FrightFest 2017 - Day 2

Ugh, well I couldn’t get the time off work so I had to miss the first three films on Friday. These things happen. My FrightFest friends vouched for ‘Freehold’ (Dominic Bridges), ‘Sequence Break’ (Graham Skipper) and ‘Radius’ (Caroline Labrche & Steeve Lonard). So I did end up thinking I had missed out. I’ll catch up with them later.

On the plus side, the whole weekend had glorious weather so once work was over and I rushed to Leicester Square and took my seat, all was right with the world. Dark stuff within; sunshine without.

68 Kill

Trent Haaga. USA. 2017-08-30

A totally winning comedy-thriller where women are nearly all trouble for a guy who evidently likes them a little crazy. Chip’s a pushover who doesn’t quite realise how crazy his girlfriend is until she persuades him to help her rob a house. Then it goes wrong, of course, and it’s all killing and lunacy from thereon as he tries to negotiate all the bloodshed and women around him. Fast, furious and funny, it’s the kind of noir-ish plotting where one bad thing leads to another extreme thing. Female empowerment means that the women are just as demented as any man, but there’s texture as AnnLynne McCord as Liza effortlessly flipflops between psychopathy, goofiness, sexiness and forcefulness.

As Chip, Matthew Gray Gubler manages to avoid making his character a pathetic sad sack but rather a smart guy who can’t help being gullible for assertive women. Its wink at the audience is sly without being its overt goal so we can all feel in on the joke without being pandered to. Its ultimate “women-are-just-trouble” coda may unintentionally tilt towards a misogynistic aftertaste, but that isn’t the whole story and this is a thorough riot of a horror-farce that puts women as the ringleaders.

LEATHERFACE 

Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury. 2017. USA

The fact that Bustillo and Maury were directing what was presumably an unpromising cash-in prequel meant that I was intrigued and open-minded about ‘Leatherface’ than I otherwise would have been. They’re the team behind ‘Inside’, ‘Livide’ and ‘Among the Living’ after all. At the very lkeast, they're so good at bacvkdrop and locale. Like ‘Among the Living’ (which I also saw at FrightFest), ‘Leatherface’ feels like a far stronger, less conventional film is trying to get out; but ‘Leatherface’ doesn’t even quite exhibit the sheer cruelty of ‘Living’. Young Leatherface is taken from his family and incarcerated in a mental institution, which, as a teenager, he then escapes with a bunch of others. I admit, it wasn’t quite clear to me that this was meant to be a game of guess-who-Leatherface-will-turn-out-to-be, but otherwise it’s a solid but unremarkable thriller of delinquents on the run from equally barbaric cops. It’s slick and better than it ought to be, but only Lili Taylor as psycho-mum really stands out.

And, of course, the announcement of the death of Tobe Hooper also cast a shadow over this title.

DEAD SHACK

Peter Ricq. 2017. Canada

On the whim of a mostly dopey dad, a family goes to a holiday home in the middle of nowhere to bond; unfortunately, the neighbouring lady has an undead family to feed… And so here’s a scenario where none of the good guys are really up to the task, the teenagers being a little immature and the dad being irresponsible, drinking and doping and disbelieving. ‘Dead Shack’ takes the familiar farcical premise of some American family comedy and gives it directions to the nearest rural horror shack. Donavon Stinson gives a glorious turn as dad – truly distinguishing the chaos – and Lauren Holly grounds things with seriousness and armour as the neighbour.  As the teenagers take charge of proceedings without being overtly precocious – Gabriel LaBelle is that annoyingly smartass pal without being obnoxious – it emerges like a ‘Goosebumps’ premise or some other teen-leaning horror except they forgot to water it down for the kids. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing as ‘Dead Shack’ maintains its horror-comedy gruel until the end when it hits a hits a few serious notes to try and give the romp some substance. It’s a lot of fun.

Salem's Lot

Tobe Hooper, 1979, USA

 

 

Adaptation of Stephen King’s novel has a small town gradually destroyed by vampires. Its deterioration is watched by typical King heroes: a successful novelist and a teenage horror fan. Central is the old Madsen house with a gruesome, haunted reputation and the arrival of antique dealer Straker and his employer Barlow. Overnight, the vampire is delivered to the quiet town in a crate and the deaths begin.

