Shocktoberfest #31 - Halloween
|
Oct 31 2010, 7:10 PM
Halloween. All Hallows’ Eve. Samhain. Whether you’re a pagan who’s out celebrating the true end of Summer (and the beginning of Winter) or someone wearing a Freddy Krueger mask out for candy, no one can deny the power of this holiday. It’s a bonanza to confectioners, pumpkin farmers and those guys who open Halloween costume stores in old Circuit City locations nationwide. And a bane to Evangelicals, who consider it to be Satanic, and dentists, who might rally against the holiday but end up doing okay in the end when you need a new set of choppers after eating a pound of “Smarties” candies.
Halloween is also the time when studios traditionally release their horror product— this October alone, we’ve seen My Soul To Keep, Monsters, Paranormal Activity 2 and Saw 3D, the last of the popular Lionsgate franchise. But Halloween as a holiday has surprisingly been under-utilized as a horror movie device. There are some big exceptions, obviously, but since John Carpenter’s original Halloween in 1978, there have been only a few films — including Rob Zombie’s ill-advised remakes of Halloween and Halloween II, both of which, inexplicably, were released in late August — which have dealt with the holiday directly. And no, Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead (1988) doesn’t count.
The original Halloween is, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, the scariest horror movie of all time. Relying much more on style and actual suspense than gore or simple jump scares, John Carpenter’s film about a virginal high school student pitted against a seemingly unstoppable killer is a masterpiece in terms of atmosphere, technique and economy of story. Shot with great atmosphere by Dean Cundey,the films stars then-unknown Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, in a career-revitalizing performance as a psychiatrist who knows the truth behind the attacks. Carpenter doesn't get bogged down in the mythology of evil as later sequels do; he focuses on the then and now, underlining the tension with a score he wrote and performed by himself (as the “Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra"), a minimalist series of repeated piano and synthesizer notes which rivals Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho as one of most iconic and effective horror soundtracks ever.
Halloween, made on the cheap and distributed regionally throughout the fall of 1978, was for a long time the most successful independent film ever. Most American horror movies up to this point — with notable exceptions like Jaws — came off as cheap-jack drive-in filler filmed in flat, serviceable TV-movie style. Halloween changed all that. Carpenter saturates the widescreen frame with inky blacks and patches of blue and orange, with Cundey using a Panaglide, a type of Steadicam, to create long, flowing tracking shots which help emphasize the fact that killer Michael Myers isn’t just a random maniac— moving with purpose, he ends up embodying a type of elemental evil. No matter how fast Curtis’ Laurie Strode runs, Myers slowly, deliberately follows; you can’t escape him. The final moments of the film — one of several endings Carpenter shot with Curtis, Pleasance and Carpenter pal and future writer-director Nick (The Last Starfighter) Castle as Michael Myers — are incredibly chilling. The irony, of course, is that, in setting up many of the elements that would become standard-issue slasher-film tropes, Halloween spawned an entire subgenre, most of which came off as the same cheap-jack drive-in filler Carpenter successfully managed to transcend.
My own personal Halloween story involves my father. We didn’t have cable back in 1981, nor a VCR, and some NBC affiliates refused to show Halloween because of its violence quotient (that being said, most episodes of CSI today are bloodier than the film); Channel 13, then the NBC station in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, instead showed the Ryan & Tatum O’Neal movie Paper Moon. So my Dad took me to my grandfather’s house — he was out of town — to watch the NBC version of the film, showing on Detroit’s Channel 4. Little did I know that the film was a special TV edit; because NBC’s Standards & Practices cut out enough violence that the film was too short for its two-hour time slot, Carpenter shot a series of new scenes, mostly involving Michael Myers’ backstory with Donald Pleasance, which ultimately set up Halloween II, which was released that fall. Thanks Dad— even though the movie scared the hell out of you.
Halloween begat 1981’s Halloween II, directed by Rick Rosenthal (though Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill directed some gory insert shots) and released by Universal. The film begins right where the original left off and ultimately wraps up quite definitively, insuring there was to be no Halloween III. Carpenter’s idea for an ongoing series was to have unrelated stories come out each year bearing the Halloween title— a type of commercial branding where the only thread would be that the stories involved the Halloween holiday. Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982) was the first (and last) of these films; audiences expecting another tale about Michael Myers instead got a story involving Tom Atkins as a doctor who gets drawn into the plans of an evil novelty manufacturer (Dan O’Herlihy) who has crafted a series of Halloween masks that tie in to the Celtic rituals of Samhain with deadly results.
