Halloween (2018)

David Gordon Green, 2018, USA

Without being remarkable, David Gordon Green’s continuation of the vast ongoing franchise has a little to please everyone. Although this leaves it open to accusations of being baggy and overstuffed, this is probably a canny move as - as is usually the case with these franchises – it seems an audience doesn’t really want something so different: regard the greatly maligned Myers-less ‘Halloween III’ and the much hated Rob Zombie ‘Halloween’* which, if nothing else, were truly taking a different tact. Green’s entry – written with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley – leapfrogs over the other sequels and versions and gleefully dismisses the sibling twist of ‘Halloween II’, starting with as clean a slate as possible. Producer Jason Blum prefers the term “reinvention” rather than “reboot”, but contorting over semantics is unlikely to really fool anyone. Endorsed by the return of Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter himself – executive producing and reprising his seminal score – and coming with a distinguished indie director, this certainly comes with as much creator approval as possible for a decades-old product. 

So it’s clean and bright and a little shaggy around the edges, as typical of American indies; meaning it replaces the precision tooling of Carpenter’s original – which, of course, is a genre masterpiece – with a more loose-limbed vibe. This means that there isn’t the sustained stress, suspense and squeeze Myer’s first appearance, but it would surely be foolish to expect to imitate that. Even so, the sequence where in more-or-less one take Michael strolls around the suburbs, wandering into houses and slaughtering residents is a set-piece that comes close. The many call backs to the first film mean fans can have fun spotting Easter eggs, but these are often more than just homages: the Michael-Goes-About-His-Business sequence also mirrors the lurking p.o.v. from the original; and when Laurie is shown mirroring Michael’s poses from the first ‘Halloween’, it goes to indicate how much she is claiming that story as a survivor. She’s been preparing to fight back this time. 

Laurie Strode** has been busy training and arming herself for Michael’s return at the expense of healthy relationships with her family. But this is far from only Laurie’s story: there’s a lot of subplots and a lot of characters where it seems this time Michael’s story is trying to cover as much slasher ground as possible. There are three generations of women to deal with: Laurie, her estranged daughter and her granddaughter. As with most slashers right now, it comes loaded with post-modern self-awareness of Clover’s Final Girl which leads the action by the nose and means to get maximum play. Curtis has certainly been on the promotional circuit highlighting this as a film very much attuned to the #MeToo movement and relishing the kickback, making this very much a film of the moment. But although he was always a threat of male violence, unlike many of the slasher sub-genre he helped inspire, Michael was surely a symbol of The Unstoppable Killer Out There rather than of rampant misogyny (he has always been indiscriminate with his kills). But there is no doubt that this one stems more from revenge fantasies than fear of the bogeyman.

The film begins with a couple of obnoxious podcasters that come to provoke Myers, the kind of critique of a mercenary media that ‘Natural Born Killers’ traded in; then there’s a somewhat off-centre subplot with Dr Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) which certainly fulfils the Gothic protestations that Dr Loomis brought to the original. But mostly what will stand out from this grab-bag of pleasures and diversions is the humour. This is the kind of casual humour that has run through much of Green’s work, not least his work on the amiable series ‘Red Oaks’. The scene where the boy complains to his father that he’d rather really be at dance class than going hunting is a nice nod to how far expectations of gender roles have moved on since the original was unleashed; and it’s not the only humorous moment that then segues into horror that means business. Many audience criticisms I have read seem to object to this, but slashers and horror have always run close to humour, just perhaps not so overt comedy: the criticism is that the humour undercuts the horror, but perhaps the only ill-judged moment is when the smart-mouth of the babysat kid undermines the horror of the closet scene (which is a great scare that is spoilt anyway by being in the trailers).  

There’s a moment when a youth shrugs that Michael’s original kill count isn’t so remarkable in an age when horrific mass killings seems like a monthly event (fortnightly? weekly?); the hoopla around Myers seems like hyperbole. In the original ‘Halloween’ he newly represented the fears that Something Unspeakable was out there threatening the cosy suburbs; indeed, he was bred in the suburbs. But this ‘Halloween’ forgoes the supernatural slant of the original, the move into The Shape: here, he is the returning trauma that must be confronted. It’s entertaining, if not particularly scary, but with enough of a nasty streak and kills to be occasionally unsettling and with humour to keep things on their toes elsewhere. Ultimately, it heads for what, in this scenario, ends up being a happy and triumphant ending. This is the age where getting your own back is in vogue, and that’s always been as prevalent in horror as bad luck. But, of course, there is a just a little ambiguity… there's a franchise to think of, after all.

• * ‘Halloween III: Season of the Witch’ has received a lot of reappraisal over time and is certainly regarded more highly now. I have always liked it and the laser-in-the-face and the masks still remain two favourite horror scares. I also have a lot of time for Zombie’s ‘Halloween’, although I doubt that would win me any friends.
• ** John Kenneth Muir painstakingly decodes Laurie Strodes name to argue that she was always going to be a winner.

A Ghost Story

David Lowery, 2017, USA

Well I can imagine this one is going to be divisive, perhaps more so than ‘I am the Pretty thing that Lives in the House’. David Lowery’s fantasy starts off as one might anticipate from an artsy-fartsy version of a traditional supernatural tale: the central couple C and M (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara – and yes, dig those initials) are educated, privileged, talented and, of course, slightly angsty; scenes last a little too long, edging into pretension, and become their most testing at the pie-of-grief scene, which veers into Tsai Ming Liang levels of endurance. He dies and comes back as a ghost, watching life in the house go on and the editing speeds up a notch as the narrative starts to play with time. She’s moved on but he can’t. 

He’s one of those sheet-draped spectres – which I think has been credited to MR James’ story ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad’ – which is both creepy and cookie. That’s the gag, that Casey

Affleck is rendered mute and anonymous under a sheet (is that him?). He is mostly passive, just standing around and observing, but becoming a poltergeist when he decides a couple of kids are perhaps too playful; after all, we aren’t shown that he is similarly troubled and troubling when adults next move in and throw a party. In this scene, he watches as Bill Oldham (Billie “Prince” Billie) engrossingly profounds on the ongoing meaninglessness of it all (he’s billed as “Prognosticator”). But it’s the cookie element that really sticks out when two ghosts “chat” through subtitles: it reminds me of some single-panelled cartoon with an obliquely humorous caption. As Phil de Semlyen says, “if you’ve ever wondered what Terrence Malick’s Rentaghost might look like, there are worse places to start looking” Or maybe, given its boxy framing and filters, it’s like a spooky Instagram picture come to life. It’s almost a cute view of ghosts, being deliberately designed on the most innocuous symbolism of afterlife entities (but of course, tell that to Michael Myers). So it is not scary – although his haunting the kids and turning into a poltergeist almost pushes that (and what did they do exactly? Wouldn’t his girlfriend’s new lover provoke such a response beforehand?) – but it’s often creepy. 

And about that pie scene?

"I wanted a representation of grief that we haven't seen before ... that felt unique and uncomfortable and profound," says Lowery, who previously directed Mara and Affleck in 2013 romance Ain't Them Bodies Saints. "I thought about how sometimes when I'm upset, I just eat a lot. I thought that would be a really powerful image."

