2/1/15 (Part One): Crazy in Love

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alienists, alternate title, Asylum, based on a short story, Ben Kingsley, Benjamin Salt, Brad Anderson, Brendan Gleeson, cinema, David Thewlis, Don't Look in the Basement, dramas, Edgar Allen Poe, Edward Newgate, electro-shock therapy, Eliza Graves, Even Dwarfs Started Small, film reviews, films, Gothic, Guillaume Delaunay, House of Crazies, inmates, insane asylum, insane asylums, insanity, isolated estates, Jason Flemyng, Jim Sturgess, Joe Gangemi, Kate Beckinsale, King of Hearts, Lady Eliza Graves, lobotomies, love story, lunatics, madhouse, medical school, mental breakdown, mental illness, Michael Caine, Movies, mysteries, period-piece, Session 9, set in 1890s, Shutter Island, Sinéad Cusack, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Stonehearst Asylum, The Call, The Machinist, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, Tom Yatsko, Transsiberian, twist ending, Vanishing on 7th Street

Back in the 2000s, writer-director Brad Anderson was responsible for two of the most interesting, thought-provoking films of the decade: Session 9 (2001) and The Machinist (2004). While Session 9 was a subtle, endlessly creepy psychological chiller about a supposedly haunted, abandoned insane asylum, The Machinist showcased Christian Bale in a haunting role as an emaciated factory worker suffering from insomnia and really seemed to put Anderson on the map. After being duly impressed by both films (Session 9, in particular, is a phenomenal horror film and truly frightening), I eagerly awaited what seemed, on the outside, to be the ascension of a brilliant filmmaker. And then…nothing.

When Anderson finally followed-up The Machinist with 2008’s Transsiberian, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Unlike his previous two films, Transsiberian was average, at best, a Hitchcock-lite exercise that had been done much more effectively by Sam Raimi with A Simple Plan (1998). While the film wasn’t terrible and featured a good turn by Woody Harrelson, it was a notable step-down from The Machinist. After Vanishing on 7th Street (2010) showed up, however, my disappointment turned into a sort of dismal acceptance: not only was Vanishing worse than Transsiberian, it managed to be a fairly awful film, by any definition. Marked by iffy acting, a scenario that felt cobbled together from much better films and a decided lack of common sense, Vanishing on 7th Street was the first legitimately bad film of Anderson’s I’d seen. After spending the next few years working in television, Anderson returned to the big-screen with the Halle Berry-starring howler The Call (2013), which only seemed to drive home the fact that the party was over. Suffice to say, he fell off my radar at that point.

Which, of course, brings us to the present with Stonehearst Asylum (2014), Anderson’s follow-up to the critically reviled The Call. Since I no longer had any particular expectations one way or the other, I was able to approach the film with a relatively clean slate, so to speak. From the outside, there certainly seem to be a lot of positives here: Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley top-line the cast (never a bad thing), it’s a period-piece set in a turn of the century insane asylum (always a cool setting/time) and it’s listed as an adaptation of Poe’s classic short story, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” On paper, this would definitely seem to have all the earmarks of an effective, low-key psycho-drama. In reality, however, Stonehearst Asylum (originally titled Eliza Graves) is much closer to Transsiberian: decidedly average and middle of the road, Anderson’s newest film features some good acting and plenty of nicely realized Gothic atmosphere but is a decidedly “been-there, done-that” affair. It’s always problematic when a film’s big “twist” can be parsed within the first quarter of the film, especially when the film makes great efforts to obscure this fact, only to deliver the self-same “twist” that was previously discovered.

Taking the basic narrative of Poe’s story but expanding upon it (in ways both effective and decidedly less so), Stonehearst Asylum tells the story of Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess), a newly graduated “alienist” (a doctor who specializes in asylum patients) who finds himself at the mysterious, Gothic Stonehearst Asylum. Once there, he meets the eccentric staff, including Dr. Silas Lamb (Ben Kingsley), the head administrator; Mickey Finn (David Thewlis), the earthy, vaguely threatening chief steward; Lady Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), a piano-playing patient who also seems to serve on the staff and Millie (Sophie Kennedy Clark), the swoony nurse who seems to be smitten with the young doctor.

