The Shot That Reeked — Literally
Stanley Kubrick wanted a predator tearing into a zebra under moonlight. What he got, according to effects legend Douglas Trumbull, was a drugged big cat chained to a painted, rotting horse on an English soundstage. The grisly setup produced one of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s most notorious images from the Dawn of Man sequence — the leopard draped beside its kill — and it came together in a way that’s as stomach-turning as it sounds.
In a 1978 interview archived online, Trumbull recalled Kubrick’s request: “It wasn't in the script, but Stanley wanted this scene with some kind of predatory animal eating a dead zebra at night.” Finding a zebra in England was hard enough; finding a dead one without killing it for the film was impossible. Trumbull’s fix: “How about a dead horse? We'll paint it to look like a zebra.” Kubrick agreed, with one condition: “I don't want anybody to go kill a horse for me, either.”
They located a horse “that was going to die any minute,” waited until it “finally croaked,” then dragged the carcass to the studio and striped it. Then the schedule slipped. “There was this dead horse which got really foul, ’cause it laid around about a week before they shot the scene,” Trumbull said. Film historian James Delson noted the crew had to “drug the jaguar and chain it to the zebra” because the animal wanted nothing to do with a week-old carcass. “With all the animals they had there, the place smelled like hell,” Trumbull added.
Trumbull’s Salty Recollections
Trumbull’s stories arrive with baggage. He and Kubrick clashed after 2001 won the Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects and Kubrick took sole credit. “Kubrick did not create the visual effects. He directed them,” Trumbull told The Hollywood Reporter decades later. “There was a certain level of inappropriateness to taking that Oscar.” That tension colors the 1978 conversation, but the details he shares are specific and, frankly, hard to invent — like the painted horse and the chained cat.
The same interview also paints a picture of a project that began far rougher than its final form suggests. “I wish I had a copy of the original screenplay that I saw when I started working on the picture, so you could see what a piece of crap it was,” Trumbull said. He described script pages that literally read, “Special effects sequence starts here. Work is now under way with our crew of artists and technicians to produce the most fantastic visual effects ever made,” followed by blank space. In his telling, Kubrick was using those placeholders to get MGM rolling while he and Arthur C. Clarke argued over the story’s direction.