Directed by Stephen Hopkins and written by William Goldman, The Ghost and the Darkness (’96) was one of those mediocre, big-studio, high-concept films that had a B-movie vibe. You could smell it before it opened, and once you saw it there was virtually no residue.

Goldman sold the idea as “Lawrence of Arabia meets Jaws“, but despite being fact-based (John Henry Patterson‘s “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo“, published in 1907) it passed along a cruel mythology — a notion that bad-ass lions were somehow analogous to the great white shark in Jaws, which is to say bringers of primal evil.

Val Kilmer played the heroic Patterson; producer Michael Douglas played an invented lion-killer character, Charles Remington — a grizzled, brawny, larger-than-life figure who seemed modelled on Robert Shaw‘s Quint. Like Quint, Remington is eaten at the end, but Hopkins missed an opportunity by not including a shot of Douglas’s bearded head — the camera doesn’t even glance at this final carnage.

Shot within the Songimvelo game reserve and with great difficulty, Hopkins called the Paramount release “a mess…I haven’t been able to watch it.”

It’s significant that a 1.12.25 Forbes article about the real-like Tsavo lions that inspired Patterson’s book doesn’t even mention the Paramount film.

Lions are today an endangered species, and one of the reason for their population decrease is sport-hunting. I’m convinced that The Ghost and the Darkness inspired Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump (respectively 19 and 12 years old when The Ghost and the Darkness opened) planted the ideas that bagging a lion enhanced the masculinity of the hunter.