Settling into his rounds, Newgate discovers that the asylum employs a decidedly unconventional approach: not only are the patients not restricted in their movements or activities, they’re also encouraged in their various psychoses. One patient fancies himself a horse, so Lamb and the staff hand-feed him and “brush him down” regularly. “Why turn a perfectly happy horse into a miserable man?” Lamb impishly responds when Newgate asks why he doesn’t attempt to “cure” the poor, delusional fellow. Most of the patients at Stonehearst are “outcasts” and “embarrassments to their families,” Lamb continues, and have been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned at the facility.

In very short order, Newgate seems to be falling hard for Lady Graves, who suffers from a particularly debilitating form of “female hysteria”: any time she’s touched by a man, her body locks up in a rigid, paralytic state and she becomes completely unresponsive. She looks the piano, however, and her and Newgate begin to bond over their shared affinity for music. At this point, Stonehearst Asylum begins to seem like a Gothic romance, a story about star-crossed, ill-fated lovers doomed to feint and pirouette around each other like so many shadows. There is, of course, another shoe waiting in the wings.

This other shoe drops with a resounding thud when Newgate happens to look into the basement and discovers a group of filthy, hungry people locked in cages. Horrified, he listens in stunned disbelief as the leader of the group, a man who calls himself Dr. Benjamin Salt (Michael Caine), explains that the captives are the real staff of the asylum: Lamb and the other patients overthrew them, imprisoned them and took over the facility. In the strictest sense of the term, the inmates, according to Salt, are running the asylum. In a case of extreme agitation, Newgate approaches Eliza with his discovery and she seems to confirm Salt’s story, with one caveat: the former administrators of the asylum were monsters who tortured the patients in the name of “science” and deserve to be caged.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Newgate doesn’t seem to have anywhere to turn. Although Eliza confirmed Salt’s story, certain discrepancies indicate that either (or both) parties might be lying. If Salt’s story is true, Newgate is in terrible danger, especially if Lamb and the others discover that he knows the truth. If Eliza is telling the truth, however, imprisoning Salt and the others is more an act of self-defense than anything else: restoring the original balance of power could have tragic results for all involved. As everyone around him (including the caged prisoners) continue to act in increasingly erratic, troubling ways, Newgate must figure out how to get both himself and Eliza out safely, even though she’s explained that she has no intention of leaving. Newgate must be quick, however: Dr. Lamb has just developed a new technique called “electro-shock therapy” and he’s quite eager to test it out…if Edward isn’t careful, he might find his stay at Stonehearst to be a bit more permanent than he might’ve hoped.

As mentioned earlier, there’s a lot working in the film’s favor. For one thing, the Gothic atmosphere is always thick and highly effective: aside from Session 9, this is, easily, Anderson’s most atmospheric work. Thick wisps of fog obscure the hulking, angular asylum’s exterior walls, long, dark halls hold endless secrets and the continuous cries and laughing of the insane form a cacophonous soundtrack to the events. The asylum, itself, is a great location and cinematographer Tom Yatsko shoots it to great effect. The cast is also, for the most part, quite effective: while Sturgess and Beckinsale are blandly vanilla as the potential lovers, they’re surrounded by a suitably colorful cast doing some nice work. While Kingsley and Caine occasionally slide from “passionate” into “melodramatic,” they’re still both rock-solid and their handful of shared scenes are an easy highlight. I actually wish that Caine would do more low-key genre work like this: he’s pretty great and lends an air of prestige to the film that certainly helps elevate it.

There’s also plenty of great performances from Thewlis as the ultra-slimy Finn (the scene where he slow-burns over Newgate’s jokey comment about his name is genuinely scary), Clark as the (presumably) nymphomaniac nurse and Brendan Gleeson, in a glorified cameo, as the head alienist. There are plenty of quirky psychiatric conditions on display here, most of which make for (at the very least) some highly entertaining scenes: the man-horse bit is pretty damn great, truth be told. The film is also able to whip up some decent tension, especially as conditions in the asylum begin to rapidly degrade and we can start to see the unfortunate writing on the wall. The lobotomy scene is both effective and highly disturbing and there’s an incredibly chilling scene involving a pair of escapees that manages to be both beautifully visual and a subtle gut-punch.