USA Today

Uh-huh, but we get the point pretty early on and that device of prolonging a scene to ridiculous lengths to make it poignant is nothing new to anyone familiar with Tsai Ming Liang or Bela Tarr or Sergio Leone, etc. Many find ‘A Ghost Story’ a meditation on time and loss and grief and so on, but its vision of grief and the after-life is conventional, offering nothing new and playing on established depictions of sad but benign hauntings. It’s as deep as a commercial for making wills for the people you leave behind, its sadness surely derived from a somewhat self-absorbed interest in being an audience to a loved one’s  grief once we die. The spirits of loved ones can’t move on until they reach some kind of closure; but the temporal playfulness pushes this theme to a conclusion where a future context seemingly cannot contain ghosts* so they have to go back to the past and start again. It’s this playfulness that mitigates it’s pretentions to produce a goofy resonance. 

‘A Ghost Story’ is often very pretty, using ellipses to issue surprises – the house is now being demolished; now they’re all dead with only the hint of Native American war-cries in the distance – and Daniel Hart’s evocative score keeps things ebbing and flowing. Its oddness is in its favour. It is a singular mood-piece – Tarkovsky’s ‘Casper, the Maudlin Ghost'? – with much to offer if you go with its conceit. And Affleck draped in a bedsheet will prove unforgettable. 

• Affleck haunts a boardroom meeting momentarily before seemingly committing a ghost-suicide, implying the business world will blot out the past and ghosts.

The display for 'A Ghost Story' at Picturehouse Central, Leicester Square, London. 

FrightFest Day 5

CURVE is a decent example of how mainstream thrillers have assimilated those serial killer narratives that are much grungier and gorier on the fringes. The killer here is smart and ingrained with a metaphysical penchant for “fate” and whatnot. A newlywed is on the road to meet her fiancé and is having doubts when she runs into a man who sorts her out after her car packs up. Revealing his true colours when on the passenger seat, she crashes the car to rid herself of him. But she only succeeds in trapping herself in the crashed vehicle while he goes back and forth to taunt her, or teach her the truth of life or something. The film’s middle section veers into problem-solving survivalist mode before the last act delivers conventional showdown material. Nicely performed, solid if unremarkable fare.

 

NIGHT FARE follows an apparent hoodlum and his pal on a night out: the latter decides to jump paying a taxi fare only for the driver to hunt them down, killing anyone in the way. Then the last act moves into something very different, just when the stripped-down, gritty violent thriller vibe seems nailed down. This shift is tone brings to the fore themes of redemption and leaves more to chew on than just the cool reflective surfaces of the taxi and the streetwise charms of the characters. It both delivers more and verges on being a preachy moral story, but mostly settles for the revenge fantasies that fuel so much of the genre but with a feeling of regrets of lives misspent.

NINA FOREVER certainly achieves a level of uniqueness. Supermarket girl Holly goes for Rob – who tried to kill himself upon the death of his girlfriend, which endears him to her – but upon having sex finds that old girlfriend keeps popping up. Through the bed in gory fashion. The tone veers from comedy to romantic drama to horror but the fact that it settles more on masochism and that the horror derives from character traits means this is ultimately real dark-hearted. In regards to Nina herself, whereas I saw her as self-centred, sarcastic and often annoying, it was obvious in the following Q&A that others in the audience found her “humorous and witty”, so I realised that perhaps I wasn’t tuned in to what the film perhaps intended with the character. Perhaps this was down to the performance of Fiona O'Shaughnessy: where some heard drollness – where she was commenting on the farce of the situation - I heard selfish sarcasm. Certainly I wondered about her positive points. Nevertheless, that this becomes more Holly’s voyage of discovery means the film steers into something more satisfyingly more Hellraiser-like and genuinely affecting.

 

EMELIE is a slick thriller about a babysitter who isn’t who she says she is. Featuring very winning and realistic child characters and a penchant for getting on with things instead of dragging on its familiar beats unrewardingly. There’s enough mystery to let this linger and its straightforward approach reaps great rewards for an audience who, just for example, wonder why the characters don’t catch on quicker or just do that. This is how you pull this off.

TALES OF HALLOWEEN is an anthology of shorts set around the eponymous season which of course has Adrienne Barbeau as the narrating DJ keeping things together as the ten stories move through amusing parodies, clay-mation and – of course – revenge fantasies. There’s a definite atmosphere of “Eerie” and “Creepy” comics. It’s so quick that the vignettes never have time to outstay their welcome. It’s often funny, frequently amusing and gory and often is a more successful compendium than, say, the “ABCs of Death”. Great horror fun.

"Evil Dead"

EVIL DEAD
Fede Alvarez, 2012, USA

It is probably inevitable that “they” would get around to remaking that notorious and beloved horror classic “Evil Dead”. Early reports were that this update was surprisingly pretty good. Raimi was overseeing it… they made a bold decision to de-Ash it, which seemed to me to be the kind of move that opens up the original premise to other interesting ideas… I went in to be won over.

This Fede Alvarez remake is justabout minute-to-minute awful.

The dialogue is so weighted down with exposition and stupidity and so badly rendered that it is stillborn upon delivery. The group of twentysomethings that go to the cabin in the woods are a bunch of rejects from “Scream” and “Final Destination” sequels who can barely muster a decent line-reading between them, despite the cast having mostly respectable resumes. Badly acted; terrible dialogue; characters behaving like total idiots (did I mention all that?); a Book of the Dead that looks like some teenager’s home-made “Evil Dead” graphic novel homage… nail-gun action which feels more stupid than goofy; bad post-Japanese horror demons; goopy, brutal and unintentionally hilarious; po-faced and nasty, not to mention ill-considered, especially in regards to re-representing the tree rape… And then, hey, she’s resurrected all clean and angelic like? And then she gives some stupid kick-ass punchline and… well, even Ash only got around to dumb-fun punchlines in the sequels… Oh dear oh dear.

I went with a couple of good pals on the first afternoon screening; there were just three of us in the cinema and we spent the entire time, beginning to end, heckling and ridiculing and snorting with disbelief.

Its twenty-first century nastiness is very much in vogue and that has perhaps obscured its overall redundancy with some, but when I think of bad remakes, this is exactly the kind of thing I am thinking of. It’s worse because it seems so in earnest. All that insistent backstory is a bore and doesn’t matter one fig because the characters are so bad and uninteresting. More backstory and more explanation! This seems to be a first strategy for remakes … but for the most part it does not help. I shall argue that this does work in Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” (and like 2012’s “Maniac”, that is how you “re-imagine” if you are going to do that “re-imagining” stuff) but… well, this “Evil Dead” remake has a screenplay by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues and, by all accounts Diablo Cody too, but the film sounds and acts as if the writing chores were outsourced to a fourteen year-old horror fan. In a world where everything we liked as youths is being regurgitated, this could be thrown on the heap with other victims of fanboy sabotage. For all my problems with “Cabin in the Woods”, at least that had an agenda to wrestle with: this “Evil Dead” offers nothing but murkier lighting, bad characters and a more thoughtless kind of brutality to its source material. It is ultimately un-scary and uninvolving as a consequence.

