Halloween (1978, Directed by John Carpenter)The sequels are all unwatchable, and the original itself
Halloween (1978, Directed by John Carpenter)The sequels are all unwatchable, and the original itself is a tired reference point and inspiration for a lazy slew of slasher films (and their parodies). It’s enough to put anyone off of the original, which just happens to be a fine little shocker, not to mention a film-school primer in audience manipulation. Indeed, in 1978 director John Carpenter manipulated viewers like no one had done since Hitchcock traumatized the nation with Psycho.That’s fitting, as Carpenter uses Psycho as a kind of foundation. Janet Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, is the heroine, and Donald Pleasance plays a psychiatrist named Sam Loomis (the name of Leigh’s paramour in Psycho). There are some other in-jokes, but more significantly, Carpenter establishes from the start that we are dealing with a slicing-and-dicing homicidal maniac, and then spends the remainder of the evening having that very human monster lunge in and out of the Panavison frame—or maybe just loom in the corner. We fully understand how a psycho behaves, and Carpenter uses that against us. The film would probably not have been greatly altered if, at some point, the director walked into frame, turned to the camera, and stated, “I’m toying with you; enjoy the rest of the show.”Thanks to cinematography that’s as crisp as a fall afternoon, the Panavision lens also captures an unsurpassed setting for a horror film so inextricably linked to urban legend. The jack-o’-lanterns, the golden leaves—all artificial, by the way—blowing across the sidewalks and lawns of a solid American suburb, and the tidy front porches evoke our collective Halloween neighborhood. It was producer Irwin Yablans’ idea to call the picture Halloween; irrespective of the first script (The Babysitter Murders), Carpenter could not have possibly used any other title. -- source link
#halloween#john carpenter#horror cinema#the seventies