On the downside, however, Stonehearst Asylum is just never quite as surprising or inventive as it should be (or thinks it is, to be honest). As mentioned, the film’s big “twist” is pretty apparent at about 30 minutes into the film, which makes the various “slight of hand” machinations at the end seem both unnecessary and a little offensive. It’s the equivalent of trying to run a shell game with only one shell: we know exactly where the pea is, so moving the shell in endless circles doesn’t really do anything. The film is also about 30 minutes too long: it would have been much more effective as a tidy 80-90 minute sprint but quickly runs out of ideas and energy when stretched to marathon-length. The use of flashbacks to illustrate one character’s fractured mental state is both ineffective and confusing and the ultimate “twist” makes so little sense as to be almost completely arbitrary. In many ways, Anderson seems to be trying to approximate the look and feel of Cronenberg’s latter-day “prestige” pictures, such as A Dangerous Method (2011) without any of his trademark character development: it’s definitely a far cry from the anguished internalism of The Machinist or, even, Session 9.

Ultimately, Stonehearst Asylum is decent enough, which is actually part of the issue. While well-made and sturdily acted, nothing here stands out: this exact same storyline has already been explored (to much greater effect) in films like Asylum (1972), Don’t Look in the Basement (1973),  Shutter Island (2010)…none of these are necessarily classics but all manage to come up with more unique scenarios than we find here. This isn’t a terrible film but it does seem like a terribly unnecessary one: by-the-book, largely bereft of genuine surprise and unevenly paced, Stonehearst Asylum will probably only be of interest if something…say, a lobotomy, for example…has managed to wipe out all memories of other, better films. Check in to Stonehearst if you like but, unless you’re nuts, you might want to find better accommodations.

10/8/14 (Part Two): The Ties That Blind

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31 Days of Halloween, auteur theory, Chan-Wook Park, Chung-hoon Chung, cinema, Clint Mansell, coming of age, Dermot Mulroney, dysfunctional family, English-language debut, family secrets, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Flannery O'Connor, flashbacks, Harmony Korine, insane asylums, insanity, Jacki Weaver, Lady Vengeance, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, murder, Nicole Kidman, Old Boy, Phyllis Somerville, psychopaths, psychosexual, Stoker, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Uncle Charlie, uncompromising voice, voice-over narration, Wentworth Miller

Pitched somewhere between Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothics and Pedro Almodovar’s psychosexual jaw-droppers, Korean auteur Chan-Wook Park’s English-language debut, Stoker (2013), is quite a piece of work. Long known for films that are as impressive to look at as they are often difficult to watch, Park’s newest film pulls few punches and holds even fewer hands, coming off as more fairy-tale influenced than any of his previous films, achieving an intoxicating, if confounding, atmosphere that’s fairly close to a fever dream. For anyone who expected the transition to Western films to “tame” park, Stoker stands in towering confirmation to the idea that Park, like all true film auteurs, will always follow his muse first and popular conventions second. While the film won’t supplant Park’s classic “Vengeance” trilogy anytime soon, Stoker is a meticulously crafted, often beautiful, treatise on the destructive nature of obsession and the familial secrets that haunt us all. While the movie seems slightly more subdued than films like Oldboy (2003) or Lady Vengeance (2005), it still packs a pretty vicious bite, albeit one informed by a particularly chilly sensibility.

Stoker centers around the surviving members of the titular family, namely the neurotic Evelyn Stoker (Nicole Kidman) and her odd, 18-year-old daughter, India (Mia Wasikowska). India’s father, Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has just been killed in a car accident, an event which has, effectively, shattered what remains of Evelyn and India’s lives. At the funeral, the Stokers are introduced to Richard’s long-lost brother, Charlie (Matthew Goode), a handsome, intense young man who claims to have been traveling the world for many years. He wants to stay and help Evelyn and India make it through their current tragedy, although his motives seem to lean more towards romancing India’s mother than to helping to soothe their mental wounds.

As Charlie hangs around, India begins to pick up little hints of things that may be…well, just a little askew, as it were: a strange argument with the housekeeper, Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville), that seems to come out of nowhere; Charlie’s strange, knowing glances at India; Aunt Gwen’s (Jacki Weaver) seeming distrust and unease around Charlie; a piano lesson that hovers at the acceptable boundaries between instruction and seduction…indeed, trouble seems to follow Charlie around like a second skin, facts which are certainly not lost on young India.

