The Butterfly Effect at 20: how Ashton Kutcher-led 2004 film filled a void left by decent Hollywood horror movies
- Written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, The Butterfly Effect saw Ashton Kutcher able to change the future in moments of blackouts
- While it’s no masterpiece, there’s something about the film that stays with you – maybe the directors should give it another go
In the 2000s, the Hollywood horror film really lost its way, relying on torture porn and tired remakes instead of new ideas. So it’s no wonder original, horror-adjacent efforts such as The Butterfly Effect (2004) stood out from the crowd, even if history doesn’t quite remember it like that.
Released 20 years ago in January, the twisted time-travel flick combines an incredibly bleak outlook with exuberant, often goofy execution. It was written and directed by young filmmakers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, whose only notable credit was scripting the excellent Final Destination 2 (2003).
While nobody could call it a lost masterpiece, there’s something about The Butterfly Effect that stays with you. As Bress says on the DVD extras, “It goes places that no other films go”.
“The butterfly effect” is a type of chaos theory named after a plot element from Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder (itself filmed – terribly – in 2005). As the film’s opening text explains, “It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.”
Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) is a latchkey kid with an overworked mother (Melora Walters) and an institutionalised father (Callum Keith Rennie).
