Fangoria magazine has it in its top one hundred forgotten horror films. Arnold Schwarzenegger hand-picked its director for his next movie Predator based on his love of this film. It was also the first leading film role for a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan….so why have most of you never heard of Nomads?
To be fair Nomads is a bit of a tough sell.
It’s best described as moody. The film has almost a foreign feel to it in terms of style which is bolstered by the fact its three main stars, Brosnan, Anna Maria Monticelli, and Lesley Ann Down are all from other countries. With the exception of French actress Monticelli playing her own nationality, Downs who is English plays an American doctor, and Brosnan who is Irish plays a Frenchman. Fun fact, the part of Jean Charles Pommier in Nomads was originally offered to French actor Gerard Depardieu who passed before Brosnan took it on.
Nomads is not only Brosnan’s first starring role, it’s also director John McTiernan’s first feature, and remains his only written film (adapted from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s book of the same name). McTiernan would go onto making huge blockbuster action films including the aforementioned Predator, Die Hard, and Hunt for Red October to name just a few. McTiernan’s work helped make the film careers of Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, and a completely unknown Alan Rickman. As big as those films would later become, Nomads audience was small by comparison, and sadly remains so to this day.
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
Nomads begins with the main character dying in an ER babbling in French.
Brosnan as Jean Charles Pommier the afflicted Frenchman, fights his restraints and manages to get free for a moment eerily whispering something in his doctor’s ear. Dr. Eileen Flax, played by Leslie Ann Downs, soon becomes physically affected by this disturbing last breath. At this point we don’t know if he passed along some sort of infection or curse but she begins experiencing debilitatingly vivid visions. Using her body as a catalyst the visions appear to be the last few days of Brosnan’s tortured life played out through her/his eyes POV style. This possession device is interesting as we are reliving a story that we’ve already seen end badly, but will it take her too?
The passing trauma from one afflicted person to another usually unknown host is a popular device in horror. Stephen King’s The Others, and the Smile franchise utilize this device to great effect. Nomads reliving in real time is particularly unnerving. Downs does a great job with what is essentially a catatonic state for most of the film but somehow keeps us invested in her/his journey.
The journey follows Brosnan’s Pommier, an anthropologist, who after a decade in the field finally settles down to Los Angeles with his wife only to get caught up with a nomadic group of neo-punk bikers. The punks are seemingly drawn to Bosnan’s newly purchased home which he soon discovers was the previous site of a gruesome murder. Clearly the real estate agent failed to mention this somehow. Pommier’s house itself resembles the same style seen in the infamous Wonderland murders and has very thinly veiled references to the Manson family murders on Cielo drive with the punks painting “Pigs” in graffiti on their garage door the same way the Manson family did.
Pommier unwisely decides to follow these interlopers around Los Angeles in order to see what’s behind their motivation. He soon discovers more than he bargained for as it slowly becomes evident these Nomads are actually ghost/demons who thrive in and around areas of trauma like his murder house. The punks themselves are wonderfully cast with genre stalwarts Mary Woronov, Frank Doubleday, and in his feature debut music legend Adam Ant as the leader of the clan. We never learn their names but they are so well cast we don’t need to, it’s obvious who they are and what they’re capable of.
After one particularly harrowing night Pommier witnesses the punks commit murder. He quickly rushes home with a treasure of what are assuredly iconic photographs only to discover none of the Nomads were ever captured on film. As moviegoers we are left asking are they real? Is he insane? Are they ghosts? Oddly the answer to all of these questions is yes.
For this reason, above all else I recommend Nomads.
The sprits can be seen, they can do damage, they can bleed, they can menace, and they can kill. Watching these conventional horror rules broken is terrifyingly interesting. The established “rules” are broken within the film as well. We see Brosnan have several physical confrontations including throwing one ponytailed punk biker from the rooftop of an LA skyscraper and beating another to death with a tire iron only to later discover both are just fine. This begs the infamous horror question, “how can you kill something that’s already dead?” The aforementioned building fall shot McTiernan would go on to steal for his own film Die Hard two years later when Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber falls to his death. The shot is nearly identical with the exception Gruber’s death in Die Hard is iconic and Ponytail’s death in Nomads is largely forgotten.
Nomads uses another popular horror trope in an exposition dump by a creepy nun. The nun stuff frankly always works. Here Pommier in an abandoned nunnery receives a warning that we know he ultimately won’t follow despite seeing horrible images all around the abandoned defiled dormitory.
By the end of the film Dr. Flax’s visions finally catch up to real time pitting her and Pommier’s terrorized wife Nikki against a horde of spirit bikers who menace the women to the brink of insanity. Barely surviving the onslaught of the demon/punk-biker home invasion, Dr. Flax and Nikki do the smart thing and head out of town only to discover the movie’s final twist. Waiting for them at the state line dressed in full demon neo-punk-biker regalia is Pommier himself who has presumably now become a Nomad destined to seek out and feed off of the trauma of the next hapless family who dares move into an infamous murder house. It’s worth pointing out this final shot of Brosnan dressed in leather biker gear is both jarring and cool and both women do a great job selling the horror of what it means.
By the time Nomads came out in 1986 the Manson Family murders were less than twenty years old, and the Wonderland murders which occurred in 1981, were less than five. Poltergeist, 1982, tread on similar ground with angry ghosts left behind when their resting site was desecrated by urban renewal. The housing tract in Poltergeist was placed over a cemetery and to save costs the developer never exhumed the bodies only moving the headstones. The thinking in Poltergeist was essentially, the ghosts have a legitimate beef. This is not the case in Nomads, or is it? Are the neo-punk biker ghosts terrorizing the living by feeding off the tragedy that occurred, or are they defending the spirits of the victims? Regardless of their motivation the message is clear…get out.
10050 Cielo Drive, the famous site of the killing of Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent by members of the Manson Family cult was finally demolished in 1994 before new construction and an address change finally chased away the morbidly curious. Prior to that, Marilyn Manson famously recorded his album Downward Spiral in the house before a chance meeting with Sharon Tate’s sister gave him a change of heart about staying there, although he did take the front door with him after finally moving out.
The proliferation of True Crime podcasts sparks the curious nature of famous murder sites even among the most normal of people and the nature of evil is always a great moral jumping off place for horror thrillers like Nomads. It forces us to answer the question when someone dies violently can it ever truly be clean or are traces always left behind?
Nomads isn’t impossible to find but it’s by no means always easy to find. It is available on Blu-ray and sometimes runs on pay channels but it never got its proper due in my opinion.
Pierce Brosnan went on to become a huge international star later taking on the role of James Bond and has had a storied career ever since. Brosnan does a pretty good job in his first starring role despite his somewhat unique over-the-top take on a French accent. But considering a first film this high concept Brosnan knocks it out of the park in my opinion. John McTiernan followed this misfire with huge success after huge success having arguably one of the greatest action film runs of the 1980s before hitting the infamous roadblock that was Last Action Hero in 1993.
Nomads has some amazing visuals, great practical effects, and more than a few jump scares. It remains a unique take on the justification of haunting the living. Check it out.
Fred Shahadi is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright,
and television writer living in Los Angeles.