To complicate things, however, India appears to be just as mysterious and complicated a figure as her uncle. She’s a dour, serious young woman who’s constantly bullied and harassed at school (one obnoxious student draws naked pictures of India and shoves them in her face, while constantly “punching at” her face, always stopping just shy of actually making physical contact) and doesn’t seem to have any friends whatsoever. There’s one telling scene where India spends her art class drawing the detailed pattern on the inside of the vase, rather than the vase, itself, as her other classmates do: as with everything else, India just doesn’t see things in the same way as the rest of the world.

As Charlie continues to stay with the Stokers, however, the psychosexual storm gets whipped into a veritable frenzy: India’s sexual awakening seems to coincide with Charlie’s increased interest in both Evelyn and India, although her coming-of-age has started to take on certain violent aspects, not the least of which is the explosive moment where she finally strikes back at her bully. As events progress, India gets ever closer to deciphering the mystery of the key that hangs around her neck, a key that will help explain not only Uncle Charlie’s strange behavior but will also set India upon a path of self-discovery, a path that will ultimately lead to both salvation…and destruction.

As with all of Park’s films, Stoker is so carefully crafted as to seem almost like a clockwork marvel. The film is a constantly moving, evolving puzzlebox, a tricky construction that purposefully obscures key information, leaving the audience in the dark for a majority of the proceedings in a similar manner to Oldboy. This sense of complexity extends to every aspect of the film, from its narrative structure to its visual language, although the cinematography ends up being the most identifiable aspect of this structure. Quite simply, Stoker’s cinematography and shot construction, courtesy of long-time Park collaborator Chung-hoon Chung, is a complete marvel. It goes without saying that Stoker is frequently beautiful and always interesting to look at: more impressive are the myriad ways in which Park and Chung use the visual language of film to get across their subtextual themes and ideas. The scene where India is completely encircled by identical shoeboxes…the bit where a spider crawls up her leg and between her thighs…the gorgeous, surprising shot where brushed hair suddenly becomes a flowing field of waist-high grass…unrelated imagery juxtaposed in ways that seem to indicate that everything, no matter how irrelevant is interconnected…Stoker is all but bursting with subtle nuance and just-out-of-eyesight symbolism.

Into this beautifully realized visual tapestry, then, Park pours a trilogy of performances that manage to accentuate and support each other in some nicely organic ways. Mia Wasikowska, currently making quite a name for herself in just about every type of role imaginable, is pitch-perfect as the morose, guarded India. In the hands of any other actress, India might have come across as more enigmatic than necessary, a “real-life” Wednesday Addams who exists purely to pour Pernod on everyone’s ice cream. Wasikowska is amazingly subtle, versatile performer, however, and India becomes a full-realized character in her capable hands. I won’t lie and say that I found India to be likable, at any point in time, but it wasn’t hard to see things from her point of view, as twisted as it may be: her continuous voice-overs were also well-handled, allowing us insight into her cluttered little brain.

For her part, Kidman turns in another dependably solid genre performance: there’s always a thinly concealed streak of insanity running through her controlled performance but Kidman’s Evelyn never comes across as a certifiable nut. If anything, she’s a wounded, needful mother who foolishly pines for the one thing that mothers take for granted: the love of their own children. Evelyn is never a completely pathetic character, however, mostly thanks to the cold steel that Kidman brings to the performance, as if one could see the metal framework just below the skin.

Special mention must also be made of Matthew Goode’s performance as the sinister Uncle Charlie. Although I must admit to being far less familiar with his career than either Kidman or Wasikowska’s, I was completely taken with Goode’s performance. Like Wasikowska’s take on India, Goode brings an overriding sense of barely contained neuroses to his depiction of Charlie: he’s able to convey a world of information with just the barely perceptible uptick of an eyebrow or a smile that’s just slightly too curdled to instill much warmth. Goode’s performance is the epitome of restrained tension: you know that he’s going to uncoil and explode, at some point, but you’re damned if his eyes give any indication as to when that might be. By the film’s conclusion, Goode and Wasikowska make an almost unbeatable pair, playing off of each other’s mannerisms and tics in some truly impressive, startling ways. Park is definitely an “actor’s director” and his newest film comes top-loaded with some typically impressive treading of the boards.

