Dragonslayer: A Fantasy Cult Classic With a Brutal Edge

This inaugural article has two origin stories. The first is that the film is a favorite of A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, and you can trace the likely origins of many elements that appear in that series (and the two hit TV shows based off of it) back to this weird little 1981 fantasy gem. The second is that, when I was nine, my stepdad—a smart, thoughtful screenwriter who had a deft touch with fantasy-minded kids—showed it to me, having remembered only that it was a movie with a cool dragon, thereby unintentionally traumatizing me for years to come.

The film marks the on-screen debut of Peter MacNicol who, depending on your age and inclination, you mainly know as the young writer from Sophie’s Choice (1982), Viggo the Carpathian’s wacky accomplice, Janosz, in Ghostbusters II (1989), or Ally McBeal’s eccentric boss on the eponymous 1997 show (or, ignominiously, as Rowan Atkinson’s straight man in 1997’s Bean). Here, he stars as Galen Brandwardyn, apprentice to the venerable wizard Ulrich (the legendary Shakespearean actor Ralph Richardson) who, after his master’s apparent murder, accompanies the cross-dressing blacksmith’s daughter Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) to Urland, where the corrupt king, Casiodorus Rex (Peter Eyre) holds a lottery of sacrificial virgin women to appease the rampaging dragon known as Vermithrax Pejorative. 

Dragonslayer was nominated for two Academy Awards; Alex North lost Best Score to Vangelis’ iconic Chariots of Fire soundtrack and the visual effects team (including the pioneering Phil Tippett, in his first nomination) lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

In many ways, Dragonslayer lives up to its status as cult classic. It’s a far more nuanced film and far better written than many of its contemporaries, and is reaching for some kind of moral reckoning beyond a Campbellian examination of the hero’s journey. 

There is something admirably dark about its worldview. Early on, Ulrich states that the reason for the dragon’s recent rampage is that dragons that live as long as Vermithrax “feel nothing but [physical] pain” which makes them “spiteful.” The real evil of the film is not a vexed and pain-maddened beast but the people who would seek to appease it, sacrificing the children of the poor and powerless rather than seeking out a more permanent solution. Nearly half a century later, it reads as a pretty good climate change metaphor, with the inaction and greed of the powerful being the proper place to direct our anger. 

The film is bolstered by a few great performances—especially Caitlin Clarke’s grounded, vulnerable turn as Valerian, which lends an unexpected gravitas to a film that occasionally veers into melodrama. Also worthy of note is a humorous-turned-tragic performance by Sydney Bromley (probably best known as Engywook in The NeverEnding Story). And the majority of minor roles are stacked with British character actors of the day, venerable workhorses giving their all to films that, perhaps, don’t deserve them. 

All this is without mentioning the titular dragon: Vermithrax Pejorative is a marvel of its age. Made using the same Go-Motion techniques that Tippett and his team pioneered in The Empire Strikes Back, it’s pretty breathtaking even 44 years later. The dragon has a long, sinewy, avian design with a huge wingspan that graphic artist and future game designer David Bunnett infused with a realism that makes the sequences where it flies feel believable. There is an aquiline quality to the face that is deliciously similar to Brian Froud’s design for the villainous Skeksis in the following year’s The Dark Crystal. The creature crawls, bat-like, on its spindly, winged forelimbs through its cave, and writhes in terrifying, rage-filled pain when stabbed. Vermithrax is a beast, devoid of human intelligence, but everything about its movement and design feels sinister, so that a viewer never forgets that it is a threat that must be destroyed. The film is also excellently paced, with a build-up that doesn’t fully reveal Vermithrax until an hour and twenty minutes in, then spends most of its remaining half hour showcasing its every move in loving, lurid detail. There is a reason that it remains a beloved gold standard among aficionados of cinematic dragons. 

That said, in some key ways, Dragonslayer feels just shy of being a complete classic. MacNicol—who is recognized, these days, as a charming and successful character actor—is shaky in his first film (and one of the few in which he takes the role of leading man). He plays Galen as a combination of plucky, whiny, and irritatingly self-assured; a sort of poor man’s version of Luke Skywalker, who Mark Hamill had played just four years earlier (and, look, Hamill is a national treasure, but he definitely improved as an actor over the course of his run in Star Wars). It’s not just MacNicol’s fault. Galen is written to be the sort of cis white hero whose biggest flaw is not believing in himself. He’s constantly being aided by his betters—Ulrich, Valerian, and Valerian’s blacksmith father (Emrys James)—whose contributions garner only the slightest acknowledgement from either Galen or, really, the film itself. 

And, while the film is more politically complex and fascinatingly bleak than many of the fantasy films that immediately preceded it (with children’s fare like The Water Babies and Rankin and Bass’ Middle-earth films dominating, alongside the exploitation-adjacent works of Ralph Bakshi), there is an unnecessarily grimdark streak that disturbed me as a child and hasn’t lessened with age. 

Arguably, the most morally upright character in the film is Casiodorus’ daughter, Princess Elspeth (Chloe Salaman) who has, without her knowledge, been kept out of the sacrifice lotteries that have sent so many other young women to their deaths. Once she is informed of this fact, she replaces all the names in the next drawing with her own and offers the closest thing the film has to a realpolitik assessment of the horrors of class inequality. Galen goes to try and save her, but she is killed by Vermithrax Pejorative’s monstrous hatchlings. My nine-year-old self well remembers the way in which the camera lingers on gross-out shots of her corpse being eaten by grotesque puppets with all the relish of a B-movie slasher film. It’s cruel in a way that didn’t sit right with my child-self and has not aged any better with the passage of time, even with an adult’s sensibilities.

