Tod Slaughter haunts my murky memory.... (or at least a few of the same streets).

On the mysterious Bushey Studios, the kind of place where both I and Tod Slaughter stalked....

 

Currently I am working on a book on killers in film, and this has lead me to perhaps England’s first real horror star, a master of melodramatic villainy, Tod Slaughter. Slaughter was total crowd-pleasing ham of the stage and then, during the 1930s mostly, of the cinema; if you weren’t literally hissing and booing him, then he wasn’t doing his job. He was mostly recognised for his “Sweeney Todd”, but he also played dastardly bad guys called “The Spinebreaker” and “The Wolf” and so on. I would even go so far as to say that his smarmy grin and murderous cackling are the kind of thing that inspired Batman’s nemesis, The Joker.

 

But anyway, I was surprised to discover that Slaughter made some of his films at Bushey Studios. Well, I grew up in Bushey in a tiny dead-end street: at the bottom was a field where they kept a horse called Trigger, fields that I would also cross to get to school. These were also the fields that spread to the end of our garden: we had a long, long garden (so it seemed to me) and at the bottom we had a gate in the fence that opened out onto those fields and we used to go blackberry picking there. But, across those fields was a wooded area and in that wooded area was a great burnt out building. I recall walking through once with my mother on a public trail when I was probably around six years old, and I remember looking at this building and my mum telling me that these were Bushey studios that had burnt down. That charred husk did intimidate and frighten me, standing there amongst the trees in the clearing as evidence of the destructive power of fire … but the truth is that memory is a faulty thing, of course. I have tried to look up the history of Bushey Studios but there seems to be very little out there; I’ve searched online and looked through my books, but I can’t find much at all except that they were originally built by renowned local artist Hubert von Herkomer and ran from 1913 to 1985. They were known for quota-quickies and sex comedies… yes, Bushey sex comedies, if you will. Some commentators say that Tigon did some projects there. They were also, at one time, the longest standing studios in the world, it is said. But it would seem to be that its history is quite a lost one. Perhaps I will find some decent account one day.

Well, since my charred vision would have been around the early 1970s and the studio went on long after that, I largely suspect my memory is at fault. Nevertheless, I have never quite forgotten that chill I enjoyed thinking that a burnt-out film studio seemed quite a creepy and fearsome thing. This is also just to mention how surprisingly close to home the finds can be when researching this sort of thing. I’m not especially a Slaughter fan, for there is too much fakery about him for my taste, but nevertheless it’s fun to know he did his villainy in the same murky realm as my childhood memories.

 

But anyway, here is a little passage on Tod Slaughter from my book, not a definitive edit by any means, but a taster.

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Tod Slaughter is the throat-cutter - naturally.

 

 

  Slaughter!

The truth is that Tod Slaughter probably did not possess the oddness of Lugosi nor the subtlety and skills of Lorre and Karloff to have matched their career highlights. He is very broad, twiddling his moustache and skipping from murder scenes uttering “Heheheheh!”; and he was so famed for this that one can safely draw an evolution from Slaughter to The Batman’s nemesis, The Joker. He practically comes with speech-bubbles. Slaughter represents the kind of performance that would carry well in melodramatic theatre, utilising the kind of easily identifiable techniques outlined by the dramatist André de Lorde in his guide for actors. For example:

The eyes. – Half-closed: malice, disdain. Lowered: great respect, shame, etc.

The Body. – With shame, and often with terror, the body is held in, the back is curved, the arms held tightly by the sides … with fear and with repulsion, the torso is held back.[1]

And so on. Indeed, it is a style suited to the physical nature of theatre: the distance between stage and audience does not especially allow the remarkable nuances possible with the close-ups of film and television cameras. But this is also an actor’s short-hand indicating what and who they are, quickly and symbolically, which for example creates necessary urgent recognition within the confines of one-act plays of The Grand-Guignol. They play upon and reinforce the gestures and style of what popular culture identifies as indicators of good and bad characters and of heightened emotion. It simplifies. 