As with almost all of Park’s films, Stoker is incredibly easy to respect, although it’s just a little more difficult to really love. While the film is constantly twisted and the narrative always unpredictable, this complexity sometimes translates into moments that are pure-headscratchers: by the conclusion, I found myself second-guessing a few “facts” that previously seemed pretty solid, mostly because I felt a little lost in the back-and-forth of the flashback-heavy narrative. The film is also just about as bleak and chilly as a film can possibly get: this sense of frigid sterility may be a little off-putting for many Western audiences, although there’s nothing in here that will challenge Western taboos in quite the same way as the plot twist from Oldboy does.

Ultimately, Park’s Stoker is an impressive English-language debut and a mighty fine film on its own rights, even if it’s not quite as incendiary or feral as the Korean films that preceded it. On a craft-level, the film has few equals: quite frankly, it’s one of the most astoundingly beautiful films I’ve ever laid eyes on. If the narrative/thematic elements of the film don’t get me quite as jazzed as the visual/aural elements…well, that’s alright, too. I respect and trust Park enough to stay with him on his cinematic journey into the darkness of the human soul: in a world where more and more things seem to get “dumbed down” for the masses, it’s always refreshing to find an uncompromising voice who trusts that we’ll “get it,” even if we’re not quite sure what “it” is.

10/4/14 (Part Two): You Know…That One Guy

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31 Days of Halloween, Ariel Gade, Barry Bostwick, Blast Vegas, cinema, Eric Price, film reviews, films, high school trauma, horror-comedies, ice cream cone, insane asylums, Jack Perez, Janie Haddad, Karen Black, Kevin Corrigan, Leo Fitzpatrick, Lucy Davis, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, mental breakdown, Movies, revenge, Ryan A. Levin, Sheriff Walt, small town life, Some Guy Who Kills People

Sometimes, my initial assumptions about a film can be way off base. Take Jack Perez’s Some Guy Who Kills People (2011), for example. Based on the title, the presence of always-funny character actor Kevin Corrigan and Perez’s previous films like Monster Island (2004), Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and Blast Vegas (2013), I was expecting the film to be a goofy horror-comedy, maybe something along the lines of Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) or the like. Instead, Some Guy…ended up being a fairly serious film with occasional surreal touches and played out sort of like a non-rape-oriented version of Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact (1983) with a male protagonist. In other words, I was way off base.

Right off the bat, we meet our protagonist, Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan). Ken is pretty much the definition of a schlub: he works at an ice cream parlor (part of his job entails wearing a ridiculous ice cream cone costume); only has one friend, co-worker, Irv (Leo Fitzpatrick); still lives at home with his mother (Karen Black), even though he’s in his mid-30s and has spent time in an insane asylum thanks to a mental breakdown and suicide attempt. He’s also plagued by recurring nightmares where he’s tied to a chair, tortured by a group of guys and doused in gasoline. Life, for Ken, is pretty much a continuous bummer.

One day, while working a birthday party in his ice cream cone get-up, Ken happens to run into one of the abusers from his nightmare. Ken fantasizes about putting a hatchet through the guy’s face and whatta ya know…the guy later turns up dead with a hatchet in his face. Seems a little suspicious but the town’s finest law enforcement officials are on the case: Sheriff Walt (Barry Bostwick), who’s also dating Ken’s mom, and Dept. Ernie (Eric Price), who’s so dumb that he makes Barney Fife look like a MENSA candidate.

In the meantime, Ken runs into the daughter that he never knew he had, 11-year-old whiz-kid Amy (Ariel Gade). Amy wants to get to know her dad, so he decides to (temporarily) move in with him. She also encourages Ken to break out of his shell and date Stephanie (Lucy Davis), the nice young woman who he previously met at the dead man’s birthday party. The bodies of Ken’s enemies continue to pile up around him, however, and it’s getting harder and harder for the Sheriff to keep making excuses. When Amy sneaks a peak at her dad’s coveted sketchbook, she sees some pretty dark drawings, including several that seem to prefigure the actual murders. Is Ken behind the murders, seeking to avenge unknown trauma from his high school years, or is there another, more sinister explanation?

In many ways, the underlying theme of Perez’s Some Guy Who Kills People can best be summed up by Sheriff Walt’s declaration that, “If thinking about killing a bunch of pricks made us guilty, we’d all be locked away for life.” He’s absolutely right: regardless of the specifics, I’m more than willing to wager that each and every one of us have wished grievous bodily injury to someone else, even if only from the safe constraints of our own imaginations. Humans thrive on wish-fulfillment: it gives us something to look forward to, even if our imagined goals are impossible, socially unacceptable or just plain stupid. Some Guys…works this angle to good effect, setting up a situation in which we witness bad people getting their comeuppance, similar to something like Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America (2011). Perez is nowhere near the filmmaker that Goldthwait is, however, and Some Guy…ends up being a much slighter, more inconsequential effort.