And the Bruce Camplbell cameo is the bonus insult.

Go back to the original to see how this stuff is really done. Nothing to see here.

The Burning (...and sexual tensions)

THE BURNING

Tony Maylam, USA, 1981

 

For a certain generation, films such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “The Evil Dead” and “The Burning” took on mythical status. There was I, at school, getting the low-down on how terrifying these films were from my far cooler pal, a guy who was tall for his age and dressed like a teddy-boy (making him quite the off-beat pal as this was the Eighties, remember) and seemed to have no trouble getting into or hold of 18 rated films. So it was that I first heard of “The Burning”, undoubtedly as we walked to school one morning. He filled me in on the slim storyline and, presumably, the nastier details. The concept of the rampaging burnt-up man certainly lodged in my brain. As this was one of the banned “video nasties”, I do wonder in retrospect how he got to see it. But only this much later in life have I gotten around to watching it myself, during which time I have seen a bundle of other films that have likely given me a near-to-perfect idea of what to expect.

As one of those horrors with a troubled history with the censors, “The Burning” has, if anything, probably increased in its notoriety. Some of this is down to nostalgia: it is indeed of its time and one of those films which contemporary slashers refer back to and copy. “The Burning” itself was already derivative of “Friday the 13^th”, which was already derivative of “Halloween”. But there is a straightforward quality to these ‘80s American slashers, an almost low-budget earnestness, that later gave way to trends in irony and recourse to homage. “The Burning” is not devoid of satirical airs and it does possess a couple of iconic qualities and one seminal scene of carnage. It has the fan-favourite “Cropsy” as its killer (played by Lou David): a creepy summercamp janitor and the victim of a teenage prank that goes wrong, leaving him flailing around on fire and a hideously disfigured burns victim, courtesy of make-up celebrity Tom Savini. Its true iconic image is the image of the silhouetted Cropsy holding up the open garden sheers, ready to bring them down on whatever victim lay beneath.

As the modern viewer might expect, there is a lot of tying-in with sex, death and mutilation. As Aurum notes,

"the film is a particularly clear example of the Puritanism of this particular subgenre, since virtually all killings follow various scenes of sex play, and thus can be all too easily read as ‘dire warnings’ or ‘punishments justly deserved'. [1]"

Indeed, Cropsy tends to go manic after foreplay or teenage sex. His first kill is a prostitute who rejects him once she lays eyes on his barely human burned visage (Savini himself says that it is not a realistic portrayal of a burns victim; it is rather a stretched, silly-putty like hall-of-mirrors distortion). Cropsy is effectively rendered impotent, and in rage he murders her with a protracted scissor-slaying. It is as if the worst thing, the very thing that turns him insane with random fury, is not so much his disfigurement but the horror of this impotency.

Next stop: the summer camp, where there is a whole lot of typical machismo, posturing and preening. The girls seem to giggle about sex and flirt in equal measure: perhaps they are meant to be, if you will, reproachable teasers (as Aurum says) but there is a slightly softer and greyer arena of interactions going on; not necessarily due to any superior characterisation and writing, but just a little ambiguity and complexity to the characters work wonders. For example, Glazer the resident bully (Larry Joshua) is himself consistently mocked and rejected and, although arguably close to one, he is not the date-rapist that many of the other guys seem so uniformly close to being. He alone is shown trying to please his girl and appreciate her. When their sex falls short, he simply apologises and doesn’t resort to aggressive insistence on his virility. He’s not a soft romantic but there is the impression that he might have range to mature. By contrast, the other "funny guys" all seem much closer to genuine date-rapists, sly coercers and Nice Guys. The tension around sex and youthful exploration is probably expressed most obviously and sympathetically in the subplot where one girl is simultaneously curious, charmed and afraid of the boy trying to romance her. But it is tough luck because any step towards sex receives a pair of garden sheers. In this way, “The Burning” is one of those films that simultaneously formed and adhered to the slasher conventions and provided the material for endless parodies.

But it is limited to see Cropsy as only a puritanical punisher. He serves as more than just a warning and retribution, for he is also the manifestation of the girls’ fear of painful penetration, of their anxieties about rape and the loss of virginity. In one example, there is a close-up of the girl trying to hold the open sheers blades at bay as Cropsy forces in on her, which is unsettling and clear in its symbolism. Cropsy is the wild, roaming, ugly personification of all the rape tendencies that seem to underlay most of the male student’s interactions with the girls. One might even find a “dire warning” in the fact that “Woodstock” (Fisher Stevens), the character referred to most as a masturbator, has his fingers chopped off. And then there is the backstory of Cropsy: in the fireside version, he was a disliked janitor who followed around a boy with his garden sheers constantly in hand.

Ah, yes, then we get to the meat of it: the raft scene. This is the scene that defines “The Burning”. It is here that the garden sheers are most used and it is the garden sheers that got the film added to the BBFC “video nasties” list during the 1980s. What the BBFC doesn’t tell you is that many of those “video nasties” were also full-on black comedies. “The Burning” is full of humour: black, intentional and unintentional. The summercamp scenario allows the shock-horror gags of Tom Savini’s gory effects work to move through teen comedy conventions. Funnier but arguably less unique than “Sleepaway Camp”, “The Burning” is far more humane and proficient than the “Friday the 13^th” series; for example, it seems to have more interest in its characters as actual people). Conversely, Savini doesn’t appear to have much time for the “Friday the 13^th” sequels and “The Burning” is certainly better conceived, but it is still b-grade stuff and its reputation rests mostly on those garden sheer killings which are predominantly bundled all into the raft massacre. One can laugh at the idea that Cropsy ~ whose actual size seems to vary from this moment to that, although the intension is surely that he is a big, big guy ~ would lay down in a floating canoe with his sheers, just waiting and hoping that a raft topped with teenagers would bump into him. But the killing are indeed savage, sharply edited and graphically sprayed across the screen. If slasher films rest their worth upon the killings, “The Burning” doesn’t have the bodycount of Jason Vorhees, but the raft slaughter is quite unforgettably vicious. It is true that slasher films seem to represent the meanest self-loathing of young horror fanatics for their own generation, portraying them often as selfish, disdainful and disposable. But those on the raft seem, of all the film’s victims, to be the most sympathetic and the least deserving. That, perhaps, is the greatest perversion. [2]