With two genre heavyweights at the helm with Stephen King and director Tobe Hooper, expectations were high for this adaptation. The general consensus amongst critics appears to be that King’s novel suffered from the limitations of television, but the novel was never particularly explicit in its horrors. It was more interested in the menace and weakening community. In this way, the TV film format seems ideal for King’s picket fence society threatened by the supernatural. The wide cast of secondary yet vividly drawn characters that populate King’s fiction often offer a soap-like backdrop, yet there may be something to Peter Nicholls’ accusation of David Soul being a “predictably wet bit of television casting.”¹ It is up to James Mason to deliver the acting delights in a nicely ambiguous turn as Straker. And it is also true that the moments that crescendo to a freeze-frame might hint at CBS censorship more than subtlety. The same year, John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’ created a similar community under supernatural threat horror, yet also demonstrated how a film may be both bloodless without compromising its violence too far.

 

Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot’, as Kim Newman has written, is a “respectable rather than devastating” adaptation that lives under the “baleful shadow of ‘Psycho’.”2 He identifies the more typically Hooperesque moment as that when a husband catches his wife and her lover and humiliates them with a shotgun. The feel here, with the over-boiled facial distress and violence implied by editing rather than by outcome, is certainly more akin to ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ than the rather plain direction elsewhere (don’t forget that ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was relatively bloodless too). Nevertheless, there is enjoyment in its long running time and slow build-up of character and incident that is closer to the novel than the 112 minute film that was subsequently edited from the miniseries.

 

‘Salem Lot’s greatest improvement upon the novel is in its use of the Glick brother vampires. In the novel, what mostly happens off-stage and is known through dialogue exposition is here given an unforgettable visual rendition. The vampire boys float outside windows, scraping on the glass, demanding to be let in. It is perhaps the film’s most memorable and chilling image, although certainly not it’s only one. I remember as a young teenager watching ‘Salem’s Lot’ and being terrified, not only by the vampires-at-the-window moments, but also at the graveyard cliffhanger and the Mr Barlow reveal. I remember watching it a second time from behind a cushion because I knew it was going to be scary. Its ambience and shock moments certainly worked on me and I am sure this particular mini-series traumatised a generation of horror fans.

The film’s greatest deviation from the novel is in its conception of Barlow the vampire. Hooper has opted to make Barlow a homage to Max Shreck’s ‘Nosferatu’; he is no longer the pretentious, condescending orator of the book: Straker is now his mouthpiece. Barlow’s entrance is another unexpected shocker, but his appearance gains the story little more than monster-make up, but nevertheless a strong defining image. It is at its best when Barlow invades an ordinary domestic dinner scene.

In many ways, ‘Salem’s Lot’ is a successful King adaptation. Despite its TV conventions, ‘Salem’s Lot’ manages some rawness, black humour and shocks; it is at least scary and atmospheric and has aged better than the televised and fondly remembered version of ‘It’. It is a long way down from here to ‘The Lost Boys’. There is no vampire sub-genre deconstruction as in Romero’s ‘Martin’, but ‘Salem’s Lot’s greatest strength is in allowing the vampires the greater visual set-ups and juxtapositioning them against the otherwise naturalistic framing. Vampires sitting in rocking chairs and coming to life on autopsy tables will still provide the delights for genre fans.

 

*

·        - Larry Cohen made A Return to Salem’s Lot, another television horror in 1987, but its relationship to the original novel and film was highly tenuous.

 

·        - Stephen King’s anthology ‘Night Shift’ contains a short story that vaguely follows up ‘Salem’s Lot’ called ‘One for the Road’. Typical of the collection, it is a slight, only mildly satisfying short.

*

[1]               Peter Nicholls,  Fantastic Cinema: an illustrated survey, (Ebury Press, London, 1984) pg. 145.

²               Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: a critical guide to contemporary horror films, (Harmony Books, New York, 1988) pg. 54.

 

Another House of Wax (World of Remakes #2)

"House of Wax"
Jaume Collect-Serra, Australia/2005, USA

"The House of Wax" seems an ideal example of how a horror remake that simultaneously cashes-in and updates a respected original can reveal the best and worst of contemporary ‘re-imaginings’. The originals ("House of Wax 1953 is a remake of 1933's "Mystery of the Wax Museum") are delightful Gothic chillers with an irresistible promise and, in one example, Vincent Price. Full of theatrical, garish and ghoulish flourishes, earlier versions were never exemplary of Classic with the capitalised "c", but simply possessed of a highly appealing horror premise, Old School charm and a good set-piece or two.