While there’s nothing about the film that really stands out, there’s also nothing about it that really screams “amateur hour,” either, although the film’s look can often be rather nondescript and I found child actor Ariel Gade to be rather annoying for much of the film. Corrigan is predictably good, however, even if he’s a much more restrained presence than he usually is and Bostwick’s performance really grew on me, even though his initial scenes were way too broad and silly: by the film’s conclusion, Bostwick has become sort of a Matlock/Columbo hybrid and he’s kind of great: Eric Price, however, is a complete non-entity as the dumb-as-dishwater deputy. British actress Davis, so great in the UK version of The Office and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), practically steals the show as the nice girl who’s sweet on a very damaged guy, although Karen Black is disappointing in a role that hits the sour zone between loony and checked-out.

Ultimately, Some Guy Who Kills People is a good, but not great, effort. The film moves quickly and is never particularly painful to watch, although it often feels a bit hackneyed and overly familiar. Fans of Kevin Corrigan (seriously: who doesn’t think this guy is one of the most under-rated actors in the biz?) should find this fun, although it definitely ranks as one of his lesser efforts. Nonetheless, there’s enough good stuff here to make Some Guy…a pretty decent way to kill 90 minutes.

10/2/14 (Part One): The Reason For the Season

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'70s films, 31 Days of Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, auteur theory, babysitters, Brian Andrews, Charles Cyphers, classic films, co-writers, cult classic, dead teenagers, Dean Cundey, Debra Hill, Donald Pleasence, electronic score, favorite films, Film auteurs, Haddonfield, Halloween, horror, horror franchises, horror movies, iconic film scores, independent film, insane asylums, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter, John Michael Graham, Kyle Richards, Michael Myers, Nancy Kyes, Nick Castle, P.J. Soles, Sam Loomis, set in the 1970s, slasher films, small town life, writer-director

Apparently, I owe John Carpenter’s classic Halloween (1978) an apology. Despite regarding the film as one of my favorites for more years than I can remember and revisiting it at least once a year, it seems that I’ve been taking it for granted. Call me “lazy” or “too comfortable” but I’ve been treating the film as background noise for far too long now: something to have on while serving up gift-wrapped sugar treats for the young’uns or to zone out to after a particularly long day at work. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I’ve seen the film so many times, kind of like how we all used to get burnt out on big radio singles back when there was radio. I’ve been looking at the movie for years but I haven’t really been “watching” it for some time now. Obviously, this was a situation that needed to be rectified.

For this year’s screening of the seasonal chiller, I decided to give it my complete and undivided attention: rather than just put it on, I wanted to try to view it (if possible) through unbiased eyes. Essentially, I had a question: if I were viewing this for the first time today, would it still have the same impact on me that it did when I was a kid? It’s a flawed experiment, obviously, since there are so many other factors to consider, not the least of which is that at the time I saw the film, I didn’t really have much to compare it to: by this point, I’ve seen more horror films than I probably thought could ever exist back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if the film could actually still affect me: I’ve been hearing stories lately about young people laughing their way through recent screenings of the film and wanted to see if this forefather to the slasher film still had any of its raw power left. As it stands, I found out two separate things: the film hasn’t lost any of its power over the 36 years since its release…and it’s entirely possible that modern audiences have rocks in their head. I’ll try to prove the former but you’re just gonna have to take my word on the latter.

Since I find it nearly impossible to believe that there are any film fans out there who aren’t at least familiar with Carpenter’s masterpiece (or Rob Zombie’s brain-dead remakes, if that floats yer boat), I’ll just give this the Cliff Notes synopsis: 15 years ago, young Michael Myers (Will Sandin) brutally stabbed his sister to death and was sentenced to an insane asylum. Dedicated psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) spends the next eight years trying to cure and the seven years after that trying to keep him locked away. When Michael escapes from the asylum on the day before Halloween, Loomis tracks him back to his boyhood home, the small town of Haddonfield. Michael arrives in the town on Halloween, steals some supplies (knives and a William Shatner Halloween mask) and quickly sets his sights on decimating the town’s supply of teenagers, in particular Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (P.J. Soles). As day gives way to night, Michael skulks about, picking one person off after the other. Loomis is on the case, however, and has been scouring the town from top to bottom, hunting for any sign of his elusive ward. As Michael closes the distance between Laurie and her two young charges, Tommy (Brian Andrews) and Lindsey (Kyle Richards), will Loomis get there in time or will the resourceful babysitter be forced into a fight for her life against a silent, inhuman monster?

