This overlooked 1999 movie is the closest Martin Scorsese ever got to making a horror film

Martin Scorsese is a director who is known, above all else, for directing gangster movies. Now, that’s not really a fair characterization of his career. Scorsese has dipped his toes in a variety of different genres during his decades of success, and made great movies across basically every kind of movie he’s touched.

In that storied career, though, Scorsese has only dipped his toe into the world of horror on maybe three occasions. With Cape Fear, he remade a classic of the 1960s about a family being stalked by a recently released convict. More recently, he directed Shutter Island, a story about a pair of detectives who travel to a remote island that houses an insane asylum after a patient goes missing.

Sandwiched in between those two movies is Bringing Out the Dead, one of the strangest and most upsetting movies in his entire filmography. The film stars Nicolas Cage (Longlegs) as a paramedic in New York City who is suffering from both depression and burnout, in part because he hasn’t successfully saved a patient in months. Throughout the film, Cage’s Frank is haunted by the ghost of a teenage addict he failed to save, and he becomes more and more cynical about whether he’s doing anything meaningful at all.

Shutter Island and Cape Fear both have more explicit horror premises, but Bringing Out the Dead is nonetheless the scariest movie Scorsese has ever made. Here are four reasons why.

It’s filled with a deeper dread than your average horror film

While there are few explicit jump scares in Bringing Out the Dead, the movie is instead filled with all of the horrible things that happen in real life. In Scorsese’s imagining, being a paramedic is akin to seeing people at their worst and most desperate, and it often means responding to medical emergencies where you can’t really do anything to save anyone. It’s a parade of death and pain, and it’s one that seems almost impossible to cope with.

Frank is partnered with three different men over the course of his shifts, and each of them seems to represent the various ways that you cope with a job as terrible as this one. John Goodman plays a man who copes by focusing on the more mundane aspects of the job, like when the best time is to grab a meal or have some fun. Ving Rhames plays an ultrareligious EMT whose faith guides him in the work he does. Tom Sizemore, meanwhile, plays a rageful, violent man who takes pleasure in beating on the people he’s supposed to help. Each one of these men is dealing with the mundane horrors of the parade of death that they bear witness to, and trying to find a way out.

Cage is playing exhaustion more than terror

Paramount Pictures

There are, of course, a couple of moments when Scorsese allows Cage to uncork the qualities that make him a special actor. For the most part, though, Bringing Out the Dead features a restrained performance that emphasizes all the ways this job has worn Frank down into a man who exists only for the routine of the life he’s in. Frank doesn’t seem to experience joy, or really any other emotion besides despair, and his performance is so unsettling precisely because it’s so easy to understand how the horrors he has witnessed could bring him to that place.

For most of its runtime, the film is so devoid of hope that all it leaves you with is the feeling that Frank’s numbness is the only appropriate response to a world filled with cruelty.

It’s chaotic in a way that feels true to life

Paramount Pictures

Most people watching Bringing Out the Dead have never had the experience of being a paramedic themselves, but the movie seems to capture the chaos of that lifestyle well. Your life is defined by instability, with the only constant being the schedule that you keep. Horror movies, at least at their best, often build tension and then artfully release it in a way that terrifies the audience.

Scorsese does that to perfection here, but the effect is not to make you jump or squirm in your seat. Instead, the tension that builds comes from the realization that the chaos Frank is dealing with is not some aberration from his normal job, but the norm itself.

It offers up a ray of hope

Paramount Pictures

There are plenty of horror movies that end in unrelenting bleakness, and there’s something admirable about leaving people with an emotion that’s unsettling. Bringing Out the Dead has the opposite trajectory, though. It starts at the bleakest possible moment, and for most of its running time, that’s what it’s focused on.

In its final moments, though, it suggests both that Frank is ultimately a noble, but flawed person, and that it really is possible to move past the terrible things that have happened in your life. We’re not defined by the horror we experience, or at least this movie suggests that we don’t have to be. The world is a scary, terrible place, but Bringing Out the Dead is a movie about one of the heroes fighting, often in vain, to make it a little bit better.

Bringing Out the Dead is streaming on Paramount+.