As a preface, this includes nearly scene-for-scene spoilers from a film with an exceptional, complex story, and I'll mark the beginning and end of the summary, as well as any important spoilers, in Bold Italics. I'd highly recommend watching it beforehand to gain your own understanding of the story, but if my summary of the film as well as my own thoughts on its themes and filmmaking are intriguing, I'd recommend watching it regardless, as it's a thoroughly layered movie that can't be done justice with words.

Psychological horror is an intriguing sub-genre. Horror in general is used to explore fear, bringing an otherwise irrational sense of dread into physical form. Classic films like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for example, all explore the fear of being stalked by a nearly unstoppable force, whether it be in your neighborhood, at a summer camp, or in a dream.

Ultimately, in most horror, the fear comes from an external source, and the dread comes from being unable to escape, and being killed. Death is among the most primal fears and corresponds with many others, most notably a fear of pain or the unknown (seeing as what comes after death is an unanswerable question), and most horror media revolves around avoiding death being the driving motivation of a character, and you don't need much more than that.

However, in psychological horror, external conflicts are there, but secondary to the deterioration of the human psyche. Films like John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) or David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) show the horrors of losing your mind due to fear of losing your own body, and your humanity in turn. Horribly grotesque effects exemplify the complete loss of what it is to be human after being introduced to a character who you knew before their transformation.

A no-longer human from *The Thing (1982*)

Before 1990, psychological horror stories were few and far between, seeing as they had no real guidelines to follow beyond the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft, with themes of isolation and hopelessness, viscera, insanity, and incomprehensible horrors. The aforementioned films followed these themes, with people being isolated (In Antarctica in The Thing, and the main character being an outcast in The Fly), displaying gory, disgusting transformations, being completely unsure of whether any given characters are even human anymore, and finally giving in to insanity at the end of each given movie, each with an uneasy ending, void of hope. They were dreary, horrifying, and amazing, but, other than some of David Lynch's works such as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Twin Peaks, Lovecraftian body horror was more or less all psychological horror had to offer. That was, of course, until Jacob's Ladder.

Jacob's Ladder (1990) wasn't wildly popular when it came out, not due at all to low ratings, but rather to a low interest in the film, grossing only $26.1 million in comparison to its $25 million budget, mostly due to it being promoted more like a straight supernatural horror movie with heavy action rather than the tragic, dream-like mystery it truly was, as well as being directed by Adrian Lyne, primarily known for average (or subpar) romance movies, and produced by Carolco, mostly known for action movies like First Blood and Terminator 2 .

It was also made at the wrong time, written in 1980 by screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin and then released in 1990, in a period where slasher movies had become so common that horror movies had practically lost their charm, with endless sequels being pumped out, but before Scream parodied and revitalized the genre in 1996. Jacob's Ladder, along with many other soon-to-be cult classic horror movies from the 90s soon became beloved by the few people who did see it, though.

(Summary starts here.)

The film follows Jacob Singer (played by Tim Robbins), a Vietnam veteran, shown in an opening with his platoon bantering among each other before they're thrown into a chaotic battle where a number of them become disorientated and eviscerated almost immediately, ending with Jacob running into the brush and getting stabbed in the stomach by an unknown attacker, as he wakes up on the subway, seemingly just having fallen asleep. Now, he has to try to go through his normal day, working as a mailman in 1975 New York and living with his girlfriend Jezebel (played by the late Elizabeth Peña), divorced by his wife after their son, Gabriel (Macaulay Culkin, the same year and released four days after Home Alone, oddly enough), died.

On the subway, he sees a strange, unnerving woman and a sleeping homeless man who seems to have a strange tail that retracts under the man's coat, but Jacob has to get off the train before he has any time to take much note of it. He tries to exit the subway station, but finds all the exits on the platform are fenced up, and tries to make his way across the tracks to the other platform. As he carefully crosses the tracks, however, a train barrels towards him, and he barely manages to get out of its way but sees that all the passengers, silhouetted and faceless against the windows, are staring down at him, and a demonic man stands at the back, watching and waving at Jacob as he gets up.

