THE BORROWER. Comedy, Horror & a Touch of Sci-Fi

The distributor promoted The Borrower as a blend of Hellraiser (1987) by Clive Barker, Re-Animator (1985) by Stuart Gordon, and Warlock (1989) by Steve Miner. Wishful thinking!

An extraterrestrial serial killer is sentenced to death, but at the last moment, the court (also extraterrestrial, of course!) opts for a far harsher punishment: the criminal is to serve a life sentence on… Earth (a primitive planet, as one of the aliens puts it), and his body is genetically modified to resemble a human form. Either the aliens’ science is flawed, or the transformation wasn’t completed properly—in any case, every few hours the criminal’s body reverts to its original form, a process that culminates in a picturesque explosion of his head. The alien must regularly rip off the heads of humans he encounters on Earth and attach them to his own body, which naturally raises the suspicions of a pair of homicide detectives: Diana Pierce and her partner, Charles Krieger.

John McNaughton rose to fame with his feature debut Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). The controversy surrounding that film led to him receiving countless scripts for cheap horror flicks, which he rejected without hesitation. “Eventually The Borrower came along, which in a way was also a bad script,” McNaughton explained, “but the concept that this monster rips people’s heads off and somehow takes over their lives struck me as a metaphor for what actors do. And that gave me something to hold onto beyond just a monster jumping out from behind a tree to scare and eat you.”

The Borrower was developed between 1987 and 1988 under the wing of Atlantic Entertainment Group, which went bankrupt shortly before filming was completed. The rights were later acquired by Cannon Films, which finally released the movie in theaters in 1991.

The Borrower sat on the shelf for three years—and could’ve stayed there even longer. The creators mixed science fiction, horror, and comedy, but the film doesn’t succeed in any of these genres: science fiction is merely an excuse for the premise, the horror elements aren’t scary, and the jokes aren’t very funny. If one really insisted, one could spot in McNaughton’s film a kind of social satire or commentary on life in a late-20th-century American metropolis plagued by rape, shootings, drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness, and more. But that’s just the background; front and center is a ridiculous story about an alien wandering the city, ripping off heads—over and over again. The filmmakers were likely aware of how shallow and repetitive this setup was, so they threw in a subplot involving a rapist, which ultimately has nothing to do with the main theme of The Borrower.