Slaughter himself is quite a heavy-set looking man, not particularly rotund, but more forceful than naturally imposing, pushy rather than intimidating. He lets his head dip so it is more in line with his shoulders, reducing his natural height as if his greed and murderous ways have left him hunched over with evil-doing. He looks conflicted between toadying and a barely repressed urge to pounce. Often this angling forward, his constant leaning in towards his co-stars, is matched with the ever-present and false upward grin which also forces his eyebrows upwards in his long, slightly jowly visage. It is indeed the kind of face that you imagine belonging to the well-fed, patriarchal and corrupt country squires that he often played; indeed he was already into his fifties when his screen career took off. Jonathan Rigby’ description of Slaughter’s essence is particularly English in flavour:

 

With his George Robey eyebrows, jug ears and prominent belly, his villainy is redolent of boiled beef and carrots gone rancid […][2]

But in some ways, his face is too plain for the pantomime villainy he trades in: there’s a kind of softness there that perhaps projects that he really is only play-acting; it does not really possess the vividness or distinctiveness of his peers. His face does not have the brooding of Legosi, nor the pathos of Karloff, for example; this is why he pushes his face to such extremes. There are moments when his physical technique is quite remarkable, as in ‘The Crimes of Stephen Hawke’ where – to aid his double-life – he seems to cause his body to shrink to half its size in order to appear to be a feeble old man. Nevertheless, this is a broad transformation from one archetype to another.

That smile is simultaneously shark-like and earnestly welcoming, both obsequious and devious. Occasionally he relies upon menacing moustaches, which he troubles and twirls, and those wide grins and bugged-out eyes to convey the malformed souls of his schemers and murderers. He is outsized in his films because those around him are often such dull foils, just as Sherlock Holmes is so brilliant because others are so slow on the uptake. He may have liked to brag of his character’s murderous ways when promoting his films, but there is never any doubt that he is merely playing at being despicable. The phoniness is essential to enjoying him.

Yes, you may hiss the villain.

---

[1]             André de Lorde, ‘Pour jouer la comédie de salon, guide pratique du comédien mondain’ (1908) 83-86 –

               Quoted in Richard J Hand and Michael Wilson, ‘Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies)’ (University of Exeter Press (1 Aug 2002) pg. 40

[2]        Rigby, Jonathan, ‘English Gothic: a century of horror cinema’, ( Reynolds & Hearn Ltd; 2nd Revised edition, London, 2002) pg. 27

 

Video and Violence: a vendor's tale

The following piece is taken from a work in progress, my pending book "The Gory Id: Killers in Film", and features as a foreward to a chapter discussing "Henry: portrait of a serial killer". I was lucky enough to find a journal entry written around 1992, when I worked in a video store, in which I documented a minor arugument I had had with a customer over the film and whether it was violent or not.
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Video and Violence:
a vender’s tale

During the 1990s, I was fortunate to work in what used to be called a “video store”, a phenomenon to be fondly remembered that came and burnt out over about a twenty-year period, more-or-less. Or rather, I worked in a newsagent where one corner opposite the greeting cards and chocolates was devoted to a wall of VHS covers. When VHS came, the impact on film watching was incredible: it is simply impossible to convey to any youngster what it meant when video tapes were invented and, after a while, became widely available affordable to any old household. Or the fact that you could rent videos overnight from your local store: amazing! Before the VHS revolution, if you had loved a film seen at the cinema, you would wait a year or more before it turned up on television; and if you wanted to see it a third time, you would have to wait another year for the repeat, of you were lucky, not forgetting that you would have to make sure you were actually home to catch it. I myself had many nights when I was meant to be asleep for school illicitly watching films and television with my face pressed against the black-and-white screen in my bedroom with the volume as low as possible so that I wouldn’t get caught. Film-watching required a patience and dedication that would seem intolerable in the digital age. And then there was the Video Nasty period, which made VHS dangerous too (David Cronenberg knew!). And then people were recording favourite films and television shows, and so sometimes you had to make sophisticated arrangements and networks of friends of friends to acquire that one that you missed on TV last week. And I have very fond memories – during the nineteen-nineties – of heading across town to the local film fair in order to buy the films banned by the BBFC: oh yes, I was very excited to have ‘A Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974), even in its second or third-generation quality. ‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ (1975)? ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ (1980)? ‘Evil Dead’ (1980)? Yep, those too and all the joys of acquiring forbidden fruit.

I recall that the very first VHS tapes in my collection were ‘An American Werewolf in London’ (1981), ‘The Amityville Horror’ (1979) and ‘Eraserhead’ (1976). I was still in my mid-teens when I got these and since they were all 18 certificates, I have no proper recollection of how I got them, although I do recall waving ‘Eraserhead’ at my mother to buy for me. That was a film that had stunned me upon stumbling upon a late night broadcast when I was thirteen, and to think I was to actually own it was mind-blowing. Video renting was also a delightful ritual: my local newsagent was also a video store and even though I did not know that I was to eventually end up working there in my twenties, in my late teens it was a treasure trove. Any horror fan of the era will tell you about the joys of browsing those big boxes with the outrageous and nasty covers. You were going to end up with the cut versions, probably, but those covers triggered the lurid and fevered imaginations of millions of young horror fans, creating imaginary horror films that were hardly ever to be matched by the actual film on the chunky cassette.