After work the next day, he goes to his chiropractor, Louis (played by the also late Danny Aiello), and he very quickly gets a flashback of Vietnam, seemingly of back when he was saved by another platoon in the jungle after suffering from a stab through the gut in the opening scene, before flashing back to Louis in confusion. After he relaxes, he mentions Louis looks like an angel, which Louis remarks he says every single time he comes in.

After he leaves, a group of kids sing "Please Mr. Postman" for him, but he nearly gets hit by a car filled with more demons walking through an alleyway, only saved by a man warning Jacob before they get him. He decides to visit the hospital to see his regular doctor, Dr. Carlson, but the rude nurse at the desk says there are no records of him or Jacob, and as she bends over to check, the top of her head appears disfigured under her nursing cap.Taking matters into his own hands, he runs past the office doors, narrowing escaping the security guard, and to Carlson's office, where he finds a therapy group being lead by a completely different man, who tells him Dr. Carlson's been killed inexplicably in a car explosion.

Later, Jezzie and Jacob go to a friend's party, where a psychic reads his palm, saying that he's already dead, which they laugh at. He goes downstairs to dance with Jezzie but hallucinates her being wrapped around the leg, sexually penetrated, and the impaled through the mouth by a monstrous tentacle, causing him to scream and collapse.

He wakes up back at home with Jezzie before she takes his temperature, finding its dangerous high, and having their neighbors help put him in an ice bath, causing him to pass out once more. He wakes up in another reality where he's still with his wife, Sarah (played by Patricia Kalember), and with all of his kids still alive, getting to tuck in Gabe, and returns to bed and wakes back in the tub having survived the fever, crying.

As he recovers over a couple of weeks, he begins to study demonology, but hallucinates Jezzie as a demon and shoves her, causing her to get angry and leave. Afterward, he gets a call from one of his old platoon friends, Paul (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince), saying he needs to see Jacob. Meeting him in a bar, Paul says that he's experiencing the same sort of hallucinations, saying that he knows he's going to hell and that the demons are trying to take him there. After the two exit the bar and say their goodbyes, Paul enters his car and it promptly explodes, killing him, a man barely managing to pull him out of the blast and attempt to help him up.

At his funeral, most of the other platoon members note they've been experiencing similar hallucinations, believing the government might have done something to them, and they try to make a court case together. However, it turns out there are no records of them in combat, but rather they were discharged on psychological grounds and the others back down. After confronting the lawyer, he's abducted by agents, assumedly from the government, who threaten him. However, Jacob fights back and manages to escape their car, but badly injures himself rolling out of it, having his wallet stolen by a street Santa.

He's taken to a hospital but has no identification (having had his ID in his wallet), begging to have Louis called in, and is taken to the emergency wing, but as he's rolled in, the wing is dark, and they pass by a broken bike, the same one his son had (it's later shown that he was hit by a car after dropping some baseball cards into the street while riding his bike), and immediately he knows something is off.

As he's taken further and further into the hospital, indisputably the film's most iconic sequence, it becomes filthy and bloody, filled with mental patients, some human, but clearly far gone, and some monstrous, crawling about on disproportionate limbs in the grating about him, as the gurney he's on rolls over chunks of flesh and gore, the wheel spinning about wildly. They finally arrive at the surgery room. One of the surgeons appears to be Jezzie but doesn't speak. Instead, the main surgeon tells him, "you've been killed, don't you remember?". Finally, a monstrous surgeon sticks a needle into his forehead, Jacob finally screaming and blacking out.

When Jacob comes to after another brief flash of Vietnam, Sarah and his kids (notably only two of them this time, without Gabe) are by his bedside, having been called in to see him. He says "I'm not dead. I'm alive," and Sarah tries to comfort him, telling him she still loves him, for what it counts, but a voice only Jacob hears says "dream on." He begins panicking again, telling Sarah, "Help me," and she holds his face in one of the film's most heartbreaking scenes.