Another subplot provides Cropsy with further interpretation. There is a close alignment between Cropsy and resident nerd Alfred (Brian Backer) from the moment of the fireside horror-story, which is, of course, the tale of Cropsy. Alfred is apparently bullied and feels friendless, an outsider and alienated. The truth of it is that his dorm colleagues all incorporate and defend him from the main source of trouble, Glazer the bully. Perhaps Alfred’s true source of alienation and sense of inadequacy lays elsewhere. Alfred’s confused association with status, sex and scares is clear from his early attempt to scare a girl in the showers in some muddled plan to scare her, see her, to woo her, and to impress and emulate his peers. All his furious, unresolved and latent desires to resolve his sexuality and punish his perceived persecutors ~ or at least to visit a jealous vengeance upon those that are ostensibly "normal" in a way that he feels he is not ~ all this is manifest in Cropsy too. Cropsy is like Alfred’s retaliation unleashed and uncontrollable. Note how Cropsy incapacitates Alfred rather than kill him off quickly like everyone else (and if we wanted to stretch: is Alfred left-handed? Because if he is, is that his masturbating arm pinned to the wall?). But there is something else that may be at play here, for is it really the girls that makes Alfred feel inadequate? Is it that Alfred may well have a latent crush on the moderately sympathetic camp leader Todd (Brian Matthews), or even Glazer himself? But let’s forget Glazer because he goes having sex with one of the hot girls and has "dead man" plastered all over him. Cropsy disposes of all the competition and leaves only the tale of the Alfred being saved by Todd the camp counsellor and then Alfred saving Todd in return. (In a rarity for slasher plotting, Todd the councellor finds Alfred due to the latter’s screams and howls of horror; no suffering in manly silence for this victim.) Many read slashers as simply misogynist, but in truth they also contain endless male insecurities and desires to protect friends, families, lovers and crushes, not to mention plentiful anxieties over gender, masculinity, femininity and sexuality. Not so much a coming-out pic, then, but lots of repressed sexual rage which Cropsy happily acts out and then goes on to provide a romantic ending of sorts.

“The Burning” is entertaining and undemanding, but it snaps along brusquely, has better than average acting and atmosphere and is no-nonsense slasher fare. It is probably exactly the kind of item that horror’s detractors would wave around as exhibit #151 in the prosecution’s case. It is also exactly the kind of disposable and nasty fun that horror fans run to for undemanding entertainment and, as ever, to work through all those social and personal anxities.

[1] The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror, editor Phil Hardy, (Aurum Press, 1993, London), page 346

[2] This perversity - that the ostensibly underserving suffer as much as the ostensibly deserving - feels like something that Rob Zombie was trying to get to with many of his female victims in his version of “Halloween”)

My "favourite" horror films of the last 5 years... (2005-2010)

Having been given this challenge by a friend of mine, I was surprised to find I got my list up pretty quickly. The list soon overran, but let's go with the primary ten first:

"Let The Right One In" (2009)
"Martyrs" (2009)
"[.Rec]" (2007)
"The Descent" (2005)
"The Orphanage" (2007)
"Ils/Them" (2007)

"The Mist" (2008)
"The Road" (2009)
"Hansel & Gretel" (2007)
"Halloween" (2007)

And then/Honorary mention:
"Wolf Creek" ("2005")
"Vinyan" ("2008")
"The Hills Have Eyes" (2006)
"Dek Hor"
"28 Weeks Later" (2007)

What do I divine from this list? That 2007 was a bumper horror year. That I really dig the grimy neo-realism of the Twenty-First century extreme horror wave. That a lot of "video nasty" era trimmings are now mainstream. That I really like the fairytale horror aesthetic too. I'm not big on happy endings either. ...Also: I think I missed some good Asian horror and probably a bunch of under-the-radar b-horrors I missed also, the kind you would stumble upon in the golden era of the highstreet video store.

I believe that "Wolf Creek" was also better than its detractors say. Half the films in the list above have key problems, but few films don't. I have seen "Hansel and Gretel" accused of a thin story (not really), and "28 Weeks Later" has calamities triggered by dumb character behaviour, but... well... sometimes a film is good enough for allowances and forgiveness to be given. For example, "28 Weeks Laters" injects a welcome seriousness and attention to mounting fear that push it beyond its formula; plus an opening that may well bustle for "fantastic opening sequence" position with "Dawn of the Dead" (2004).

"28 Weeks Later" comes from my 'fun horror' pile, and I note that there is not enough from this pile that made the list; modest films that I felt transcended its format through execution and gusto (No, I wouldn't count "Zombieland" and "Shaun of the Dead" appears to be 2004; "30 Days of Night" (2007) is enjoyable enough but ultimately evaporates upon reflecction). This "fun pile" has little to do with humour and more to do with the enjoyment of genre tropes well presented. "The Mist" starts and runs as fun and - though there are plenty who did not like it - that ending shoves it off the deeper end into something far more troubling and vital. More fun: The "Orphanage" scores for having a couple of scenes that genuinely gave me the scares and having a genuinely heartbreaking explanation at the end... like "Hansel and Gretel", it overcomes weaknesses through beautiful execution and simple allegiance to the ghost story, moving into pure storytelling. "Hansel & Gretel" could very well be in a tie with "Dek hor", an equally creepy/sweet and beautifully executed ghost story.

Not since "The Blair Witch Project" has hand-held camera felt so vindicated and brilliantly utilised as in "[.Rec]", a point-of-view stance that dragged the viewer deeper and deeper until backing itself into a corner of the genuinely nightmarish. It also allowed for wonderful long takes. An excellent formal approach at the service of the genuinely scary unfolding zombie tale (and you can keep your "Cloverfield"). "The Descent" had a similar shrinking into a nightmare-space trajectory, and ended up a bizarrely emotional experience, seeming from out of nothing more than the standard monster movie dilemmas - something so few manage.

Blahblahblah "torture porn", etc. "Martyrs" and "Ils" took few prisoners. Both felt infused with genuine social awareness, commentary and outrage - especially "Martyrs", whereas contenders such as "Frontiers" felt forced and probably hollow and "Shaitan" felt ultimately undernourished. Both "Martyrs" and "ils" were scary for different reasons.

"Haut Tension" felt like a good con trick, but a con trick nontheless, but director Alexandre Aja scored better with me with "The Hills Have Eyes"; perhaps not as 'clever', but a more straightforward, gruelling, silly and grimy remake of the Craven original that holds up well as a nasty piece of gore-and-scares.

My feelings towards "Halloween" remain: it will stand future scrutiny.

Yes, I am calling "The Road" a horror film.

I suspect "Vinyan" could well find weakenesses in one of the top ten and take it's place; upon reflection the film reveals strength and strength and odd places for the ghost story (yes?) that feels pretty damned original and authentic.

As a mixture of post-modern horror and pure story, "Let The Right One In" is sublime. The horror genre at the height of its abilities. I need say no more.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

John Carpenter, 1976, USA


The story of John Carpenter, as any fan knows, is that he used to deliver stripped down, witty, genre-savvy thrillers and horrors, accompanied by spare and dated but wonderful synth-scores. I believe "Dark Star" (1974) to be one of the best science-fiction comedies ever made. I think "Halloween" (1978) has some the best direction ever, and I can watch it endlessly for composition and suburban mood only. Inbetween, Carpenter made "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), which is pretty much his zombie homage as re-imagining of "Rio Bravo". It reminds me of Walter Hill before Walter hill kicked in. But that early work especially...

Carpenter starts with a shoot-out that lacks any of the satisfying punch that an opener might rightly want. It's fast brutal and ugly; the parties involved are anonymous, disembodied voices. It starts as it means to go on, in shadows and washed-out hues of blue, with measured pace and menace and the menacing ominous synth riff that frequently falls into white noise. A fresh black cop babysits a station just about to close down; on the streets, silent gangs decide to exact some revenge and kill a little girl, whose father kills the murderer and then takes refuge in the non-functioning station. The gang surrounds the station and stages a kamikaze assault; inside, the cop, the girl and the infamous criminals who just happen to be there find themselves forced to unite to defend themselves.

