Near the end of the film, as “Holly Sargis” (Sissy Spacek) and “Kit Carruthers” (Martin Sheen) are being flown back to South Dakota, Holly explains in voice-over that Kit will be executed in the electric chair several months later, and that she will be granted probation and marry her defense lawyer’s son. The film ends with shots of clouds, after Kit asks one of the lawmen if his “uniqueness” will assist his case but the lawman hesitates to answer. As noted in the New York magazine, NYT and other reviews, the tone of Holly’s narration, which is heard intermittently throughout the film, is florid and reminiscent of pulp romance novels or confessional magazines. For example, early in the picture, she states, “Little did I realize that what began in back alleys in this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.” Although most of the film is in color, there is one sequence in sepia. That sequence, showing the public’s reaction and intent to pursue Kit and Holly for the murders, features shots of empty streets; children escorted by guards; men signing up for posses; and individuals posing with rifles, ammunition, and law books.
       The end credits contain a thank you from the producer to several individuals, the American Film Institute and the people of Otero County for their cooperation in the making of the film. The onscreen credit for Dona Baldwin reads, "Hair/Wardrobe." The onscreen end credit for Malick, for whom Badlands marked his feature film directorial debut, reads, "Written, produced and directed by." As noted in the ^LAT review, Malick was one of the first Fellows of the AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies. Lanton Mills, the seventeen-minute short Malick made there in 1971, featured a variation on the scene in Badlands in which Kit suggests to Holly that they bury their belongings and speculates on who might dig them up. One of the actors appearing in Lanton Mills was Warren Oates, who portrayed Holly’s father in Badlands. According to a 1975 Sight and Sound article, after leaving AFI, Malick was hired to rewrite drafts of several scripts, among them, the 1971 Columbia production, Drive, He Said, for which he did not receive screen credit, and the 1972 production, Pocket Money (see entries below), for which he received onscreen credit.
       The Sight and Sound article reported that Malick began working on Badlands during his second year at AFI by simultaneously writing the script and creating a sales kit with slides and videotapes for potential investors. A 2004 Guardian (London) article reported that Malick secured half the financing to produce the film from dentists, lawyers and doctors, and $25,000 of his own money. The other half was raised by executive producer Edward Pressman. In Jul 1972, when production began using a non-union crew, the budget was approximately $300,000, not counting deferred payments to laboratories and actors.
       According to the Sight and Sound and Guardian articles, the production encountered many problems, such as difficulties between Malick and certain crew members. When photographer Brian Probyn became ill, another photographer, Tak Fujimoto, filled in until a third, Stevan Larner was hired. According to the Guardian article, the editing and sound departments also had turnovers. Among other problems on the set was the destruction of cameras during the fire sequence. When principal photography ended $35,000 over the budget, Malick took other rewriting assignments in order to finance the editing, which, according to the article, occurred over ten months.
       The music of renowned composers Erik Satie and Carl Orff, as well as popular songwriter, singer James Taylor, was used in the soundtrack of Badlands to convey the dreamy, aimless sensibility in the film. Two popular songs of the 1950s are featured in Badlands. The music and lyrics of the 1957, “Top 40” release, “Love Is Strange,” to which Holly and Kit dance during the forest sequence. On the night before their arrest, Holly and Kit dance to a radio broadcast of “A Blossom Fell,” performed by Nat “King” Cole.
       Despite the standard disclaimer that Badlands is not intended to depict real events or persons, as noted in reviews, the inspiration for the story was the 1958 killing rampage by nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming, including Fugate’s mother, stepfather and half-sister. The film story veers from actual events in many ways, and often makes the characters appear more sympathetic. However, several elements from the true story are present in the film. According to a modern biography, Starkweather had a string of low-wage jobs, among them, refuse collector, and like Kit in the film, identified with actor James Dean’s image of a teenage rebel. After a confrontation with Fugate’s mother, who did not approve of his relationship with her daughter, Starkweather killed her family. Instead of taking refuge in a forest, as the movie shows, the couple remained in Fugate’s home in Lincoln, NE for about a week, keeping visitors away by claiming that the family had the flu. When they sensed suspicion had been aroused, the couple proceeded to the farm of an elderly friend of Starkweather’s family, whom Starkweather shot. The next day, they killed a teenaged boy and girl from whom they hitched a ride, and the girl’s body was later found half naked with multiple stab wounds. The discovery of the bodies of the couple and the elderly man instigated a major investigation.