Sometime after they've left, Louis finally arrives and forces his way into Jacob's room, wheeling him out of the hospital to his office. Jacob asks if he's dying, and Louis notes he's only got a slipped disk. Jacob says he was in hell and doesn't want to die, and Louis, in the film's most well-known dialogue, quotes Meister Eckhart, a philosopher, and mystic who saw hell too.

Louis quotes, 'The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you.' he said. 'They're freeing your soul.'... so the way he sees it if you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all." Finally, Louis sets his slipped disk back into place, fixing him, able to stand again, saving him.

Finally arriving back home, Jezzie is upset he essentially went missing for two days before he tells her he was in the hospital, concerning her, but before they can address it, they get a call. Jacob is nervous, thinking it may be the agents coming to finish the job, and tells Jezzie to pretend he isn't there, but he overhears that the caller is a man who was in Vietnam, and, taking the phone from Jezzie, the man tells him that he has answers for what's happening to him, and a location to meet him at. Jezzie doesn't want him to go, worried he'll get hurt again, be he comforts her, and goes out.

Reaching their meeting place, Jacob spots the man and realizes it's the same person who saved him from the car-driving demons and the explosion from earlier, who introduces himself as Michael Newman (played by Matt Craven). Newman takes him out of the open and explains to him that he was a chemist in Vietnam, working on chemical warfare.

The U.S. government assigned him to make a drug called the Ladder, which exponentially increases aggression, in exchange for letting him out of prison after being caught making meth. The Ladder was then tested on Jacob's platoon in preparation for a massive battle, but they all brutally killed each other before any of them could even begin to fight the Cong, shown in a final Vietnam flash.

Jacob leaves and decides to take a taxi to his old family home, let in by the doorman who recognizes him. The home is dark and empty, and he simply decides to fall asleep on the couch in the living room. When he wakes up, the room is bright, the morning's light washing over him. He gets up and walks into the hallway, where he sees Gabe sitting on the stairway, playing with some toys. Jacob, in broken understanding, embracing his son in a comforting, loving hug, before Gabe finally takes his hand and leads him up the stairs into a bright light.

Fading into a man's face, back in Vietnam again, Michael Newman, appearing to be a doctor who was trying to resuscitate the man, finally declares him dead, taking off his dog tags gently. He notes the man put up "a hell of a fight," and notes how peaceful he looks in death. Another doctor asks what his name was, and Newman reads the nametags, declaring the name Singer, Jacob Singer, and the screen fades to black.

As the song, "Sonny Boy" plays (a song that Jacob sings as him and Gabe's special song), a message appears, saying, "It was reported that the hallucinogenic drug BZ was used in experiments on soldiers during the Vietnam war. The Pentagon denied the story," before a final image shows a picture of Jacob and Gabe from behind, walking down the sidewalk together.

(Summary Ends Here.)

The plot of Jacob's Ladder is nearly perfect in conjunction with every other element of the film. Despite being 116 minutes long, nearly two hours, it never feels like there's nothing happening or even that things have slowed down from beginning to end. The film's surreal, dream-like feel never falters for a second, but instead switches between a peaceful rest and a waking nightmare, ever moment feeling painfully real, and yet unnervingly otherworldly, as if nothing is ever quite right, until the very end.

Much of the film's dreamy quality is cemented by its visuals. The movie looks timeless, beautifully shot primarily in New York (as well as the Vietnam segments in Puerto Rico), with cinematography by Jeffrey L. Kimball. Most notable is its use of lighting and color, such as the opening scene, picturing helicopters flying over rivers and plains while the distinctive orange sunrise pours a warm light over the landscape, the choppers silhouetted against the beautiful sun.

It often uses very harsh light or extremely dark shadows in some of the more nightmarish scenes, often having bright flashes of light within a sequence of pure horrifying chaos, or the transition from one reality to another, while the dark backgrounds allow focus on a character's face, and the colors of these darker scenes usually have much more distinctive uses of color, with striking whites, murky blacks, deep blues, the aforementioned bright orange, and splashes of reds. At the same time, more melancholy or even-toned scenes are more evenly lit, and often more washed out in terms of color, with soft, almost heavenly light cast through the windows or backgrounds of many scenes, showing a brief pause from the hell Jacob has to go through.