It's simple and pulpy, peppered with hard-boiled dialogue, humourous asides and offbeat treats - such as the criminals playing "potatoes" to decide who gets to go on an escape mission. The film benefits from excellent performances from its leads, who strike the right balance between the playful and earnest. Darwin Joston as Napoleon Wilson looks like a prototype for "Escape From New York's" Snake Pliskin. Laurie Zimmer excels as the level-headed and capable desk-girl turned soldier, standing up to and alongside the guys without once compromising her femininity. The characterisation and integration of sexual and racial issues is both distinctly Seventies and subverted. As Rumsey Taylor notes:

• The crime gang excepted (which is anonymous and expendable), no primary character in the film embodies his stereotype. The criminals exhibit trust and selflessness, the new policeman (the survivors’ hierarchal authority) is black, and the women are composed, always clothed, and never scream. It is responsible, dynamic characterization. http://notcoming.com/reviews.php?id=9

In this way, the viewer never feels insulted and never quite knows who will do what. There are shocks - the death of the girl - and small moments that surprise our sense of cultured morality. Should we really root for convicted murderers? We certainly take as much relieved, cathartic pleasure as they do when they start popping off the shotguns. The father exacts revenge, but it leaves him catatonic rather than heroic. And when the other desk girl suggests they throw him outside, since he is what the gang wants, and the others stare at her and she says "Don't give me that civilised look!", the conflict between morality and the sacrifices one might make for survival is kicked right out in the open. Hadn't we already thought of that plot option before she voiced it? And what about the potential and underplayed romatic frission between Napoleon and Leigh? She seems like an otherwise sensible woman...

Appropriating and playing with genre types and expectations, "Assault on Precinct 13" is both entertaining and loaded with social commentary, like all the best b-features and pulp fiction. The gangs are rendered with a near supernatural aura... silent and near-invisible, climbing through windows like vampires, acting en masse like zombies. We are far from the fast-talkin', wise-assin' gangsters from a hundred films and shows. Yet, this never once unbalances the realism, pushing into something more allegorical. It's a rare trick for a crime thriller, and neatly accomplished. Even better, Carpenter totally subverts the idea that quiet, orderly streets mean peace and discipline. This are silent communities where the ice cream man keeps a gun at hand and where the empty streets mean you won't get any help.

FUNHOUSE

So the end result appears to be that Tobe Hooper’s best are his debut, the seminal "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and his adaptation of Stephen King's "Salem’s Lot", which remains a benchmark in TV horror. Hooper could do scary, in different ways. Even "Poltergeist" is a consummate example of family-friendly and toothless horror… with some scary. "Funhouse", another early Hooper horror, is ultimately disappointing. Apparently beset with production problems and interference that left subplots going nowhere, it’s a routine tale of "teens" not doing as they are told and uncovering terrible monsters at the local fair. It’s long on build-up, hobbled by pedestrian dialogue, characters and plotting and lacks for inventive killings. What it does have is a wonderful evocation of the carnival in all its detail and tackiness, a wonderful midway crane-shot, an unforgettable monster (some debate as to whether Rick Baker’s design is good or not: I say it’s scary, repellent and truly nightmarish), some lukewarm to above-average acting, and excellent set design. The funhouse itself is packed with garish lighting and mechanical monsters, seemingly bigger on the inside than the outside, full of genuine carnie adornments. Ultimately, it’s a routine slasher dressed up really nicely, and so it is more than acceptable when the milieu is so winning.

The most interesting aspect is that when we start off in the family home, our female protagonist Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) is getting ready to go out on a date, it quickly emerges that her prankster younger brother Joey (Shawn Carson) has turned as much of the place as he can into a funhouse of his own. Dummies, masks, cheap shocks… all present and correct, and damned if he isn’t engaging from the start in a thoroughly cheeky homage/rip-off of "Halloween" and "Psycho". In their respective funhouses, both attackers indulge in displays of violence from sexual immaturity: Joey attacks his sister in the shower with a decidedly limp fake knife, wearing a mask that makes him look like a demented old man; our hideous monster Gunther’s (!) premature ejaculation and un-fulfilment drives him to murder girl scouts and fortune tellers. Gunther and Joey both have excellent reveals when their masks are torn off to reveal… greater horrors than the masks traded in. In another "Halloween"-style gag, we see Gunther ( Wayne Doba) help run the funhouse wearing a Frankenstein’s monster’s mask long before the truth about his deformity is revealed (the patrons are deliciously clueless). But at base what "Funhouse" has is the kind of two-dollar sexual motivation and undertones of most post-"Friday the 13th" killer flicks, and exactly the kind that "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" didn’t trade in. On the one hand, sexual immaturity drive the confused to horrible crimes and pranks of passion, and on the other, it’s only the virgin seemingly rewarded with survival.

It is the carnie father and son that represent the family sticking together and surviving against the odds, despite also evidently being the foreign threat to small-town America. The father (Kevin Conway, adding much needed class) is both repulsed and loving to his hideously deformed son, given to bouts of cruelty but also not ready to let him be lynched like his mother or displayed as a sideshow freak like his brother. In comparison, the respectable middle-class suburban family are cold fish indeed, peddling in quick disdain, superficial concern and seemingly disinterest in one another. We can at least allow credentials of tragedy to the horrific monster and dad team, especially as mime artist Wayne Doba gives his best Karloff’s monster rendition to inscribe the Gunther with all kinds of pathos. There’s not much to care about in the double-dating couples who decide to stay overnight in the funhouse, just for chuckles and foreplay. Despite a nice realistic moment where an initial altercation between Amy and her slightly disreputable date sets the night off on the wrong foot, there is little of interest to the couples themselves.

Once these nondescript couples see Gunther commit murder and are hunted down, one might have asked for a little more inventiveness with the funhouse lay-out and props, what with them being so creepy, fun and fascinating. One might have wished for a more creative killing spree to compensate, although there is quite a convoluted castration for Gunther, with his midriff crushed in the gears of the funhouse… yet it never feels as excessive as it ought to be. …Meanwhile, our Joey has skipped out of home and is enjoying the carnie all by himself, and in a further state of impotence can’t get inside the funhouse, which is surely his spiritual home. One can argue that his side-story finally goes nowhere. We could also leave the funhouse asking who the real monsters are… and that’s your standard issue horror coda right there. It will probably always work.

Tobe Hooper, 1981, USA

"Halloween": the biopic (World of Remakes #1)

"HALLOWEEN":

THE BIOPIC

1/ Fear of the Remake.

Firstly, the original "Halloween" is scary. As a kid, it terrified me every time I watched it… for years… I have no idea how many times I have seen it, and even now I am happy to leave it on as wallpaper, because the direction alone is a pure treat. There’s a killer on the loose, and that’s all you need to know. You don’t need to know why.