Immediately, in just invoking Price’s name, a key difference in the old and the new flares up: modern horror does not have the same cache of horror stars such as Lugosi, Karloff, The Chaneys, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing It’s in the casting that we find the conflict in the "House of Wax" remake [1]. It feels like two films competing against one another: one is a contemporised rural Gothic with lashings of Twenty-First Century graphic cruelty plus a glorious topping of surrealism; the other is one of those Teen Horrors (well, twentysomething) that seem dictated by the production company to draw in the demographic they imagine make up the horror audience. The audience who’ll apparently only come to see pretty young things talk dirty and get killed by something monstrous.

And so it is that we begin with an arresting opening that feels more like Tim Burton on a particularly nasty day - a dinnertime in which one of two brothers is strapped savagely into a chair, all to slightly edgy if not jaunty editing - which then gives way to generic soft metal and a bunch of bratty and bitching young Americans. They all fit their stereotype, their dramas are soooo day-time soap and sure enough, the chaste girl is going to be the Final Girl of sorts, the loved-up black guy and the slutty one (some stunt-casting with Paris Hilton) will do some bumping-and-grinding and the delinquent… well, he is not the obnoxious, crass type, but rather the misunderstood type. This means he will be redeemed. Herein lies the most original feature of the drama, for "House of Wax" is about sibling love rather than romance. It is not in any way revelatory - some generalised stuff about there always being a ‘good’ sibling and a ‘bad’ sibling - but it does make a change after the bland amorous pairings at the core of so many standard horrors. Otherwise, it is simply an undistinguished cast borrowed from a long line of tedious slashers and High School flicks and is probably responsible for what makes "House of Wax" so superficially banal.

But when it steers into a mixture of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) and waxy surrealism, it quite excels. Jeune Collet-Serra directly fluidly and fluently with fine sense of establishing geography and showing off the wonderful set design details. "House of Wax" throws up a number of far-fetched but gleeful conceits and spikes them with a decidedly modern focus on body horror, all culminating in the unapologetically contrived separation by knife of wax twins. Indeed, you can almost hear someone looking to remake the originals - and actually, they probably did not refer to the originals at all - and saying "Hey, what about if the house is, you know, actually made of wax?" And this paves way for the deliriously surreal denouement of the final chase in a melting building. For this little wonder, it wins over its flaws. In fact, nearly all its weaknesses can be forgiven for the exemplary set design, the lovingly grungy detail, the ending, plus another great otherworldly scene: a cinema of wax dummies watching "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?" (1962)These unforgettable set-pieces and the full-on joy the film-makers have with wax, both on a grand and small scale, make this a minor surrealist horror treat, and all that tired and humourless teen-slasher stuff is just weak scaffolding.
*
1 - The only potential crossover star I can think up is Robert England, and he is hardly a household name in quite the same way. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecktor, possibly, but he has hardly earned his crust by affiliating himself with horror.

DESPERATION

Mick Garris - USA - 2006

The first half is fair enough, with the demonic sheriff rounding up random people who just happen to be passing through his middle-of-nowhere town called Desperation, jailing them for some undoubtedly demonic purpose.. Once the victims are out of the jail, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt for an old man to spout exposition, then for an tediously evangelical and pious child to gush born-again Stephen Kingisms. King has said that horror is conservative because it is about the fight between Good and Evil. Actually, the fight between Good and Evil is the Conservative view of horror which takes for granted the existence of such polar forces. Usually this involves the most banal evocation of horror, the kind fully on display in "Desperation": unholy portals, possession, random prophetic visions, possessed people acting in hammy fashion and using pop-culture references in that punning post-Jack Torence, post-Freddy Kruger manner. Evil also uses spiders and snakes and big cats and wisecracking Hellboys (yes, Ron Perlman). God uses visions of angelic dead girls and back-story conveyed in the style of old silent-movies (complete with title cards and tight editing) to pass on visions to the prophet-boy. Later, He will use personal, shameful memories served up as bad war movies. And God also sends divine soap to aid escape plans (rather than, you know, simply opening cell doors). King’s conservative vision of horror does not accommodate the far more complex, painful and truthful horror of post-Vietnam genre films such as "Night of the Living Dead", "Last House on the Left", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"… the list is well known. To top off how this incorporates all the worst traits of King’s screenplays, the hero with the spiritual dilemma is yet again a writer.

All that matters is what God wants, says the kid at one point. In such a weak offering, does King really think he has a message to spin? It’s a mess, it’s badly paced, weakly played and unimaginatively rendered, especially come the second half. If you are to look for a far more disturbing investigation of the temptation of Evil, look to another King mini-series, "Storm of the Century". It is everything that this effort is not: carefully paced and a sturdy allegory and not just a little disturbing.

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.

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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.