Many close-in shots are of a character's face, usually Jacob's, and often without dialogue. Much of the film's best acting, and many of the most heartbreaking, especially from Tim Robbins, are simply a facial reaction, or a quiet, sympathetic moment between characters. Contrastingly, some of the most disturbing, horrific moments are loud, harsh, and unnerving, but are often capped by a period of dialogue without music or any other sound beyond speech, or a moment of pure, tense silence, such as the hospital sequence, or the dance party scene.

The movie doesn't use any CGI at all for its effects. All of the film's monsters and demons were completely practically brought to life through puppets and prosthetics, and the film's most well-known effect, the vibration or twitching that so many horror games and films have used since was created by an actor rapidly shaking their head around at a low frame rate, which gave the effect of inhuman, blurred twitching speeds when sped up.

The twitching effect from *Jacob’s Ladder.*

The twitch effect as seen in *P.T. (2013)*

Jacob's Ladder has incredible sound design and a criminally underappreciated OST by Maurice Jarre (who previously worked with director Lyne on 1987's Fatal Attraction, as well as creating the critically acclaimed Lawrence of Arabia's OST). Having a fairly short soundtrack at only about 38 minutes, the film relies heavily on silence, ambient sound, and brief musical cues to create a strikingly designed soundscape.

Much of the film's atmosphere is coated in an eerie quietness. Jacob is a generally soft-spoken man, helping portray his kindly, fatherly nature, and, as previously mentioned, some of the most tear-jerking scenes of the film. The main theme of the movie is a soft, dark piano piece that transitions into strings, and a full orchestra with a flute solo, briefly quieting back to the piano accompanied by slightly more tense strings, before building to the full orchestral climax that peaks with an angelic choir.

One of the saddest, melancholy pieces of music put to film, it has a warm, yet depressing feeling of nostalgia, perfectly capturing the film's themes of loss, death, and love. This theme is scattered throughout the film at its most significant points, most notably the opening scene and climax, starting the film with a soft, mysterious quality, and ending it on a deeply bittersweet, saddening note. While the film is effectively more deeply saddening than it is horrifying, many of its sequences that are incredibly unsettling are characterized by an equally unsettling score. Unlike the very soft instrumentation of the main theme, as well as the track "Sarah", (notably the musical cue from 4:53 to 6:37) which are backdrops to much softer scenes, the more horror-themed scenes have far harsher and far less conventional instrumentation.

The film's most distinct sound throughout the soundtrack is a combination of deep bass tones, an unearthly, East Asian inspired woodwind, and an otherworldly, unnerving choir. In combination with varying harsh plucked strings, Tibetan throat singing, dark piano, heavy (as well as more East Asian inspired) percussion, and metallic banging set the oppressive, nightmarish scenarios the film presents, such as “High Fever” and “Descent Into Inferno”, which play during the ice bath and Hospital scenes respectively.

These heavily contrasting sounds paint a clear line between a nightmare and a dream, both connected in their ethereal nature. The combination of incredibly striking visuals and immaculately crafted music and sound (or lack thereof) lead to a practically perfect atmosphere, supporting the mysterious, psychedelic story leading to a near timelessness with incredible subtlety. However, its biggest flaw, and the one thing that sets it as a film of its time, is the drug plot point.

(More spoilers, as well as a brief History lesson.)

The film is an extremely personal story about one man's psychological struggles as a walk through purgatory as Jacob refuses to let himself be dragged into hell and finally allows himself to pass on after, as the famous quote says, the devils really turn out to be angels, and he's taken to heaven by his personal angel, Gabriel (named after a Biblical figure, as almost every significant character is, which connects the film back to its biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder), although much of Jacob's connections to reality and whether of not most of the film is flashbacks, hallucinations, or a mix of reality and a pre-death fever dream is heavily up to interpretation.

