‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ Ending Explained, Beat Sheet Style: A Case Study in Genre-Busting

From Dusk Till Dawn leaves the impression of a randy satyr: half-man, half-goat, its scopophilic male gaze fixated on feet and other parts of the female anatomy that can only be rendered with asterisks in polite reading company. It’s not just the profane poetry that Cheech Marin’s mic-wielding master of ceremonies unfurls at the door of the Titty Twister bar in Mexico. This is how the second half, or goat half, of the movie begins.

Spoilers for From Dusk Till Dawn, dead ahead. 

Marin’s monologue, peppered with the p-word (rhymes with “wussy”) and bestiality allusions, does sound like the kind of low-brow soliloquy a satyr would give. There’s a sophomoric quality to From Dusk Till Dawn, well befitting a film scripted by a young Quentin Tarantino and directed by his B-movie blood brother, Robert Rodriguez. Tarantino and Rodriguez teamed again in 2007 for Grindhouse, which packaged itself as a double feature, and in a way, From Dusk Till Dawn is its own kind of double feature: part crime movie, part vampire movie, all satyr.

The first time I watched it, I don’t even think I knew it was a vampire movie. Did you? Or were you surprised when it busted out the bloodsuckers?

“I’m Pretty Sure Silver Has Some Sort of Effect”

Those bloodsuckers barge in through the backdoor, so to speak, but From Dusk Till Dawn is more of a front door for us into the 2022 vampire movie centennial. The movie hit theaters on this date in 1996, which means that it’s the silver-plus-one anniversary today of the flick where characters argue about silver’s effect on vampires, or lack thereof.

Wikipedia assures me that From Dusk Till Dawn is now a cult classic. So, there you go. We’re in a cult together.

I don’t know if the end of From Dusk Till Dawn really needs explaining. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but to be perfectly candid, ending explainers drive SEO traffic, or so my editor tells me. So I’m just going to use that as an excuse to take a deep dive back into this movie, which stars Tarantino regular, Harvey Keitel, and George Clooney in his first major movie role during his breakout ER period.

Keitel plays the preacher with an RV and a crisis of faith, Jacob Fuller, and Clooney plays the fugitive bank robber, Seth Gecko. Tarantino himself plays Seth’s brother and partner in crime, Richie Gecko, and Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu play Fuller’s daughter and son, Kate and Scott.

Our hard-traveling antiheroes, the Geckos, are in the RV with their hostages, the Fullers, when they cross the border into Mexico and stop at the Titty Twister, a private bar “for bikers and truckers only.” This is where things get interesting.

The Unasked Prep Question: “What If Vampires Exist?”

From Dusk Till Dawn plays its cards close to the chest and doesn’t give much (if any real) indication that it’s a vampire movie until well into its second half. Tonally, however, the movie tells you everything you need to know in the first ten minutes about what to expect from it. Its cold open is almost exactly that long: Clooney’s name comes onscreen right at the ten-minute mark.

Before we dig into its ending, it’s worth examining those first ten minutes to see how From Dusk Till Dawn foreshadows the shape it will take. There are no overt clues about the existence of vampires in this corner of the Tarantino-verse, and while I can’t presume to know his intentionality or that of Robert Kurtzman, who conceived the story, I might hazard a guess that it’s because they wanted to put the viewer in the same boat as the characters.

The Geckos and Fullers have no earthly reason to believe vampires exist. Accordingly, they’re blindsided when the revelation comes, with only the man of God, Jacob, clocking the last-second warning of a knife dripping green blood.

There’s a juicy shock value to the film’s late emergence of the undead, but it also might be a deal-breaker for some viewers, sort of a nuke-the-fridge or crap-the-cot type of third-act scenario. The structure of From Dusk Till Dawn is rather bifurcated — like a devil’s tail — and when trying to reconcile the two halves of it, the first half doesn’t necessarily flow organically into the second half. Not when it comes to all the abrupt vampire business at the end.

A Trojan-Horse Vampire Flick

Personally, I find the genre-busting aspect of this film daring, but I think there’s another version of From Dusk Till Dawn that exists out there in the ether, where maybe Scott is a Lost Boys-type kid who likes reading vampire comics. He talks about them before we ever see them, and thereby establishes a precedent for things vampire-related before the real vampires show up.