Come the Twenty-First century and many previously scorned low-budget horrors had be reclaimed as cinematic classics, or at least worthy. And there seemed a greater and more cynical spate of old favourites being remade. Or "re-imagined". This isn’t anything new, and Horror has always been a highly, ahem, cannibalistic and incestuous genre. That and shamelessly derivative, of course. But to be a horror fan is, unlike proper critics, to find the gold in the trashy, and not to criticise the trash for not being shiny enough. Inevitably, a remake of "Halloween" was declared, and they said Rob Zombie was going to remake it. Well Zombie had earned a lot of fandom with his earlier features - "House of a 1,000 Corpses" and "The Devil’s Rejects". They showed promise, but lacked discipline and erred on what I’ll call the "heavy metal" vision of horror. He was known for white trash sleaze. Then we heard Zombie was going to give Michael Myers a proper childhood back-story. A white-trash back-story. It didn’t sound promising. It sounded like blasphemy. A small corner reserving judgement because they believed in Zombie; the rest of us did that thing of snorting our derision at Hollywood defiling the greats.

My first reaction was fascination. I groaned at the un-sophistication of the opening set-up. Repulsive stepfather cussing everyone in sight and if he wasn’t an abuser, that‘s probably only because he didn‘t have enough screen-time to get around to it. Mother-stripper. Michael Myers sister making weak gags about his masturbating. Baby wailing in this maelstrom. On the other hand, we had young Michael starting the morning by cleaning up having murdered another pet, and during the bad white trash breakfast dialogue asking for a replacement furry victim. The shaky-cam began to reveal itself as cinematic, not just Hollywood YouTube. We had standard school bullies who, naturally, brought with them a load of smut-talk concerning Michael’s mother. And then there was the first killing… the bully gets it and it’s horrible. Truly horrible. Something chilling sets in. After the family murders, Malcolm McDowell dominates Act II, which is concerned with Michael’s institutional treatment. Act III, and Michael is a gigantic slab of heavy metal meat, on the rampage in all washed-out ugly colours. There’s a station rest room with a black guy offering a Tarantino-esque segment. There are a lot of bloody bear breasts, firmly staking this as exploitational and unprogressive, maybe even cynical. It’s too long. I was waiting for it to end shoddily, but it doesn’t: the end is straightforward, nothing fancy. And yet.

It finished and it stayed with me. I saw it again. The dialogue was still weak, and yet I found I had remembered, and still recall it mostly as a silent movie. The camerawork is impressive still, utilising a variation on the handheld prowl cam brilliantly used by Carpenter; it shakes around the scenes and glances around the killing, often falling still on framing as consummate as the original. Here, rather than stalking and prowling, it’s like a voyeur-bug, or a detached part of Myer’s psyche watching himself. The early killings are compelling and eschew fast-cutting shock-editing for a more elongated sense of dread. The resonance is of matter-of-fact brutality, rather than cheap thrills. The view shakes around the murder of the stepfather, then it pauses as the blood floods from the bottom of the frame, off screen. As the household slaughter unfolds, Michael takes a moment to look outside at the fake horrors, all those trick-or-treaters. The final rampage has none of the thrills and clutch of suspense of the original, but it does give Michael a moment of utter pleading and confusion when he falls to his knees before his non-comprehending sister; and it does have a finely executed and extended metaphor of the old Myers house being torn apart by Michael from the inside.

As trite as the expression "re-imagining" is (smacking of denial as to the actual nature of the carrion-like "remake" beast eating from the good name of the original), Zombie’s "Halloween" almost validates the term. Zombie has filtered Carpenter’s original through his own agenda, and ultimately that is as it should be. The alternative is the kind of serviceable but unremarkable horror remake in the vein of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". I didn’t care that "Halloween" was too long (I rarely do). I chuckled at Malcolm McDowell showing everyone else how to actually dispense a line. I was convinced by Daeg Faerch’s angel/devil delivery: one minute momma’s boy, next silently creating corpses around the house. I wallowed in the sleaze, the flipside of Carpenter’s clean suburbia (decades later and suburbia had devolved into "Gummo" and "Suburbia"). Damn if the very choices mostly dreaded - extended and coloured-in Myers origins - became that which elevated Zombie’s version and gave a parallel vision of the original. It’s more grungy than heavy-metal. With a more focused basis - using Carpenter’s original rather than Zombie’s own idea - Zombie arguably revealed more disciplined and mature aesthetic compared to, say, the "Natural Born Killers" style of throw-every-at-the-wall-hope-it-hits-on-a-statement of his earlier efforts. It was more "Martin" and "Henry" than "Friday the 13th" and "Black Christmas". There was meaning in this remake.

2/ The Ups and Downs of Michael Myers

In ‘Film Comment Magazine’ (March/April 2008), Nathan Lee lays out the proper way to watch Zombie’s "Halloween": not as a teen-titillating slasher, but as a biopic. Indeed, it sports all the obvious, clunky dialogue typical of biopics of even Oscar-fraternising repute such as "Walk the Line". It follows a linear childhood-to-adulthood timeline, but it also inverts the biopic genre. Whereas many biographies follow the Lazarus and martyrdom templates, Zombie offers up Myer’s life story as an unstoppable, scarcely explicable fall from barely held grace. There are two endings to "Halloween", one where Myers achieves some glint of redemption in sparing his sister, and the other in a faintly ambiguous showdown where she kills him. This latter is the version I saw theatrically, and the one I base my comments upon. The former offers some respite, some speck of humanity for Myers; the latter doesn’t, as he pursues his sister through the wreck of their childhood home only for her to pull a Final Girl turn-around. But even with the more positive ending, this isn’t a story of redemption like many biographies, but of complete psychological collapse. (For your comparison: "There Will Be Blood".)

Zombie is at pains to trace the line between internal and external psychological climates that drive Michael to his first kills - and a second viewing reveals the earliest murders as unforgettable and shocking as Carpenter’s original. Then to the failings and inability of institutions to help, indeed, they compound Myers’ psychosis. When the prison guards go on a despicable spree to abuse their inmates, it’s trashy enough, but also reminiscent of similar scenes in Lynch’s "The Elephant Man". But here, Myers is not salvaged by the kindness of civil society, but crushed in its wheels in a world where everything seems to be devolving, and the niceness of suburbia seems to barely compensate. The institutions, as represented by Malcolm McDowell’s psychologist, seem to be making stabs at humanitarianism, even towards someone like Michael Myers; but their smugness, self-congratulatory manner and inability to prevent their charge’s complete psychological collapse allow Myers the total monster to fester until he sees his chance to unleash himself. It is probably this middle section that bores those that come for the tits-and-blood that Zombie can’t help but wallow in and which, at first glance, appears to be his main conclusion to all that has gone before. But this second act shows the extent of Zombie’s ambition and dedication that he pushes the boundaries of the slasher form, by stopping the whole show to make sure we see the final environmental reasons for the evolution of this monster. Arguably, watching Michael’s psychological retreat from the world is just as distressing as his early murders. And also, Zombie is not interested in evolving Myers into a Myth. Myers is a pure meat-and-potatoes monster.