Counteractively, the point that all of his hallucinations are, assumedly, all drug-induced psychosis weakens the spiritual nature of the film and convolutes its otherwise tightly woven, yet still complex narrative within its final third, and would be easy enough to completely remove from the film, as this side plot only takes up about 10 minutes of the film, as well as a scene that WAS cut from the film. It feels almost as if there needed to be some kind of practical explanation for many of the film's more nuanced and thought-provoking themes, but the more likely explanation was the time it was written.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975, with the United States pulling out in 1973 due to extreme losses and rising tensions in the states with protests, government conspiracies, and presidential controversies. After the end of the war, many soldiers came home to scorn and mistreatment despite most having to participate through a draft rather than volunteering. Back home, with their established societal rejection, many soldiers began experiencing PTSD from the utter brutality of the war, but beyond even that, a number of soldiers began experiencing even worse symptoms. This was due to extremely heavy drug use as well as experimentation during the war.

Many soldiers were supplied, by the U.S. government, with amphetamines to enhance performance during battles, allowing soldiers to feel invincible, as well as heightened senses, and narcotics and anti-psychotics to suppress psychological effects. Dose recommendations weren't followed well at all, being given out haphazardly, and with unregulated usage came drug abuse and addiction.

While these soldiers were hooked, a few more unfortunate souls were essentially force-fed over 250 different kinds of drugs as part of experiments. In a facility called Edgewood Arsenal, around 7,000 soldiers volunteered over its establishment from 1948 to 1975 and had differing drugs and chemical agents given to them through pills, gasses, and injections, being told by the researchers they were never in any danger, according to the former volunteers, and more often than not, not being told what they were being given or the affects it might have on them.

These experiments were intended for the Cold War, but the results were put into motion during the Vietnam War. Soon after the war ended, all volunteers were released and the program was discontinued, and the director of the program was called into questioning for a lack of out-patient care and questionable recruitment methods. After release, many soldiers tried to organize lawsuits against the CIA and U.S. Army for a complete lack of treatment, but it took over 15 years for one to take shape in the 90’s, and until 2013 (as the result of a suit starting in 2009) for any results.

One of the most common modern tropes in Vietnam criticism is that the government essentially waited until those they affected were practically dead before addressing any issues (seeing as most Veterans would be anywhere for 65-125 as of writing this), but at the time Jacob’s Ladder was written, 1980, and then put to film in 1990, Vietnam-based films were still hopeful in bringing light to the experimentation and addiction so many soldiers faced, and the effects they continued to face after.

The film tries to use this commentary to the best of its ability, but often doesn’t lean into the theme hard enough, mostly due to time constraints as well as additional scenes covering the subplot being cut after being deemed too disturbing by test screeners, which is a shame, since they would have been some of the best scenes in the whole movie.

The most notable of these scenes is the one where Michael Newman and Jacob go to a hotel after Newman explains the Ladder drug to essentially exorcise him of his demons. Jacob lays down in bed, as Newman, in a very intimate close-up shot, drips a liquid onto Jacob’s tongue that supposedly will help him. He then lays him down fully, and everything seems fine at first. Then, cracks start appearing in the ceiling, and the bed starts shaking violently. Blood drips from the cracks, and it almost seems like there’s something alive underneath it. The ceiling starts cracking, falling in, onto his face, blood fills a light, and Newman tries to calm Jacob, and hold him down, stop the shaking, but it doesn’t work.

Soon, a corner of the ceiling is completely gone, and the shaking stops for a moment. We see an enormous, monstrous eye, just staring at Jacob, and he stares back. And then the shaking comes back, even worse than before, and Jacob’s face contorts as the noise, the screaming, swells to its climax, and Jacob passes out. When he wakes up, he sees Newman, backlit by a bright light, almost angelic looking, and they both smile, thinking it’s finally over, and everything’s alright.