Maybe this other hypothetical Scott even fancies himself a vampire hunter. He’s looking for the undead, keeping his eyes peeled at roadside stops, but no one takes him seriously. The effect would be to put the question, “What if vampires exist?” in the viewer’s mind, just for a second, here and there. If you could smuggle it in somehow, you might lose some of the shock value later, but it could still be a neat twist or payoff when the viewer realizes, “Oh, my god. Vampires were real all along!”

That’s just me playing an armchair critic with the pretensions to rewrite film history. As it is, From Dusk Till Dawn takes a much different approach.

This is a vampire movie that never floats the possibility, “What if vampires exist?” before it’s too late and our heroes are already in the vampires’ nest. It centers on characters who haven’t the faintest notion there are bloodsuckers in their world. This allows it to go from being a simple crime drama or action comedy with disturbing horror inflections (rape and murder) to a Trojan-horse vampire flick by the end.

Those Crucial First Ten Minutes

From Dusk Till Dawn starts out deceptively quiet, on a long desert road, as Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, playing the same character here as in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) rolls up on a liquor store. Inside, he makes small-minded small talk with Pete the cashier (John Hawke). They both use offensive terms like “Mongoloid” and “retard,” seemingly alluding to a local boy with Down’s syndrome.

Whether this is Tarantino simply punching down, drip-feeding us his politically incorrect, mid-‘90s idea of humor, or whether it’s a device to sap sympathy away from these two yokels before they die, is anyone’s guess. But the conversation takes a turn for tense when Earl starts talking about an intrastate bank robbery that ended in a massacre and has been all over the news. The robbers took a teller hostage and are “supposed to be headed for the border, which would bring ‘em right my way,” Earl says.

Parks’ delivery of his lines and the tightening camera perspective build suspense before we even know there’s a Hitchcockian bomb under the table. Earl excuses himself to the commode, and here comes the twist: the very bank robbers Earl was talking about, those selfsame Gecko brothers, are right there in the store. They’ve been hiding out in back, keeping two customers hostage, while Pete has been giving what he deems to be an Oscar-caliber performance in acting natural with Earl.

The Moral of the Cold Open: Expect the Unexpected

Seth’s own dialogue with Pete ratchets up the tension even more because there’s a gun and the threat of violence in play. In typical Tarantino script fashion, this is a movie where stretches of tough-talking will alternate with sudden acts of violence. It’s also a movie where we should expect the unexpected.

Rodriguez and Tarantino — both of whom worked with producer Harvey Weinstein, a real-life vampire in the Martin sense, on this and other Miramax and Dimension films — haven’t shown us anything vampire-related yet. But in the same way that Richie grabs a Texas roadmap after the Gecko brothers have shot up the store and killed Earl and Pete, they’re showing us the roadmap for the movie ahead. The script ensures that Rodriguez gets a chance to do his Desperado thing and have them walk away from the building without looking back or flinching as it explodes behind them.

I’m tempted to break out a screenwriting book and go through and beat-sheet the whole film from there, but since this is ostensibly an ending explainer, I’m going to jump ahead now and focus mainly on what I regard to be Act 2B and Act 3 of From Dusk Till Dawn. I’m especially interested in the nuts and bolts of how the movie arrives at its bait-and-switch ending. Near as I can tell, this is a film that follows a very traditional Hollywood format even as it goes about merrily genre-busting.

Walking the Beat (Sheet) Through Act 2B and 3 of ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’

From Dusk Till Dawn has a 108-minute running time, minus five and a half minutes for the closing credits. So from a narrative perspective, it’s really about 1 hour and 43 minutes long. The all-important “False Victory” comes when the Geckos and the Fullers make it across the border to Mexico and the Titty Twister in Jacob’s RV. Jacob says, “Hey, guys, we’re here,” after 44 minutes have elapsed.

They enter the Titty Twister — Hell envisioned as a raucous topless bar — where the mariachi band sings songs in Spanish about angry cockroaches (“cucharachas enojadas”) and smoking weed (“fumando marijuana”). Outside, they’ve encountered Marin’s character (the second of three), who boasts the Bond girl-like name of Chet Pussy. Seth has broken Chet’s finger and nose while Richie has literally kicked the man (or monster) while he was down. This will come back to bite them — again, literally — in a few minutes.