       Unlike what is dramatized in the movie, Starkweather and Fugate circled back to Lincoln, but, as in the film, took refuge in a wealthy man’s house after getting past his maid. Starkweather killed the man and his wife (a character not represented in the film), and later stole many valuables, driving off in the couple’s expensive Packard. By this time, Starkweather and Fugate’s photographs appeared in the newspapers, giving them a notoriety that appealed to Starkweather. The Nebraska governor called for the help of law enforcement agencies, the National Guard and the FBI. A reward was posted for the capture of Starkweather, who, with Fugate, was now traveling toward Washington state, where his brother resided. While crossing through Wyoming, he decided to exchange the luxury car for something less conspicuous, but his attempt to steal a Buick led to the murder of its owner, and his struggle with another civilian caught the attention of a deputy sheriff. Like the film, a high-speed chase ensued that ended when Starkweather stopped, but his reason for surrender was that he had been wounded by windshield glass shattered by gunfire.
       According to a 31 Jan 1958 LAT article, Starkweather told the arresting sheriff that “I always wanted to be a criminal but not this big a one.” That statement was spoken by Kit almost verbatim in Badlands and earlier had been included in the Lanton Mills script. Starkweather also said that he “wasn’t mad at anyone” and that he wanted to “be somebody,” statements Malick used in Badlands’s dialogue. Also, according to the LAT article, Starkweather claimed that Fugate “took no part” in the killings. The modern biography stated that after learning that Fugate had told authorities that he took her hostage, Starkweather blamed her for the stab wounds of the young woman and implicated her in other killings, all of which Fugate denied. At his trial, Starkweather was found guilty, and he was executed by electric chair in 1959. Fugate was unable to convince the jury that she had been held against her will, but, because of her young age, was given a life sentence.
       According to a 13 Aug 74 Box article, Fugate was being held at the Nebraska Women’s Prison in York and was seeking parole after serving sixteen years, when she was given a personal preview of Badlands, shortly before the film opened in Nebraska. She watched the film with Malick and Sheen, who were seeking her reaction, but, according to the article, she did not comment on the film. 31 Oct 1973 LAT and LAHExam news items, occurring shortly after Badlands’s first screening, reported that Fugate, who claimed to be a “redeemed Christian,” was denied parole. However, her life sentence was commuted to a thirty-to-fifty year term. The shorter sentence made her eligible for parole in 1976 and, according to a 21 Jun 1976 NYT news item, Fugate finally gained her parole that year.
       Badlands was screened as the closing feature of the New York Film Festival in Oct 1973. A 6 Nov 1973 DV news item reported that Warner Bros. acquired the film for $950,000, which was about double the reported negative cost, outbidding its competitor Cinema V. A 2 Oct 1974 Var news item reported that Badlands won first prize, the Golden Seashell, and Sheen won best actor at the San Sebastian film festival, prompting Warner Bros., which had not planned to distribute the film in Europe, to schedule runs in Spain and consider other territories. Although Badlands received critical acclaim, and Malick was identified as a major new talent, it failed to draw audiences.
       The NYT reviewer of Badlands felt that the film’s story of violence prompted by psychology rather than poverty or other societal problems placed it firmly in the contemporary times of the 1970s, with Kit and Holly “directionless,” “technically literate but uneducated,” and “members of the television generation run amok.” However, in a New Republic review, Malick stated that he wanted the story set in the past, as it was “meant to be a fairytale or romance.” Vincent Canby of the NYT described Badlands as a “ferociously American film.” The Var review suggested that the film’s subtext was a study of those who indiscriminately “idolize film stars and criminals” and of the “mythmaking propensities of the U.S. public,” comparing Kit to a “perverse Horatio Alger.” In 1993, Badlands was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for the United States National Film Registry. Two years after the making of Badlands, Spacek married the film’s production designer, Jack Fisk. Other films based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree are the 1963 production, The Sadist, which was written and directed by James Landis, and a 1993, made-for-television movie, Murder in the Heartland directed by Robert Markowitz and starring Tim Roth and Fairuza Balk.