Do we like Dan O'Bannon?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and his work is beloved, but the record is thin on kindness and he reportedly ran a tense set.
Dan O'Bannon was a USC film student who teamed up with classmate John Carpenter on a 45-minute short called Dark Star. It was later expanded into a 1974 feature, and he acted in it and supervised the effects. That's the mad-scientist-in-a-garage start to a career that basically invented a chunk of modern sci-fi horror.
After Dark Star he did a stint in Paris on Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, which never got made, and he says he faked the targeting screens for Star Wars at George Lucas's request. Then he wrote Alien from a story he developed with Ronald Shusett. He told Den of Geek he modelled the creature on the life cycle of parasites.
The big stoush was over Alien's credit. In a 2007 interview O'Bannon said producers Walter Hill and David Giler allegedly changed character names in his script to claim a screenplay credit. Arbitration left them without one, and he called them “scoundrels”. That's his side of the story, and they've disputed it.
He wasn't always easy to work with, by his own telling. He said he micromanaged the crew on Return of the Living Dead, who disliked it, and he later delegated more. On Total Recall he said Shusett kept taking the script away and bringing in other writers, which left him unhappy with the ending.
On the harm test, we searched for anything he said or did about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet, and for the company he kept. Nothing turned up in the sources we read, and no court cases or accusations either. He died in 2009, so the record is about his films and interviews, and that's honestly the whole list.
The good stuff is the work and the craft. Dark Star won the 1975 Golden Scroll for Best Special Effects, Alien won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and Return of the Living Dead gave us a zombie comedy he compared to Airplane! for horror. A 2025 retrospective calls him a great screenwriter of iconic psychotronic films.