 2003, he never considered there would be two kinds of horror fans: The ones who believe a killer isn’t hardcore until a pet is killed, and the ones who can stomach any kind of bloody carnage, but even an off-screen pet death is going too far.
The 2003 version of Willard stands well enough, and is worth a watch if you’ve never seen it. I suggest supplementing the viewing with a double feature, watching the 1971 version first. The written source material will always be helpful in any film watch, but Ratman’s Notebooks fills in so much about the protagonist and his rodent friends. You’ll wonder why neither film bothered to use Ratman’s disguise and local media lore. It’s alluded to in the newspaper headline, “Rats as Big as a Man!,” but the decision to leave Willard unmasked throughout was a mistake.
It would have been a risky move, cinematically, to have Crispin Glover don a mascot-style rat head; but it also may have been just what either version needed to make a creepy icon of the human protagonist. If done right, Willard could join the ranks of the handful of iconic horror faces recognized high and low. Maybe it’s time for another retelling.
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