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| From http://breathingdead.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/1191857431-halloween.jpeg |
Dir. John Carpenter
USA
Film #31, for Wednesday 31st October, of Halloween 31 For 31
Written and completed in November,
this review is a fitting way to end October of writing with the next month
enclosing over the other. Plenty of films were missed or were not available to
cover as I desired, while others were spotted and hastily added, turning out to
be fitting for the occasion and worth their weight in being written about. Despite
my desire to not let this get in the way of ordinary life, my original rules
for the project failed to realise how much enjoyment and pride I would get from
the whole work even if it was hard. To end the project with a fitting film, I
had to go back to something as iconic as Halloween,
a horror film talked about by everyone, praised by many, and the original
bloodline for a whole sub-genre without taking into consideration its influence
on other genre films. There is of course the fear that with a film as written
about like Halloween there will be
difficulty adding anything new to it, but that seems a pointless argument. Also
I can claim to a different perspective where, first viewing it in my later
teenage years, I thought it was a good film and respected its legacy, but far
from the best of its genre in my view. Rewatching it this year changed my mind
to this, and this repeat viewing to end the October season has confirmed that.
And to think there are so many terrible
horror films that lay claim to being tributes to it. Just before watching Halloween last night I decided to clear
through a shot-on-digital work called Maniacal
(2003, director Joe Castro) that I knew going to be bad, only to realise
the comparisons between it and a good
film like Halloween were fitting. Even
if it is a lowest of low budget films, Maniacal
in its worst virtues ended being a perfect template for all the horror films in
the last decade that I could live without, shot on video or the type of cult
and mainstream releases of a far higher budget you usually think of, the padded
out and forced regurgitation of previous ideas with a self deluding habit of referencing
the films of yesteryear like a lame attempt at starting a conversation at a
social gathering. Quentin Tarantino
could be blamed for this, but I would rather point the finger at a film like Scream (1996) whose self-referential
comments, that never broke down the clichés it was pointing out and making it
seem half hearted, mixed with the to-be-expected habits of lazy filmmaking in
later films and their mentality and lead to mere name-checking without
attempting to break down the references and breaking into anything new. Maniacal, about a mentally challenged
young man who escapes from an asylum - actually a room or two with a few people
dressed in white frocks but I’m not going to scorn the film for its cheapness
when its actual sins are redundancy – is as much part of the brethren of film
fan cinema of my generation, with films like Scream or most of the neo-Grindhouse movement, which references and uses the tropes of the
past on purpose, but merely feel like copies that only illicit thrills for the
references or tropes themselves. (Kind of like Family Guy, to kick it on the ground again on this blog to be
honest.) Maniacal’s actresses
clearly evoked the female protagonists of Halloween
(Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes and P.J. Soles) but transmogrifying the friends of the main character from
high school girls to women with clearly silicon pumped breasts, like two miniature
footballs stuffed in a flesh suit or when Andy
Sidaris unfortunately went to the fake breasts over the beautiful real ones
immediately in his action-softcore films, as much an act of more mainstream
films when young actresses are sculpted into plastic instead of flesh and bone
and human souls. Final Cut Pro edited scenes and software font text onscreen in
Maniacal becomes use of CGI without
any sense of creativity. Poor technical composition becomes hackneyed ‘music
video’ editing. Crow barred references to slasher films become rehashes of
older generations of films without striving to be something new. A
shot-on-budget piece of forgettable waste becomes a overhyped and creatively
sparse piece of waste, low or high budget alike eating its own innards without realising
the consequences or ignorant to them. When claiming to be tributes to the past,
they merely descend into the tedious equivalent of an mind numbing trivia contest rather than a excavation of
what frightens the viewer and raises the hairs on the back of their head. Horror
has had its crud since its origins, but with this generation there is a sense
that they mis-viewed films like Halloween
and, bar the few gems that cause my heart to backflip in exhilaration, a lot of
them missed why these classics deserve that moniker.
It is Halloween at Haddonfield,
with Michael Myers returning back, after a fifteen year stint in an institution
for killing his older sister at six years old, with designs to kill more people
for the sake of killing. His psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is in pursuit, by for three young women (Curtis, Kyes and Soles) they are
inadvertent casualties when the day is taken over by night and a holiday that
is supposed to be trick ‘n’ treating and joy is disrupted by a tall shaped man
in a pale white mask with a knife.