The film is all over the place— little of it makes any real sense, with weird humanoid androids killing people left and right and the notion that computer chips inside the masks will cause children’s head to melt and spew snakes and insects, while genuinely eerie, doesn’t hold up to even minor scrutiny. But the film, directed by Carpenter’s former production designer Tommy Lee Wallace and scored again by Carpenter (in association with Alan Howarth), is eminently watchable and fun even when we’re not sure what the hell is going on. The notion of using the dark druid origins of Halloween is clever and Atkins and O’Herlihy make for solid leads, with O’Herlihy particularly relishing his not-unsympathetic character’s sinister nature. The masks themselves are great; once you hear the “Silver Shamrock” theme, you’ll never get it out of your head. The commercial failure of Halloween III allowed producer Moustapha Akkad to craft a new series of Halloween movies without Carpenter’s involvement; between 1988 and 2002, five more sequels were released; none of them — not even the ambitious Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) which brought Jamie Lee Curtis back to the franchise — hold a candle to Carpenter’s original.
The most recent Halloween horror movie is the anthology Trick ‘r Treat (2008), written and directed by X2/Superman Returns screenwriter Michael Dougherty. The film — not to be confused with the 1986 heavy metal horror film Trick Or Treat — is an enjoyable seasonal treat filled with an escalating series of nasty tricks starring Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker and a crotchety Brian Cox in a series of tales that ultimately intertwine. Not everything works — a couple of the stories seem a little disconnected from the main narrative — but the film is incredibly entertaining, with Dougherty clearly having fun with the genre but unafraid to deliver surprises, scares and a few very dark twists. Best is his idea to tie the stories together with Sam (Quinn Lord), a tiny trick-or-treater dressed in what look like old pajamas and wearing a burlap bag with button eyes over his head. We don’t learn who (or what) Sam is until the end and the reveal is creepy, disturbing and fits in well with the twisted logic of the film. Originally scheduled for release in 2007, the film sat on the shelf for nearly two years as Warner Brothers didn’t know what to do with it; it was ignominiously dumped to DVD and Blu-Ray in October 2009. The film, ghoulish in an E.C. Comics/Creepshow kind of way, deserves a lot better. Hopefully its home-video success will engender a new series of Halloween-themed films. Dougherty has talked up plans for a sequel— maybe John Carpenter’s plans for new seasonal horror will come to fruition after all in Dougherty’s able hands.
As Halloween night comes to an orange-and-black close, Beast Witches to you all and thanks for reading. Too many great films didn’t get covered this time out — Nosferatu (1922), Freaks (1931), Black Sunday (1960), Don't Look Now (1973), The Wicker Man (1973), Phantasm (1979), The Hunger (1983), amongst many others, not to mention Universal Studios' classic monster movies and the output of Britain's Hammer Films — but keep your eyes peeled for future articles on the genre here on GeekWeek.
Halloween. All Hallows’ Eve. Samhain. Whether you’re a pagan who’s out celebrating the true end of Summer (and the beginning of Winter) or someone wearing a Freddy Krueger mask out for candy, no one can deny the power of this holiday. It’s a bonanza to confectioners, pumpkin farmers and those guys who open Halloween costume stores in old Circuit City locations nationwide. And a bane to Evangelicals, who consider it to be Satanic, and dentists, who might rally against the holiday but end up doing okay in the end when you need a new set of choppers after eating a pound of “Smarties” candies.
Halloween is also the time when studios traditionally release their horror product— this October alone, we’ve seen My Soul To Keep, Monsters, Paranormal Activity 2 and Saw 3D, the last of the popular Lionsgate franchise. But Halloween as a holiday has surprisingly been under-utilized as a horror movie device. There are some big exceptions, obviously, but since John Carpenter’s original Halloween in 1978, there have been only a few films — including Rob Zombie’s ill-advised remakes of Halloween and Halloween II, both of which, inexplicably, were released in late August — which have dealt with the holiday directly. And no, Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead (1988) doesn’t count.
The original Halloween is, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, the scariest horror movie of all time. Relying much more on style and actual suspense than gore or simple jump scares, John Carpenter’s film about a virginal high school student pitted against a seemingly unstoppable killer is a masterpiece in terms of atmosphere, technique and economy of story. Shot with great atmosphere by Dean Cundey,the films stars then-unknown Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, in a career-revitalizing performance as a psychiatrist who knows the truth behind the attacks. Carpenter doesn't get bogged down in the mythology of evil as later sequels do; he focuses on the then and now, underlining the tension with a score he wrote and performed by himself (as the “Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra"), a minimalist series of repeated piano and synthesizer notes which rivals Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho as one of most iconic and effective horror soundtracks ever.
Halloween, made on the cheap and distributed regionally throughout the fall of 1978, was for a long time the most successful independent film ever. Most American horror movies up to this point — with notable exceptions like Jaws — came off as cheap-jack drive-in filler filmed in flat, serviceable TV-movie style. Halloween changed all that. Carpenter saturates the widescreen frame with inky blacks and patches of blue and orange, with Cundey using a Panaglide, a type of Steadicam, to create long, flowing tracking shots which help emphasize the fact that killer Michael Myers isn’t just a random maniac— moving with purpose, he ends up embodying a type of elemental evil. No matter how fast Curtis’ Laurie Strode runs, Myers slowly, deliberately follows; you can’t escape him. The final moments of the film — one of several endings Carpenter shot with Curtis, Pleasance and Carpenter pal and future writer-director Nick (The Last Starfighter) Castle as Michael Myers — are incredibly chilling. The irony, of course, is that, in setting up many of the elements that would become standard-issue slasher-film tropes, Halloween spawned an entire subgenre, most of which came off as the same cheap-jack drive-in filler Carpenter successfully managed to transcend.