I would say that the whole section of From Dusk Till Dawn at the Titty Twister, before Satanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) morphs into a snake-headed vampire at the sight of blood, roughly aligns with the end of the “Fun and Games” part in a classic script outline. It delivers on “the promise of the premise” of the fugitive Gecko brothers escaping and enjoying their freedom.

These quoted terms are the ones Blake Snyder uses in Save the Cat, which critic turned screenwriter C. Robert Cargill (Sinister, Doctor Strange) has cited as one of the three books that aspiring screenwriters “will be expected to know” even if they don’t agree with all of the advice therein. It’s not the Bible but it is an industry standard.

Doubling Down on the False Victory

If there were any doubt that crossing into Mexico and entering the demonic refuge of the Titty Twitter is a/the False Victory moment, Tarantino himself lays that to rest when he spells it out in dialogue and has Jacob say to Seth:

“Are you such a loser you can’t tell when you’ve won? The entire state of Texas, along with the FBI, are looking for you. Did they find you? No, they couldn’t. You’ve won.”

They share a toast to family. “Well, now you’ve had your drink,” The Godfather would say. That’s our cue for the lights to dim.

The bartender, Razor Charlie (Danny Trejo), takes the stage and introduces Ms. Pandemonium with great pomp and circumstance. Hayek strides out on stage in her bikini, but unlike Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi (keeping in mind that Rodriguez recently took us back to a key location from that movie in The Book of Boba Fett), she is no one’s slave. In fact, she will later tell Seth that he’s going to be her slave.

Poetic Justice for Gloria

I haven’t really addressed the ickiness of Richie, who is a leering sex predator. Being locked in a room with Tarantino as he bragged was enough to make Fiona Apple quit cocaine. At least she got out alive, which is more than you could say for the matronly bank teller, Gloria Hill, played by Tarantino’s old acting teacher, Brenda Hillhouse (in her final role).

Having seen flashes of Gloria’s bloody corpse, unceremoniously butchered by Richie, earlier in the film, it’s a nice bit of poetic justice for Satanico — the predator to end all predators — to go straight for him after she finishes the python portion of her exotic dance.

Tito & Tarantula play “After Dark,” as good a vampire song as any, while Richie sucks whiskey off the mistress of the macabre’s toes like a good little “lapdog of Satan.” If indeed Tarantino has a foot fetish, similar to his car trunk and Mexican standoff fetish or Stanley Kubrick’s bathroom fetish, this is a pure expression of it, and we have Rodriguez to thank for it.

Things go south when Chet Pussy and friends show back up and Razor Charlie stabs Richie in his wounded hand. Seth promptly unloads his gun on the bouncer while Richie goes to town on Razor Charlie with the knife.

The Midpoint and Bad Guys Close In

There are about 41 minutes of “movie” left (again, not counting the credits) when Satanico announces, “Dinner is served.” From Dusk Till Dawn then officially becomes a vampire flick.

This is the big twist that hurtles us into Act 2B and the back half of the movie. Though not technically a true Midpoint, minute-wise, I believe it functions that way, structurally.

Isn’t it just like evil to come in hot as a seductive dancer, only to reveal its true grotesque form once it has you cornered? The Bad Guys Close In swiftly after Satanico’s transformation, picking people off left and right.

Thankfully, there are a few other good guys (or less bad guys) in the Titty Twister with the Geckos and Fullers. Sex Machine (Tom Savini) brandishes a whip and codpiece gun. Frost (Fred Williamson) rips a vampire’s still-beating black heart out of its chest and tells long and involved Vietnam stories.

All Is Lost and Dark Night of the Soul

It’s like we’re in an Indiana Jones movie, all of a sudden, with the faces of bloodsuckers melting like Nazis. Our heroes take them out with table legs, pool cues, and even pencils. Razor Charlie, meanwhile, rips a guy’s arm out of its socket like a rabid Wookie (Wookies being the word that Rodriguez used for his spaghetti-zombie-esque vampires, according to the DVD commentary).

If Seth is to be regarded as the protagonist, then Richie’s death could be considered the All Is Lost moment, since it effectively renders their whole escape mission moot, now that his brother is dead. After Seth rams a stake through Richie’s chest (Franken-Quentin’s skull lands on the floor with 31 minutes to go), he has what feels like a Dark Night of the Soul, where he pours himself a drink at the bar.

