The Ninth Configuration (1980) on Netflix
Colonel Hudson Kane takes command of a castle the Army runs as an asylum. Among the patients is astronaut Billy Cutshaw, who refuses to say why he aborted his Moon launch.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.7/1010,288 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Toward the end of the Vietnam War, the Army houses disturbed and AWOL soldiers in a gothic castle in the Pacific Northwest. Colonel Hudson Kane arrives to take over their treatment, and Colonel Fell walks him through the patients' eccentricities. Among them is former astronaut Billy Cutshaw, who aborted his Moon launch and was pulled from the capsule screaming, and who refuses to explain what turned him back. Lieutenant Reno, meanwhile, is attempting to stage Shakespeare with a cast of dogs. Kane lets the men live inside their fantasies rather than restrain them, and Cutshaw gives him a St. Christopher medal.
In these lists: The Best Horror Movies of the 1980s
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Ninth Configuration (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Blatty originally cast Nicol Williamson as Colonel Kane, but Stacy Keach recalled that Williamson, staying at the Budapest Hilton, ripped the phone from the wall and threw it through his suite's plate-glass window; Williamson was fired and Keach hired.
- No studio would fund the film, so William Peter Blatty put up half of its $4 million budget himself and persuaded PepsiCo to supply $2 million, on condition it be shot in Hungary, where PepsiCo had blocked funds and invested the production money in a Pepsi bottling plant.
- The film is believed to be the first use of the "Howie Scream" stock sound effect, later heard at Howie Long's character's death in Broken Arrow (1996) and when the Terran Academy is selected in the Starcraft video game.
- Tom Atkins, who had a minor role, said Blatty financed part of the film by selling his Malibu home and kept the cast in Budapest for two months, which produced 22 upset, angry and drunk actors who struggled to show up for work.
- Michael Moriarty was set to play Captain Billy Cutshaw but dropped out of the production; Scott Wilson, who had originally been cast as Fairbanks, took over the part.