But back to that earlier question: did the film have any impact on me this time around or did I find myself re-evaluating my lifelong love for the film, ala Kevin Smith’s now odious Clerks (1994)? As it turns out, the film is still just as impactful (to me, at least) today as it was a couple of decades ago: despite knowing every twist, turn and plot development, I was still glued to the screen and even caught myself reacting to a few setpieces that I was sure would be old hat by this time. Now that the “Is it still effective?” question is answered, time to think about the “Why?” part. Why is Halloween still such an effective horror, even as it rapidly approaches its 40 anniversary?

The easy answer, of course, is that Halloween is still so damn effective because it’s such a well-made film. Yeah, that’s a bit of a cop-out but let’s increase the magnification to 1000x, shall we? First off, Carpenter is an absolute master filmmaker: that’s no hyperbole, rather one of those accepted scientific facts. By the time of Halloween, he already had a massively entertaining sci-fi epic under his belt (Dark Star (1974), as well as one of the most undisputed badass films in the history of popular cinema: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). I’ve already written extensively about Assault on Precinct 13 in another blog but here’s the recap: Assault is one of those raw, primal films that sprung fully formed into the world, like Athena out of Zeus’ head, and proceeded to rewrite the rule book on what low-budget action films were capable enough. Suffice to say that Assault on Precinct 13 would be a feather in anyone’s cap: for Carpenter, he just called it his sophomore film.

But back to Halloween. So we’ve got a master director who’s just taken his first baby steps towards on helluva career. What else do we have? How about that iconic electronic music score? Short of the Jaws (1975) theme song (and maybe Jurassic Park (1993), come to think of it), I’m hard-pressed to recall another film’s instrumental score that’s so easily recognized and functions so Pavlovian among genre fans. The responsible party? That’d be our man John, again, who also wrote the instantly memorable score for Assault. So we have a master director and an amazing musical score…what else we got? Well, we’ve also got a pretty impressive cast, even if they’re mostly unknowns (with the exception of the legendary Donald Pleasence, of course). Despite appearing in a few TV shows prior to this, Halloween was also the big-screen debut of Jamie Lee Curtis, which also adds a few feathers to its cap: film fans, genre or otherwise, know Curtis as being one of the most dependable, strong and fun performers to tread the boards in this modern film era. Curtis’ performance as Laurie is a true watershed moment in horror, since it introduced the horror world to the notion of a strong female lead. While Laurie might not be quite in Lt. Ripley territory, her character is anything but a damsel in distress: Loomis may shoot Michael several times from a safe distance but Laurie goes mano a mano with the fucker, employing hangers, knitting needles, knives and whatever else she can get her hands on to inflict maximum damage. Loomis may be the guy who gets in the final shots (for all the good that does) but Laurie’s the one who softened up the devil, in the first place.

Unlike the scads of “dead teenager movies” that followed in its wake, the “victims” in Halloween are not a clichéd, unlikable bunch of cannon fodder: they might not be fully developed characters in the way that characters in The Godfather (1972) are, for example, but they’re also a light year away from the “horny/stupid/asshole” stereotypes that would pop up in just about every other slasher film ever made. Laurie and her friends may not quite look like teenagers but they definitely sound like them and it’s pretty impossible (for me, at least) to not feel empathy for them. Contrast this to something like Hatchet (2006), which delights in introducing super-shitty characters so that audiences will cheer when they get fed into a wood chipper: it’s a subtle but big difference.

Alright…so far, we have a film with a master director, excellent musical score, effective acting and sympathetic characters. What else does it have going on? Well, it’s got an exceptionally tight script, for one thing, a script which manages to dole out just enough information to get us intrigued but not enough to make us glaze over (I’m absolutely looking at you, Rob Z). It also has some pretty astounding cinematography, courtesy of Dean Cundey, the man with the camera who shot everything from Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976) to most of Carpenter’s catalog (including The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China and Escape From New York), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and Jurassic Park (to name but a very few out of a very impressive career). Cundey uses plenty of gorgeous wide shots in the film, along with that (by now clichéd) “killer’s POV” that’s name-checked in just about 99.9% of slasher films. If you watch Halloween and think, “Gee, this stuff is so cliché,” ponder this, Poindexter: this was the film that pretty much wrote the rulebook on this kind of stuff (if you held up your hand and said, “Bay of Blood (1971)!,” you get points for that, too).

