The Ghost and the Darkness is a 1996 thriller film about the Tsavo maneaters, two lions who attacked the builders of the Uganda-Mombasa Railway in 1898, killing about 135 of them, and the subsequent hunt to kill them. The attacks, which took place in Tsavo, Kenya, were recounted by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. New reasearch says that the lions likely ate about 35 people, although 135 deaths are clai...
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The Ghost and the Darkness is a 1996 thriller film about the Tsavo maneaters, two lions who attacked the builders of the Uganda-Mombasa Railway in 1898, killing about 135 of them, and the subsequent hunt to kill them. The attacks, which took place in Tsavo, Kenya, were recounted by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. New reasearch says that the lions likely ate about 35 people, although 135 deaths are claimed by Patterson.
The film, although based loosely on Patterson's account, romanticises his story and fictionalises important elements of the plot. William Goldman's script introduces Michael Douglas as the American big game hunter Charles Remington, a character based on Anglo-Indian big game hunter Charles Ryall. In the original script, Remington was an enigmatic figure named Redbeard, but when Douglas chose to both produce the movie and play the role of the hunter, the character was expanded; Goldman's book Which Lie Did I Tell? argues that...
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