In 2024, the world finally witnessed a remake of “The Crow,” a film that has long been a staple of gothic superhero cinema. This new version stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric Draven, a man who returns from the dead to avenge his and his fiancée Shelly’s murders. Directed by Rupert Sanders, this remake has been a long time coming, with various directors like Stephen Norrington, Joan Carlos Fresnadillo, and Corin Hardy attempting to bring their visions to life but ultimately failing. However, one director might have succeeded in creating his own unauthorized take on “The Crow” without anyone realizing it. That director is Tommy Wiseau, and his film is “The Room.”
At first glance, it might seem hyperbolic to compare “The Room” to “The Crow.” After all, “The Crow” is a dark, stylized superhero fantasy set in a perpetually gloomy Detroit, while “The Room” is a notoriously bad domestic drama shot with both film and digital cameras because Wiseau was confused about the difference between the two formats. However, upon closer inspection, there are surprising similarities between the two films.
Consider the imagery in “The Crow” when Eric Draven, played by the late Brandon Lee, flashes back to his life with Shelly before their murders. Their relationship is depicted in a single room lit by candles, where they laugh, embrace, and express their love for each other. A young girl named Sarah, who is friends with Eric and Shelly, also appears in these scenes, admiring Shelly in her wedding dress and sniffing a bouquet of roses in slow motion. This impressionistic montage blends romantic scenes with moments where Eric, Shelly, and Sarah act like a surrogate family, engaging in activities like pillow fights and playful shaving cream battles.
Now, compare this to one of the stranger elements of “The Room.” Wiseau stars as Johnny, a banker madly in love with his girlfriend Lisa, who ultimately betrays him by sleeping with his best friend Mark. Johnny and Lisa have an inexplicable relationship with their neighbor Denny, whose age is ambiguous. The actor playing Denny looks like an adult, but the characters treat him like a minor, making it even weirder when he interrupts Johnny and Lisa’s bedroom foreplay by joining their pillow fight. Lisa later tells her mother that Johnny wanted to adopt Denny because “it’s really a tragedy how many kids out there don’t have parents,” even though Denny appears to be in his mid-to-late 20s.
The way these sequences are staged, shot, and edited are different because one was made by Alex Proyas and the other by Tommy Wiseau. However, if you look at them side by side, the similarities are hard to ignore. Both films feature romantic scenes in a single room, a curious fixation on roses, and a surrogate family dynamic. If someone watched “The Crow” while distracted and then decided to pay homage to it (or rip it off) without fully understanding filmmaking logistics, they might end up with a scene like the Johnny/Lisa/Denny pillow fight in “The Room.”
It’s not out of character for Wiseau to pay homage to or rip off films he admires. The most famous moment in “The Room”—Wiseau howling “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”—is a direct lift from James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause,” where Dean’s character moans the same line (minus the “Lisa” part) to his squabbling parents. Wiseau has long acknowledged his James Dean fandom, even visiting the site of Dean’s fatal traffic accident to pay his respects, as depicted in “The Disaster Artist,” the film about the making of “The Room.”
While Wiseau doesn’t look like James Dean in “The Room,” his long black hair and preference for black shirts and jackets do make him resemble Brandon Lee in “The Crow,” minus the black-and-white face paint. Both films are, at their cores, tragic romances and fantastical revenge stories set in extremely artificial realities. “The Crow” takes place in a bleakly art-directed Detroit where the sun never shines, while “The Room” is ostensibly set in San Francisco but was shot on a dingy green screen and a couple of shabby sets in Los Angeles.
It feels like Wiseau saw “The Crow,” liked it, absorbed a few stray elements from it, and threw them into the pot of melodramas and romances he drew from when writing “The Room” screenplay. While I couldn’t find any direct evidence that Wiseau is a fan of “The Crow,” a Reddit page filled with illustrations of Tommy Wiseau as the Crow suggests that others have noticed the similarities too.
In conclusion, while “The Room” is not a direct remake of “The Crow,” the parallels between the two films are intriguing. Both are tragic romances set in artificial realities, featuring characters who navigate love, betrayal, and revenge. Whether intentional or not, Wiseau’s “The Room” could be seen as his own unauthorized take on “The Crow,” adding another layer of fascination to the cult classic.
Source: ScreenCrush, Wikipedia