This is not to say that the plot point itself is a bad one. After all, people doing the right thing and dying for it is a common and often very effective trope. But, between the visceral hideousness of her death and the film’s lack of follow-up on the Urland citizenry’s reaction to it, it reads merely as an extension of the violent cinematic misogyny so pervasive in the ’70s and ’80s, rather than any sort of impactful beat.

Similarly, the film has a somewhat sophomoric and confused take on religion. It’s setting shares the same kind of “the age of magic is ending” melancholy that we find in Tolkien, and Dragonslayer seems to posit—as with many reinterpretations of Beowulf (another tale about the inflection point between the pagan and Christian worlds marked by a rampaging dragon-creature)—that Christianity is a hollow substitute for actual sorcery. An early scene features Jacopus (played by Emperor Palpatine himself, Ian McDiarmid!) as a priest whose faith does not save him from being burned alive. Later, after Vermithrax is defeated, a broken Casiodorus Rex futilely stabs the corpse, claiming the victory for himself and God in a moment we are meant to recognize as fundamentally false and unfair.

But the film also has both Valerian’s father and another gloomy, stalwart Urlander named Greil (Albert Salmi), convert after Jacopus’ death, and includes a heartfelt moment where Valerian is given a crucifix by her father as a parting gift. It feels like a point about the importance of faith made clumsily and, if there is an intended critique of the Church’s power, it is somewhat messily at odds with the film’s critique of the secular power of a selfish king.

Those things don’t entirely erase the considerable goodwill the film engenders, but they do add a sour, somewhat uncomfortable asterisk to any positive assessment. When, filled with all the righteous indignation of a child encountering unfairness, I demanded my stepdad answer why he thought this was at all appropriate for me, he said “Well, I hadn’t seen it in ten years, you forget a lot of details in that time. In ten years you might not remember either.”

I replied “In ten years this is all I’ll remember.” This was the case until my recent rewatch, and I was surprised to discover that there is much that is laudable about the movie, even if I probably wouldn’t recommend it without a heavy caveat.

As hinted at earlier, Dragonslayer is, obviously, a landmark film in the development of cinematic dragons. It is the first major example I could find of a film dragon attempting to square a four-limbed design (two legs, two wings—what European mythology typically thought of as a wyvern) with realistic-feeling creature anatomy. Lauded dragon designs seen in later works like Reign of Fire (2002), Game of Thrones (2011-2019), and Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy (2012-2014) likely owe some of their genesis to Bunnett’s stellar design work. 

But more than that, Dragonslayer is, in many ways, a key to all mythologies for George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic. There are a plethora of fun little details, names, and plot points that Martin either lifted outright or reworked and expanded on in his novels. 

Centrally important, of course, is the name of the titular dragon. I have mentioned in previous articles on Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon that Vermithrax Pejorative is Martin’s favorite cinematic dragon. In season 1, episode 5 of the original GoT series, Harry Lloyd’s Viserys Targaryen III tells the story of seeing the dragon skulls in his father’s throne room. He names Aegon the Conqueror’s three dragons—Balerion, Vhagar, and Meraxes—as well as Vermithrax. This was Benioff and Weiss’ homage to Martin’s love of Dragonslayer and, later, when Martin wrote his World of Ice and Fire and as well as Fire & Blood (upon which HotD is based) he named King Jahaerys’ dragon “Vermithor” to vaguely square the world of his books with the world of the show.

But beyond this bit of draconic Martinalia, there are other important parallels that seem to have found their way into GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Viewers will spot some other obvious names. Both our love interest, Valerian, and Casiodorus Rex’s enforcer, Tyrian (John Hallam), likely inspired the use of their close-but-legally-distinct variations (Valyrian, Velaryon, and Tyrion) in Martin’s work. Obviously, I can’t be one hundred percent sure in either case but, given that this is one of Martin’s favorite films, it seems far more likely that they come from Dragonslayer and not, say, the long running, French, sci-fi comic Valérian & Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières or the 1995 computer game Tyrian.

And, in a more general sense, Dragonslayer treats a high fantasy tale with mythic overtones as something grounded and mundane. Obviously, Martin is not the only or, indeed, the first author to use fantasy as a vehicle for pointed commentary about the shortsightedness and fallibility of men, but it is striking that the film and Martin’s books adhere so closely to the idea that, in a world where terrifying fire magic and gigantic, flying reptiles exist, the most dangerous and deadly threats spring from the appalling abuses of men in power. Even the film’s cruelty finds an echo in Martin’s own bloody plots. I would argue that the latter is more successful at instilling a deep sense of moral horror on behalf of his slain characters, but it’s possible to see Dragonslayer as a sort of prototype for the genre of high fantasy that is more concerned with social realism than magic. Given how much Martin’s books (and the later TV adaptations thereof) have shaped the fantasy tropes of the last quarter century, our current landscape owes a lot to Dragonslayer. 

But what do you think? Please share your own memories, good or bad, of watching Dragonslayer, and your thoughts on its cinematic legacy! And let me know what ’80s fantasy films you’d like to discuss in future articles!