And then, with the advent of video cameras being made affordable and available to the general public, we started to make our own films too. But more on that later.

So I came to work at this video palace, and I grew to know its particular selection of hundreds of films intimately. There was the excitement of the days when my boss would bring back new titles from the supplier, or those that were delivered. What new films would I get to see? And then there was the disappointment of those he hadn’t ordered that I wanted to see. It was amazing, for example, when he brought back ‘Henry: portrait of a serial killer’ (1986), which I had seen in one of its rare, rare cinematic screenings at the Everyman Cinema, when it had quite traumatised me. And then I rented it out. There were times I would take home a film every night, from junk horror to Hollywood Top Titles. Then other people rented it out, much to my amusement, for I was certain that for the most part that it was not what they expected.

One day, a man slapped the cassette of ‘Henry’ on the counter, returning it, and he said, “It’s supposed to be violent, but I’ve seen more violent ‘15’s.” So I asked him, with quite some tactlessness: didn’t he find seeing a kid’s head being whacked against the floor and having its neck twisted violent? He sniffed the answer away. I wondered if he would feel different if someone broke into his house and murdered his kids (he had three). He still wasn’t convinced. He had obviously watched ‘Henry’ for the violence and had been disappointed. Perhaps the BBFC’s cut had been successful in taking out all the extremities after all? Perhaps his view of screen violence was different to mine? Oh, I am sure.

But more than that: that very day, two ten year-old boys from Merseyside had been in court for murdering a two-year old boy the week before. Their names were Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. This was the famous Jamie Bulger Case and the media and the entirety of British society was consumed with it. When the police tried to smuggle the two boys out of court, the crowd of adults outside attacked the vans, throwing bricks, threats and expletives after the van and the kids (and the police?). Soon, the prosecution in the case and the media would claim that a typical little b-movie horror called ‘Child’s Play 3’ (1991) was inspiration for the boys to kill, bringing about a second wave of “Video Nasty” hysteria. The after-effects of the first “Video Nasty” wave still had not passed, and wouldn’t until the invention and whirlwind effect of DVD. Indeed, ‘Henry’ itself had been in certificate and censorship limbo for around eight years before I got to see it, uncut, at the Everyman Cinema. But with the Bulger Case consuming all, violence and children and parenting and screen violence was very much enflaming the majority of media and national conversation. Quentin Tarantino’s debut ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992), for example, was a cause célèbre for the pro-censorship and anti-screen violence voices and kept the topic at the forefront of media outrages (although all Tarantino had actually done was leave in all the blood that film noir had previously had to keep out).

 

And within this climate where sensitivity to screen violence was high, this man that I was debating with, having rented and dismissed ‘Henry’, asked me if I had been to the Gallarea yet: The Gallarea being one of the brand new shiny multiplex cinemas that were suddenly popping up and sweeping the country, killing off all the local and small cinemas in their wake. I said that I hadn’t been to The Gallarea – yet – because it wasn’t really showing the films I liked, and I tended to go to The Everyman in Hampstead instead. To which the customer pushed up the tip of his nose and he said, “Snob!” Evidently we were never going to agree on representations of violence on screen.

Myself, I was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of screen violence and its relationship to society around that time. I was convinced that verisimilitude in screen violence was crucial to a moral representation: the more realistic and graphic, the more honest and truthful. I had foolishly been turned off by the hysterical super-violence of ‘Total Recall’ (1990), for example (later I would come back to it, wiser, less pious, and relish its absurdity and outrageousness), even though it was a film I should have otherwise lapped up for its outrageousness (which I did later). I, you see, was busy watching shockers such as ‘Henry’ and ‘Man Bites Dog’ and the ridiculous and stupid violence of contemporary action films did not convince me. I felt that they were trivialising a very serious subject. This, after all, was the glory days of super-violent actioners in the style of Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and ‘Rambo’ hits. Their lack of realism and awareness was an insult, I felt as I missed the greater complexities and representations of screen violence.

And so it was indeed the verisimilitude of John McNaughton’s ‘Henry’ that met my criteria of the time. And this, indeed, was to me real horror and real violence on video. And that was before the character of Henry himself video-taped his killing.

(To be continued in "The Gory Id: Killers in Film")

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.

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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.