As a biopic, Zombie’s "Halloween" offers qualities that Carpenter’s peerless original did not: despair, pathos and a genuine slice of tragedy. It is not a delicate piece, but it is considered in its rendering and chilling in its detachment, a detachment that hides a surprisingly curious and humanitarian core. Why is Myers? it asks. The camera not only spies, it pries. It asks without pretensions to knowing. Although rampaging is all it ultimately concludes, this is only because "Halloween" knows we have no answers. For these reasons, it is a worthy remake, a genuine re-imagining, and, I expect over time, it will be revealed as a minor classic on its own merits.

HALLOWEEN

"Halloween":

Suburbia, Sex, Slashers

1: The Mystery of Michael Myers

It goes without saying that ‘faceless’, expressionless, silent killers terrify due to their apparent emotionless and impenetrable veneer. To this deliberate end, Michael Myers of John Carpenter’s "Halloween" has the gimmick of the mask - famously, a William Shatner mask. We see Myers’ face only twice: as a child, and as an adult in the frenzy of killing - and in the latter example he desperately pulls the mask back over his face. Once the mask becomes his true visage, he moves from Myers to the boogeyman, or The Shape, elevating to mythical and iconic status, before our eyes, within the film and across its fan-base. No definitive explanation is given as to why Michael murders his sister, and this too is deliberate ~ unlike "Nightmares in a Damaged Brain", it is not the confused witnessing of the sexual act that triggers him, the primal scene. Is it his suspicion of his sister’s sexual nature that activates him, perhaps? Prepubescent, incestuous jealousy? We assume it’s the deviant teenage sex, as we always do, but we really have little evidence. Or did he always intended to kill from the moment he approaches the house? Obviously this lack of motivation is essential to Myers: it matters not why he kills, only that he does, He’s the boogeyman.

Myers enters his own home like an intruder, by means of a definitive use of point-of-view hand-held camera, gliding and searching an unremarkable suburban home. And the camera goes out of focus at one point so we cannot identify the hand reaching for a knife, withholding the killer’s identity until the prologue’s shock revelation. (In fact, this is [producer] Debra Hill’s hand, which creates a far more mundane reason for this out-of-focus moment: to disguise the fact that it was not a child’s not for the sake of surprise revelation, but for purely practicality.) It is a seminal horror film opening: smooth, brilliantly executed, wry, chilling, thrilling and promising all the unspeakable terrors to come.

Far less politically charged than the new living dead, Texan cannibals and last houses on the left, "Halloween" nevertheless subversively laid bare the fragility of the post-Baby Boom suburban opulence. The old monster-on-the loose scenario was updated and rampant in your conservatively inclined leafy town, subtext relatively intact. Myers might just as well be a man in a rubber suit, so alien and inhuman is he. Just because you have a nice house, it won’t stop him, and he doesn’t roar and run so that you call the military in either. Nonetheless, Myers is a force of nature: that unleashed Id, dispatching sexually active young adults; a smalltown horror that doesn’t know to stay dead, finally transcending himself into a supernatural, mythical entity.

There is little realism to Myers: his sole redeeming feature is that he was once a child, but this is barely substantial: it is simply the first shock and twist. Even as a child, when his Halloween mask is first taken from his face by his parents, the face is equally blank and unreadable. His childness - I.e., his vulnerability and innocence - it’s an assumption he discards presumably as soon as he can. He suffers none of the detailed psychological disturbances of "Nightmares in a Damaged Brain"; he does not possess any knowing smirks like the variably human Damien Antichrist of "The Omen" series. There is no filling-in of Myers’ childhood; no distraught but insightful interviews with the parents; no concept that rehabilitation will redeem him, or that he even qualifies for it. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is almost there simply to run around refuting Myers’ ability to be human, to declare the blank concerning ‘The Blank’. Loomis is not so far from Kevin McCarthy at the end of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers", trying to warn the impenetrable traffic of an alien invasion, bringing about the end of humanity. There is no attempt to endow Michael Myers with any sympathy or reasoning, and therefore he ends up forever the inhumane murderous child. Damaged children and mutant offspring have always been essential to the genre, as much as child abuse has created a large proportion of TV "tragedy" drama. Robin Wood has rightly identified childhood itself as a state of "Otherness"[1]. Myers is s parental, cultural and social nightmare. What is he the result of? Idealised but ineffectual Baby Boomer parents? The net result of repression in a Christian-Conservative-Capitalist society? The manifestation of virgin-babysitter Laurie’s fear of sexual punishment and the predatory male? Or is he just, you know, plain bad?

[1] The other states of Otherness is to be: other people; woman; the proletariat; other cultures; ethnic; alternative ideologies/politcal systems; sexually ‘deviant’ - & children. ~ Robin Wood, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film", in Movies and Method: volume II, ed. Bill Nicholls, (University of California Press, London, 1985) pg.199-200.

2: The Friends of Michael Myers

Sidestepping the slasher’s origins in giallo (like a disreputable pal to American thrillers, what with all that European explicitness), in its American horror context "Halloween" was released the same year [1978] as "Damien – Omen II" and "The Fury"; 1977 had offered "Audrey Rose", "The Exorcist II: the Heretic" and "The Island of Doctor Moreau". All these were mainstream expressions of the horror genre, all possessing monstrous offspring. Their subtexts were filtered through a middle-class, neo-Gothic setting and traditional Christian and conservative ethic, working on a vision that at once embraced and then rejected modernity in all its opulence, as well as contemporary science for solutions to spiritual questions and advancements. By contrast, the alternative low-budget scene offered the likes of "The Hills Have Eyes", "Night of the Living Dead" and "I Spit on Your Grave" alongside "Halloween". Unsurprisingly the big-budget horrors reaffirmed your basic status quo of Good and/vs. Evil, whereas the independents, in an post-Vietnam era, just weren’t so sure.

George Romero and Tobe Hooper had already clearly pointed out how horror had a natural affinity for documentary technique and aesthetic. Despite being low-budget and ostensibly modest, Carpenter’s "Halloween" helped point to how the new wave of horror could carry a modest but slick sheen too. Free from the demands of mainstream production, finding it increasing easier to at least get hold of a camera, the low-budget filmmakers were able to carve new paths through taboos, and their influences were permanent. Damien’s smirk in "The Omen" signifies the audience’s complicity in the enjoyment of such high-concept, absurd demonic shenanigans; but "Halloween’s" killer offspring is far too close to home, confirming our fears for our children left unsupervised there, confirming our worst fears about their promiscuity, about the realism of prowlers and murderers. Despite Myer’s supernatural evolution, it is his corroboration of our paranoia and worst fears that consolidates his mythic qualities. That’s no big secret, but nevertheless, despite its homage to the fun of fear, therein lies the poignancy of Carpenter’s film.

It is easy to see how Aurum concludes that "by sidestepping social or moral comment, [Halloween] offers a foolproof blueprint for bloody violence," [2] but Halloween offers very little blood and by-passes easy moralising in order to create a symbol of a very real and deep fear for a fresh-packed suburban generation. Myers is a moral void, ergo inhuman, ergo a killer. When he kills his sister, he watches himself stabbing her; later he will use the same gaze to study his victim as they hang dying upon the wall. It is as if he cannot understand or believe what he has done, his fascination very much like a child pouring acid upon a slug or smashing bottles. Y’know: just to see. And further to this, Carpenter, and his unsurpassed use of prowling Panavision camera toys with us and our nerves in the same way. And again it links the serial killer deeply with voyeurism, and therein cinema itself. What does it mean to watch someone being killed, even cinematically? In this way, Myers is the very passive-aggressive audience that simultaneously celebrates the fear he provokes in them. This alertness to voyeurism was always present in killer films, (e.g. "The Spiral Staircase") but Myers was a somewhat quieter and decidedly modern rendition of your Hitchcock killers or Peeping Toms. Pretty soon, serial killers were going to be a sub-genre all of their own.