The Dark Night of the Soul gets even darker and more hopeless when Sex Machine — now vamped out — throws Frost through the door, and Frost rises — also now vamped out — and spreads his arms wide as the bats come flying into the bar. If that’s not part of Seth’s Dark Night of the Soul, it’s still certified as the “Oh S**t” moment because that’s what he says as he beholds the bats. He and the Fuller kids retreat into the bar’s recesses; Jacob has been bitten and he gets left behind to fend for himself.

Break Into Three and Finale

Tarantino once said, “Movies are my religion, and God is my patron.” In a 2015 interview with Dan Rather, he revealed that he had gone through a religious phase when he was younger, living with his grandmother in Tennessee and going to a Christian church where he “got baptized and saved and all that stuff.” However, as an adult, he told Rather, “I don’t really know if I believe in God, especially not this Santa Claus character that people seem to have conjured up.”

Some of this may have informed Jacob’s backstory in From Dusk Till Dawn. The widower and apostate improvises a baseball bat and shotgun cross, and it’s a truly scary image when he stands up from behind the bar and sees himself surrounded by snuffling vampire ghouls. Jules Winnfield’s Ezekiel 25:17 speech in Pulp Fiction, which Tarantino lifted from a Sonny Chiba movie, not the Bible, was originally intended to be coming out of Jacob’s mouth during this scene, back when Tarantino was writing From Dusk Till Dawn as his first work-for-hire screenplay based on Kurtzman’s treatment.

As Jacob reunites with Seth and his kids in the Titty Twister’s back room, Seth realizes that the one-time preacher is their best weapon against the vampires. “Only one problem: his faith isn’t what it used to be.” Luckily, he’s amenable to pep talks, and they’re in a room full of stolen trucking shipments. “So which are you?” Seth asks pointedly. “Are you a faithless preacher? Or are you a mean motherf***ing servant of God?”

By my estimation, the Break Into [Act] Three comes here, as they devise a plan to kick down the door and hit the vampires with everything they have. In a montage, we see them loading up their convenient crossbows, water guns, and condoms turned water balloons for the climactic fight. The Finale only lasts fifteen minutes or so. R.I.P. Jacob and Scott.

The Road to El Rey (Cannibal Hell) Is Paved with Tex-Mex

In the end, From Dusk Till Dawn remains a true Tex-Mex oddity, best served up as a midnight snack. The Texas half plays like a spiritual cousin of Death Proof and the Mexico half plays like a cousin of Planet Terror.

Rather than just being a proof of concept for Grindhouse, however, this is actually a better movie. If you’re wondering why it gets a pass from me despite Tarantino’s #MeToo moment and despite my unease with more universally acclaimed genre titles like FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, maybe it’s because this film makes gutsier storytelling moves and is less outwardly pro-vampire/vampire-centric. It gives us some human heroes we can root for.

Obviously, I’m talking about the Fullers, not so much the Geckos. Richie is evil and he gets what’s coming to him. Seth, though charismatic, is no nice guy, either. And he’s headed to El Rey—envisioned in Jim Thompson’s novel, The Getaway, as an infernal kingdom where criminals cannibalize each other and there is no escape.

Rodriguez would later use El Rey as the name of his TV network, which launched with From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. From what I remember, the 10-episode first season had an intriguing start, but by watering down the same story with an additional 350 minutes, it ultimately couldn’t match the film’s pure-grain ending.

The Final Image

When Cheech Marin shows back up for the third and final time in From Dusk Till Dawn, the movie, we get the sense that Seth is about to spiral down into another circle of Hell, like he did when crossing the border and like he did when passing through the Titty Twister’s doors.

I appreciate them letting Kate be the Final Girl.

The truth is, as much as I heart Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, I was always kind of blasé about Tarantino until the scene with Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) in the kitchen in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. There’s a moment of great surprise that comes in that scene, and as a moviegoer, I like to be surprised.

Only after that did I seek out From Dusk Till Dawn, and it surprised me, too, right up until the gnarly last moment. The Final Image, a matte painting that reportedly still hangs on the wall of Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios, reveals the Aztec vampire pyramid and truck graveyard in back of the Titty Twister. It perfectly exemplifies the kind of world-building, mind-expanding pullback reveal that a good story with some layers to it will give you. At least, that’s what this one gave me.