However, in a later deleted scene, when Jacob returns to his family’s old home, he encounters Jezzie. Jacob is confused and asks where his family is, to which she just responds, “It’s over Jake. Over,” again and again, as a thunderstorm kicks up and bright lights flash around the room, and she begins transforming with the vibration effect and flashes of bat-like wings. Jacob screams, “WHO ARE YOU?” as she becomes more and more monstrous, unrecognizable, featureless, flashing between Jezzie and the shapeless demon, light blaring and wind rushing, before Jacob decides to pull off the veil that seems to cover the monster’s face, revealing it to be a reflection of himself. Newman’s cure hadn’t worked at all, but Jacob, in his final moments, faced his final demon: himself.

These two scenes are incredibly powerful, and cemented the two sides of Jacob’s Ladder together, both the drug commentary and the spiritual psychological horror of the film. In the first one we’re given hope through a substance, a “cure”, which I personally believe is a comment on trying to escape addiction through another substance, while the second scene shows the only way to truly escape your demons and die without regrets is to take a look in the mirror and face yourself.

These collective scenes would have pushed the movie just over 2 hours, as they take up about 10 minutes of screen time, but would have connected practically the only critical flaw of the story, which, regardless of being very much of its time, was very poignant other than a lack of resolution in the film’s third act in terms of the drug subplot. These two scenes also lean into something the film does have a solid enough amount of so that it isn’t an issue, but certainly could have used more of to cement even more of a cult classic status: actual horror.

(End of Spoilers.)

Jacob’s Ladder, as previously mentioned, is more deeply sad than it is scary, which works for the melancholic story, but additional horror would have made sympathy for Jacob and the nightmarish tone of the film just that much more impactful. The special effects used in the deleted scenes are incredibly effective as some of the best pure psychological horror ever put to film. You don’t know exactly what it is you’re looking at. They appear formless and fleshy, violently shaking and contorting, never allowing you to get a good enough look at them, and they’re all practically made, but some of the best uses of the film’s monsters, the ceiling demon and Jezzie’s “true” form, were cut because they were just that horrifyingly disturbing to those that saw them in early cuts.

All around though, it isn’t a big deal, since the horror scenes that did get in are still disturbing in their own right, and went on to be the inspiration (along with, again, the work of David Lynch) for some of the most iconic horror media of all time, most notably the Silent Hill video game series, as well as the vibration effect pioneered by Jacob’s Ladder used in the movie being one of the staples of horror effects, used in an endless number of films, games, TV, and even music videos. The music and dreamy nature of the film also came to be a staple of effective psychological horror media, as well as stories with a twist of fate regarding the main character, such as M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Silent Hill 2 (2001), with a similar theme of mortality.

As previously mentioned, the movie wasn’t wildly successful at the time, only just making back its budget, surrounded and overshadowed by an endless number of wildly popular horror, action, and thriller films in the same year, such as Total Recall, Tremors, Stephen King’s Misery, Edward Scissorhands, the Night of the Living Dead remake, Child’s Play 2, and Predator 2, really being one of the worst years possible for a subtle, artistic psychological horror film to be released, but it did slowly get the cult following it deserved.

In case you couldn’t tell at this point, I adore Jacob’s Ladder, and it currently stands as my favorite movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a beautiful tale of love, war, dreams, nightmares, life, and death. The music, visuals, story, and themes work perfectly in accordance with each other other than, again, the unresolved drug plotline, but all around it’s a near seamless film from beginning to end, and I can’t recommend it enough to people who like less flashy and more thoughtful, mysterious horror like The Sixth Sense, Twin Peaks, or Silent Hill, and enjoy connecting with a character struggling with loss and mortality.

The film did get a remake in 2019 that I’ll never talk about because it’s garbage and has almost nothing to do with the original anyways, so just know that it isn’t really worth watching regardless of whether or not you’ve seen the original. The original, however, comes free with HBO Max, and is fairly cheap to rent on most other video services since it’ll going on 30 years since its release in November, and it’s definitely worth the small price if you’ve got two hours to spare, especially for a perfect presentation of the beauty of psychological horror.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and The Beauty of Psychological Horror

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