My own personal Halloween story involves my father. We didn’t have cable back in 1981, nor a VCR, and some NBC affiliates refused to show Halloween because of its violence quotient (that being said, most episodes of CSI today are bloodier than the film); Channel 13, then the NBC station in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, instead showed the Ryan & Tatum O’Neal movie Paper Moon. So my Dad took me to my grandfather’s house — he was out of town — to watch the NBC version of the film, showing on Detroit’s Channel 4. Little did I know that the film was a special TV edit; because NBC’s Standards & Practices cut out enough violence that the film was too short for its two-hour time slot, Carpenter shot a series of new scenes, mostly involving Michael Myers’ backstory with Donald Pleasance, which ultimately set up Halloween II, which was released that fall. Thanks Dad— even though the movie scared the hell out of you.
Halloween begat 1981’s Halloween II, directed by Rick Rosenthal (though Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill directed some gory insert shots) and released by Universal. The film begins right where the original left off and ultimately wraps up quite definitively, insuring there was to be no Halloween III. Carpenter’s idea for an ongoing series was to have unrelated stories come out each year bearing the Halloween title— a type of commercial branding where the only thread would be that the stories involved the Halloween holiday. Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982) was the first (and last) of these films; audiences expecting another tale about Michael Myers instead got a story involving Tom Atkins as a doctor who gets drawn into the plans of an evil novelty manufacturer (Dan O’Herlihy) who has crafted a series of Halloween masks that tie in to the Celtic rituals of Samhain with deadly results.
The film is all over the place— little of it makes any real sense, with weird humanoid androids killing people left and right and the notion that computer chips inside the masks will cause children’s head to melt and spew snakes and insects, while genuinely eerie, doesn’t hold up to even minor scrutiny. But the film, directed by Carpenter’s former production designer Tommy Lee Wallace and scored again by Carpenter (in association with Alan Howarth), is eminently watchable and fun even when we’re not sure what the hell is going on. The notion of using the dark druid origins of Halloween is clever and Atkins and O’Herlihy make for solid leads, with O’Herlihy particularly relishing his not-unsympathetic character’s sinister nature. The masks themselves are great; once you hear the “Silver Shamrock” theme, you’ll never get it out of your head. The commercial failure of Halloween III allowed producer Moustapha Akkad to craft a new series of Halloween movies without Carpenter’s involvement; between 1988 and 2002, five more sequels were released; none of them — not even the ambitious Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) which brought Jamie Lee Curtis back to the franchise — hold a candle to Carpenter’s original.
The most recent Halloween horror movie is the anthology Trick ‘r Treat (2008), written and directed by X2/Superman Returns screenwriter Michael Dougherty. The film — not to be confused with the 1986 heavy metal horror film Trick Or Treat — is an enjoyable seasonal treat filled with an escalating series of nasty tricks starring Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker and a crotchety Brian Cox in a series of tales that ultimately intertwine. Not everything works — a couple of the stories seem a little disconnected from the main narrative — but the film is incredibly entertaining, with Dougherty clearly having fun with the genre but unafraid to deliver surprises, scares and a few very dark twists. Best is his idea to tie the stories together with Sam (Quinn Lord), a tiny trick-or-treater dressed in what look like old pajamas and wearing a burlap bag with button eyes over his head. We don’t learn who (or what) Sam is until the end and the reveal is creepy, disturbing and fits in well with the twisted logic of the film. Originally scheduled for release in 2007, the film sat on the shelf for nearly two years as Warner Brothers didn’t know what to do with it; it was ignominiously dumped to DVD and Blu-Ray in October 2009. The film, ghoulish in an E.C. Comics/Creepshow kind of way, deserves a lot better. Hopefully its home-video success will engender a new series of Halloween-themed films. Dougherty has talked up plans for a sequel— maybe John Carpenter’s plans for new seasonal horror will come to fruition after all in Dougherty’s able hands.
As Halloween night comes to an orange-and-black close, Beast Witches to you all and thanks for reading. Too many great films didn’t get covered this time out — Nosferatu (1922), Freaks (1931), Black Sunday (1960), Don't Look Now (1973), The Wicker Man (1973), Phantasm (1979), The Hunger (1983), amongst many others, not to mention Universal Studios' classic monster movies and the output of Britain's Hammer Films — but keep your eyes peeled for future articles on the genre here on GeekWeek.
Comments
Sign in to comment with your TypePad, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo or OpenID.