James Gunn's First Movie Proves He Hasn't Changed in 20 Years
James Gunn’s directorial debut Slither turns 20 in 2026, capturing a crucial moment in the Superman director’s evolution.
In 2006, James Gunn was no longer a B-movie brat, but he wasn’t a blockbuster filmmaker yet, either.
The future DC Films co-CEO began his career at the (in)famous Troma Studios, the NYC-based B-movie studio known for combining slapstick comedy with excessive sex and violence. Gunn’s first screenplay, Tromeo & Juliet (1996), was co-written with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman. And it’s a Troma movie, all right: The tagline on the poster promises “all the body-piercing, kinky sex, and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had!” That being said, underneath the shock value lies the pure heart that makes Gunn’s movies stand out from their peers.
That’s not to say that Slither is a mature movie, simply a sincere one. Ten years after Tromeo & Juliet, Gunn had graduated to the big leagues, writing the screenplay for Universal’s Dawn of the Dead remake (also known for launching Zack Snyder’s career) and the sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed for Warner Bros. Both did well at the box office, laying the groundwork for Gunn’s official debut as a director. Before Slither, Gunn had written, acted in, and produced movies, but had never directed one. And after the way it performed in theaters, it’s a miracle he was ever able to do so again.
In an inverted version of how it used to go before critics started taking horror more seriously in the mid-2010s, many reviewers liked Slither — The New Yorker called it a “delightfully disgusting comic horror film” — but audiences did not. The film struggled in theaters, and ended up losing $3 million at the box office (not including marketing costs). But all was not lost — Slither soon became a word-of-mouth favorite on DVD, ensuring its longevity as a cult classic.
Looking back, it’s a clear transitional moment for Gunn, who proves that he has the chops for the larger scale and slicker look of a studio movie while still indulging in the splatter excess of his youth. Blockbusters are basically B-movies blown up to enormous size — OG blockbuster Jaws, for example, has the structure of a Roger Corman shark movie, but with a bigger budget. And while it’s not quite a blockbuster in terms of its budget — it would take Gunn a few more years to reach that level — Slither was a major step up for Gunn, making it a perfect example of this phenomenon.
Like any good retro-inspired sci-fi horror movie should, Slither takes place in a quaint small town: Wheelsy, South Carolina, home of an annual deer hunt and basically nothing else. We meet a few of the locals, including police chief Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), his childhood friend and permanent crush Starla (Elizabeth Banks, doing a fun Southern accent), and her husband Grant (Michael Rooker), whose most attractive asset is his bank account. This love triangle doesn’t go away, exactly, when Grant gets infected by a billion-year-old galaxy-hopping parasite. But it does take a back seat to the more urgent business of squashing the thousands of space leeches that are turning the residents of Wheelsy into mindless zombies.
A sighting of the parasite in Slither.
The DNA of ‘80s horror movies is all over Slither. References to beloved horror figures fill the town — the lodge where everyone hangs out is named after Basket Case and Brain Damage director Frank Henenlotter, for example — and Gunn’s old mentor, Lloyd Kaufman, appears in a cameo as the local drunk. It also shares a few key plot points with the 1986 horror-comedy Night of the Creeps (1986), and the outrageous effects recall the alien mutants in The Thing (1982) combined with the famous “Shunting” scene from another cult classic, Society (1989).
Most importantly, however, the comedy is similarly broad and silly, garnished with a bit of sarcasm from Fillion, who perfected the art of the straight-to-camera quip on Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s this self-aware sense of humor that brings Slither out of the ‘80s and into the 21st century, foreshadowing the irreverent, but affectionate sensibility Gunn would later bring to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Another throughline between Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy is the former film’s ironic use of the Air Supply song “Every Woman in the World,” whose soft-rock cheesiness cheekily contrasts with the extreme violence on screen.
With Slither, Gunn is a horror fan having fun with a genre he loves, just as he would one day become a comic-book nerd playing with superheroes for a living. Along with a game cast and a witty script, Gunn’s enthusiasm ensures that Slither is a ton of fun. It begins as an alien-invasion comedy that evolves into a monster movie gross-out before building to a grisly zombie apocalypse, indulging in juvenile jokes and grotesque set pieces along the way. It proves that James Gunn is an incorrigible goofball, and we like him that way.