Most people have seen Halloween, seen it a few or many times,
and even dared wander through the fourth to sixth parts of the franchise with a
curiosity that kills cats, but it amazes me to think, as fans of the film may
attest to as well, how few lessons were learnt from it about how a film should
be made even if its intentions is a visceral horror movie. John Carpenter is not the worst stereotype of a ‘film fan’
director, his obsessions outside of cinema as well as enamoured by the cinema
too, as shown interviews with him, and his influences go outside of horror
films as well. When he does tip his hat to genre film – showings of the
original The Thing From Another World
(1951) or Forbidden Planet (1956)
on the televisions the characters watch – it is not bashed over your head but
neatly threaded into the whole work. He also riffs on them, as when the primal
electronic noises of Forbidden Planet,
as it is being played on a TV within a film, suddenly is layered over an image
of Myers’ sinister machinations outside in the supposedly safe suburbia. Even though
the film is primarily a simplistic horror film by design, set on Halloween
because the producer wanted to try a film set at that time, it was made with
thought, love for the work, and to make something to pin the viewer to their
seat. That does not stop it being more than this, and that makes it a far
greater piece of entertainment too as a result. I will openly lift comment from
an audio review I listened to, by the podcast The Gentlemen’s Guide To Midnight Cinema and pointed out by one of
their guest reviewers (Link To Podcast Episode Here), that the single class we see onscreen has Curtis’ character listening to a
discussion on fate and its inevitability, how Laurie Strode the main
protagonist will inevitably meet Michael Myers face-to-face. Adding my own two
cents to this idea, the fact that in a scene not so long afterwards the Blue Oyster Cult song (Don’t Fear) The Reaper is heard diegetically
on a car radio, even if it was a coincidence, cements the sense that as well as
being a killer-on-the-loose film, existing before slasher films came to be, Halloween plays into the season’s
background by having a bogeyman who at one point literally forms tangentially from
the complete darkness of a shadowed doorway.
Cinematography – even over Carpenter’s legendary score and the good
performances – is Halloween’s
greatest virtue as provided by director of photography Dean Cundey. Again as I have stressed in an earlier review, one
does not need to have taken a Film Studies class to see why a film like this is
a great for its cinematography, but merely to notice where the camera moves, or
is placed, and why. The greatly canonised metaphor of a film camera being a
mechanical version of the human eye is one that could help anyone, if they
think of it, see the best techniques for how great they are even if the
terminology is completely lost to them. In a single camera movement – such as a
swing across from one side of a telephone booth, where Dr. Loomis is trying to
warn the sheriff of Haddonfield, to the open door he is stood in-between – this
film shows its technical prowess, and the whole movie is full of panning,
gliding and moving cameras that all evoke the growing tensions that can make
the hairs on the back of your neck rise even on the hundredth viewing. That is
not taking into consideration the opening sequence from the first person
perspective of a six year old Michael Myers, a prolonged take from outside the
house, to the top rooms, and out again.
When the film moves into its main
night time setting, Halloween fully
becomes the masterpiece I realised it was, the absence of light creating
shadows and darkness that add to the fear of Myers and exemplifies the scares
further. Drenched in shadows, the film started reminding me of Film Noir,
German Expressionism, and in the effect of light on window blinds that produces
lines on scenery and people’s faces, even Bernardo
Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970),
Carpenter’s film in company with
these films where the use of manipulation of light and darkness adds so much to
their moods and emotional impact. It also helps Halloween in its supernatural element, the everyday aspects of life
– babysitting, watching horror films on Halloween night, having sex with your boyfriend
– punctured by a figure that materialises out of the pure blackness with a real
sharpened blade. That the characters are modest and charmingly real - Laurie
the primordial ‘Final Girl’ of slasher films yet able to enjoy a toke on a
joint that thus pisses all over the ‘rules’ of innocent heroine in this
subgenre before they were set - emphasises a humanity to the film while causing
the stunning use of shadows, filtered through the ominous electronic score, to
feel even more frightening in how it devours a normal environment and twists it
inside-out.
So much is written about Halloween, but it has to be emphasised
what its virtues are just in hope that one day the tributes made to it by new
films will be honourable rather than a disgrace. If this season has proved
anything, bar my new found torture technique of writing thousand word reviews
for almost 31 days straight, it is that for me genre cinema needs to be
championed for its least formulaic entries and surge of risk taking and
consideration of quality. Even the hilariously ridiculous horror films needs to
be better in their (accidental) field better than any other. Great films are
still being made, but the realisation just how many pointless films are made
wants a process of energy efficiency and a more methodical recycling of
previous films to be put in place, horror films that are full bursts of passion
and creativity rather than rehashing Halloween
for the umpteenth time. It took me a while to realise the virtue of the film,
but as part of it was the result of so many others I’ve seen failing the moment
they started, it was also the result of slowly appreciating how spine tingling
the film was. As the final credits ended just before the 1st
November at 12 o’clock in the morning, the Jack O’Lantern I carved smiling its
burning grin in the darkness of the hall outside the living room and October a
whole year away again, Halloween
proved to be the obvious way to end the whole project because, and I apologise
for my language to you the reader, it’s that damn fucking good a film to have
the final word in on the entirety of the month.
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| From http://bandbent.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/jamieleecurtis3.jpg |
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