From the Depths of Purgatory Comes…Jacob’s Ladder By Robert Meyer Burnett
“Suddenly, a strange and terrifying spectacle unfolds before Jacob. The dancers undergo a shocking transformation… Horns and tails emerge and grow like exotic genitalia… new appendages appear, unfolding from their backs. Armored scales run in scallops down their legs… Bones and flesh mold into new forms of life, creatures of another world.”
― from Bruce Joel Rubin’s screenplay for Jacob’s Ladder
There are movies, and then there are legends. Some films arrive on schedule, announced with fanfare, advertised on billboards, and then fade into the churn of box office statistics. Others claw their way into existence after years in purgatory, whispered about in back rooms, traded like secret manuscripts among insiders who can’t quite believe they will ever be made. Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder belongs firmly in the second category ― a film born of myth, fear, and obsession, whose journey to the screen was as improbable as the film itself.
To understand how unusual Jacob’s Ladder was, we have to go back to 1983, when American Film magazine ran a piece that had the aura of forbidden knowledge. Stephen Rebello, with the eye of a detective and the heart of a movie lover, wrote “One in a Million,” an article about the best screenplays that had never been produced. Hollywood, Rebello reminded us, is not a meritocracy. “The best screenplays aren’t necessarily the ones that get made,” he observed with weary resignation. Some are “too special” for the masses — Hollywood code for “unmarketable.”
Rebello polled forty-five producers, agents, and development executives ― the people who read everything but approve almost nothing ― and assembled a list of ten unproduced screenplays considered the best of their kind. It was an early version of what we’d now call “The Black List.” Half of them, improbably, would go on to be made, including At Close Range, The Princess Bride, Total Recall, Miracle Mile, and, strangest and most haunting of all, Jacob’s Ladder.
What made Rubin’s script stand out was not only its craftsmanship but its aura. People spoke of it in hushed tones: “Read it ― it’s extraordinary.” Unlike most horror scripts, which offer jolts and shocks, this one lingered. It raised gooseflesh not in the dead of night but at noon, under bright fluorescent lights. You couldn’t shake it off.
Rubin himself described its creation as almost supernatural: “Jacob’s Ladder was the first movie I wrote that was delivered. By ‘delivered,’ I mean I had nothing to do with it. I sat at the typewriter and took dictation. It was just coming through me and scaring the hell out of me.” His wife once read over his shoulder, aghast, and asked, “What are you writing that for?” Rubin could only reply, “I don’t know. But I can’t stop.”
Rubin had been circling these questions for years. Before he became the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Ghost, he worked as a film curator at the Whitney Museum, pondering the big questions that rarely fuel commercial cinema: What is the self? What happens after death? If identity can be swapped, who are we really? His first screenplay, The George Dunlop Tape (1973), began as a modest 16mm project about shared consciousness. Douglas Trumbull transformed it into Brainstorm, giving it a sci-fi sheen. But Brainstorm suffered a cursed production, haunted by Natalie Wood’s tragic death and MGM’s reluctance. It limped to theaters in 1983, remembered more for scandal than vision.
Meanwhile, Jacob’s Ladder floated in development limbo, attracting big names ― Michael Apted, Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, Richard Gere ― but scaring them off with its demands. Rubin pinned his hopes on Ridley Scott, but after the bruising visual effects slog of Legend, Scott had no appetite for another effects-heavy vision of the afterlife.
Hollywood has a way of tempting integrity with opportunity. Rubin initially balked at adapting Friend, a pulpy novel about a teenager reviving his dead girlfriend as a robot. “I can’t write that. I didn’t come to Hollywood to make horror films,” he told producer Bob Sherman. Overnight, principle gave way to pragmatism. He called back and took the job. The result, Deadly Friend (1986), directed by Wes Craven, ushered Rubin inside the studio system.
Still, Jacob’s Ladder refused to die. In 1986, Cinefantastique ran a story, “The Script No One Dares to Film.” Storyboards by Aaron Lopresti tantalized readers with glimpses of hellscapes that might never be realized. Later that year, Paramount acquired both Jacob’s Ladder and Rubin’s new script Ghost. For a moment, it seemed the stars might align.
Adrian Lyne, having set aside The Bonfire of the Vanities (which Brian De Palma would later direct, with Tom Hanks, ironically one of Lyne’s early choices for Jacob’s Ladder), took up Rubin’s script. Lyne called it “one of the best I’ve ever read.” Paramount executives disagreed, unnerved by its unflinching Vietnam flashbacks and apocalyptic imagery. They shelved it. Carolco Pictures, flush from the success of Rambo, rescued it, offering Lyne creative freedom and a $25 million budget.
Casting became a battle of wills. The studio wanted star power — Pacino, Gere, Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Madonna. Lyne wanted authenticity. He insisted on Tim Robbins, then best known for comedies, and Elizabeth Peña, who brought heat and tenderness to Jezebel. Robbins gave the film vulnerability, a man crushed by forces he can’t name. Peña gave it humanity, reminding us of the life Jacob might cling to even as the world dissolves.
The production choices defined the film’s enduring power. Rubin’s script contained Old Testament imagery of demons, angels, and visions of hell itself. Lyne grounded it. He immersed himself in Vietnam documentaries and firsthand accounts of near-death experiences. The grotesque hallucinations were realized not through CGI (which didn’t yet exist) but practical effects: contorted bodies, vibrating heads, twisted hospital corridors inspired by Francis Bacon’s paintings. By keeping the surreal imagery tactile, Lyne ensured the horror would not age. The infamous gurney ride through a nightmarish hospital still feels like a descent into hell you can touch, smell, and never forget.
Test screenings were brutal. Audiences were overwhelmed, even traumatized. Lyne trimmed twenty minutes from the final act. What survived was still unlike anything else in mainstream American cinema.
On release in November 1990, Jacob’s Ladder opened at number one, earning $7.5 million. But word of mouth faltered. Audiences expecting a conventional thriller gave it a CinemaScore of C-. Critics were split. Rotten Tomatoes today records 72% approval, Metacritic 62%: “generally favorable.” The box office stalled at $26 million domestic.
But here’s the irony. Just as Rubin’s screenplay haunted Hollywood for a decade, the film itself has haunted audiences ever since. It is a cult object, referenced on comedy podcasts, debated by cinephiles, remembered less as a hit than as a unique experience. To watch it is to be unsettled, confused, and ultimately moved.
At its heart, the film is built on an idea Rubin borrowed from Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: the dilation of time in the moment of death. What feels like days or weeks may be only seconds. In Jacob’s Ladder, that instant is transformed into an odyssey of trauma, memory, and release. The demons, Rubin insists, are not demons at all but angels, tearing away attachments so Jacob can let go. Death, the film suggests, is not punishment but liberation.
“When Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder came out,” Rubin recalled, “people asked why I kept writing about death. I told them: because only by embracing death can you understand life. Death can come at any moment. And when you know that, life becomes totally, remarkably precious.”
Lyne’s film may never sit beside The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby in the horror canon. But it doesn’t need to. It is its own strange creature: part horror, part spiritual parable, part Vietnam elegy. It is a film born in development hell, which somehow clawed its way back to the light ― an artifact of Hollywood purgatory that has never lost its power to disturb, and perhaps, to console.