Legend has it that from "Psycho" and "Halloween", a brand new batch of novelty murders were born. If "Psycho" was the sly entertainer, "Halloween" was the overachieving runt and "Peeping Tom" the despised black sheep, academically pointing to the phobias and perversions of his peers. "Psycho" leads to "Silence of the Lambs". "Halloween" led immediately to "Friday the 13th", whereupon the lineage immediately stunts itself, and to too many derivatives to speak of; latterly revived somewhat by post-modernism and post-MTV ‘cool’ of "Scream". "Peeping Tom" led to… "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", "Man Bits Dog" and "Funny Games", perhaps. Arguably it was going to be David Fincher's "Se7en" that distilled all these into one fin de siecle package, and then Fincher's "Zodiac" that denied all the showbiz of the genre by treating it purely as police procedural and puzzle. The urban-legend-come-super-naturally true would give the world Freddy Kruger (a despicable but safely fantastic horror) and Candyman (ditto)… And so on. Nevertheless "Halloween" remains a truly entertaining and influential piece, a recognised classic and, due to its staking a claim on a seasonal holiday, classic and eternal.

[2] Halloween review, the Aurum Encyclopedia of Horror, pg. 329.

 

 

3: Myers is a Bad Date

It is impossible to avoid reflecting upon serial killer flicks without mentioning Carol J. Clover’s concept of ‘The Final Girl’: a masculinised heroine who survives or destroys the serial killer [3]; she is a homoerotic stand-in for the male audience, and thereby denies feminist reading. But it seems short-sighted to assume that any violent female reaction to a male threat immediately endows her with unquestionably masculine traits [4], or even that her use of a knife immediately endows her with a substitute phallus ~ sometimes a weapon is just a weapon (it depends upon representation, context, etc.). ‘The Final Girl’ also more-or-less sidesteps the erotic appeal of the female in distress to the male audience. The female body is threatened and damaged in the scenario, it is stabbed and slashed and revealed, pierced and bloodied; often taking the form of a stab-and-strip show. The Final Girl is not the only surrogate upon which the male gaze can project his own vulnerability and fears, apparently ‘feminine’ qualities. There are those also played out through male surrogates, the erotic appeal of the female left intact: these apprehensions are played out in an archetype which might be termed the Male Protector.

In many horrors, the desire for the male to protect the female is stimulated and challenged, and almost always they fail. Defending one’s loved ones is deeply fixed in the traditional male gender role, and slasher flicks - unlike action films - spell out how fathers, husbands and boyfriends can/will fail as the Male Protector. The threat is often another, stronger, homicidal male who wants to deny other males their sex-lives and to punish the females for theirs. Films like "Halloween" renders the male fear of being unable to save and safeguard the female body and feminine objects of lust and affection from superior male predators. This arousal and failure of the Male Protector, who is often dispatched early, symbolises all kinds of impotency. Other times the dynamic might change and become more complex when the threat facing the Male Protector is a mother ~ "Psycho", "Friday the 13th", "Deep Red", etc. In "Black Christmas", the final twist rests upon the Male Protector’s failure to recognise the female threat. These latter films also show the perceived homoeroticism of The Final Girl as failing to address female violence.

The slasher film also services rape-revenge fantasies for women. The surviving and central/final girl may not actually be violated, but her fear and the threat of it alone is enough to validate extreme self defence. After all, she must dispatch the killer in a gratuitous, graphic and inventive manner to satisfy revenge for having been stalked and humiliated. Oh, and the slaughter of her pals. Evidently, this also co-insides with the need for a show-stopping, sweaty, exhausted end to the cinematic experience, and we are often left celebrating female endurance and resourcefulness. Faceless or excessive male sexuality, often seen as violent, warrants extermination, or at least a good castration. In Abel Ferrara’s "Ms. 45: Angel of Death", the mere ability of men to breathe heavily upon the disturbed woman Thana is enough to earn their deaths (and she goes one better than wearing virginal white: she dresses as a nun!). Laurie in "Halloween" avoids symbolic rape, but she must pay back Michael Myers for what he has done to her friends, as if they were but rehearsals for her potential fate. This is why she must witness her friend’s corpses, in a moment of amassed horrific revelation and plot assemblage. Through these films, female protagonists are allowed the power to survive and eliminate the sexual abuses suffered by all sisterhood, past and present.

[4] Another key qualification of the masculine "Final Girl" that Clover states is their given unisex name: Laurie in Halloween, Marti in Hell Night, but this is obviously highly limited and easily dismissed once past a handful of final girl candidates.

4: Michael Myers is a Monster

William Schoell finds Halloween endowed with tedium, repetitious music, a rip-off of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (they are, of course, two quite different beasts, but…). He says: "Bloodless and pedestrian, Halloween just sits there when it should be doing something," despite its "nice premise." [5] Alternatively, "Halloween" anticipates the mythologizing of the modern serial murderer; the repetition of the score may be seen as a motif for the killer’s relentlessness [6]; its bloodlessness may reflect only a "comparative tastefulness" [7]. He is correct on the mythologizing and the score, but also misses the film’s reliance upon build-up, menace and suspense rather than cheap gory pay-offs, as used by its many imitators. Further, it is often the lesser known Bob Clark film "Black Christmas" (1975) that is often credited with forerunning the youth-orientated slasher genre, and is a far more identifiable forerunner for "Halloween" than "Texas Chainsaw", if only in atmosphere and use of a national ‘holiday’. Or, as Kim Newman puts it, "'Halloween' was about as original as an Italian Western remake of a samurai epic" [8].

Nevertheless Myers was a culmination of his killing predecessors, and for better or worse pointed the way ahead. The originality of "Halloween" is obvious: in near-definitive and timeless use of its widescreen Panavision streetscapes and of subjective camera; in its non-Gothic unmannered acting reminiscent more of Seventies neo-realist thrillers (all the camp is neatly distilled into Pleasance‘s Loomis); in bringing giallo traits to American killer flicks; in the thick but modernised shadows and sudden shocks; in truly giving the girls centre stage and a fighting chance for a feminised age; in bringing the slaughter to suburbia. Both in technical execution and entertainment value, it rewards study and repeated viewing. It remains seminal as a purveyor and portrayal of contemporary fears.

_____________________

NOTE: This article is a shorter version of a work-in-progress chapter for my intended book on horror/thriller cinema, "The Gory Id: essays on killer films".

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[5] Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower: the shocker film phenomenon, (Robinson Publishing, London, 1988) pg. 133.
[6] Carpenter has often said how the film did not frighten preview audiences at all until the score was added.
[7] Schoell, pg. 134.
[8] Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies, (Harmony Books, New York, 1988) pg. 144.