So all that stuff’s thrown into the mix, which should go a long way towards answering the question, “Is Halloween actually a good film?” (Short answer: Of course.) The deeper question, however, is why is Carpenter’s film still so effective despite all the films that have come and gone since? There have been plenty of bloodier, rawer, more frantic, more hopeless and more eye-popping films over the years, no two ways about it. How, then, could I stand on my apple-box and bend your ears about this old dinosaur? Well, folks, there’s a pretty simple answer: like Hitchcock before him, Carpenter is an absolute wizard at creating tension so thick that you could cut it with a knife. From the opening credit sequence (and let’s be honest: it’s one of the coolest, if simplest, credit sequences in the history of the medium) to the final shot, Halloween is nothing short of a barely concealed live wire. Much of the credit for this impenetrable mood is due to Carpenter’s amazing score: rarely have there been musical tones that seem more suited for reaching into someone’s chest and squeezing their heart into strawberry jam. The film also has a deadly serious tone (despite some welcome comic relief via the ultra-snarky Annie), which helps with the oppressive atmosphere. Digging deeper, however, there’s another reason for this: Carpenter has purposefully crafted a world that oozes menace and threat from every pore, regardless of the time of day, the characters involved or the storyline.

Despite seeming the obvious way to go, the majority of Halloween’s narrative doesn’t take place during the evening: some of the flat-out creepiest shit happens right out in broad daylight. Carpenter does something so simple, yet devious, that I’m surprised no one else has really figured this out yet: he lets his monster just walk around among the unsuspecting sheep. During the lead-up to the night-time festivities, Carpenter manages to stick Michael into the corners or margins of just about every shot. Laurie notices Michael watching her from across the street, while she’s in school…Laurie notices Michael hanging out on a sidewalk, in her neighborhood…Michael is just driving a car around through the streets of Haddonfield, as natural as if he were cruising on a Saturday night. Unlike other cinematic monsters, Michael doesn’t seem to strictly a “creature of the night,” as it were. The majority of the kills occur after dark, but the stalking is pretty-much a 24-7 deal.

There’s a reason this works so beautifully and it has to do with that old chestnut of Hitchcock’s regarding showing the bomb: if a couple are sitting at a table and suddenly blow up, the audience is surprised and shocked but only momentarily. If the audience witnesses someone place a bomb under the table, set the timer and leave, however, than we suddenly have a whole other animal…we have suspense. The characters might not know about the bomb but we do, which has the natural effect of keeping us on the edge of our seats: we keep yelling at the screen, telling the idiots to get the hell away from the table but they, of course, won’t listen.

Carpenter’s bomb, so to speak, is Michael. In many ways, he’s like a living ghost that haunts Haddonfield. Since we already know who and what he is, thanks to the opening, Loomis’ description and the harrowing asylum escape, we already know what he’s capable of once he shows up among the “normal” folks. Laurie and her friends might not know who the goony guy in the Shatner mask is but we do and that makes all the difference. Since Michael is an omnipresent force in the film, we never reach a point where he’s not on our minds: we might temporarily forget him, as we get caught up in some bit of teenage minutiae but he’s always right around the corner to remind us. Once the killing begins in earnest and Michael becomes an unstoppable force, it’s almost like our fears have been confirmed: if only those idiots would have listened to us about the bomb, none of this shit would be happening. Thanks to this technique, Halloween has about a million times more resonance and power than generic slashers that merely set up a group of people, establish a threat, wait until dark and kill ’em all.

These are all great reasons to love Halloween, as far as I’m concerned, but there are plenty of other reasons. Nick Castle’s performance as Michael may be mute but he manages to instill no small amount of characterization, none the less: one of my favorite scenes in any horror movie, ever, is the bit where Michael lifts Bob (John Michael Graham) off the floor, nails him to the wall with a knife and proceeds to stare at him, slowly cocking his head to the side as if he were a dog watching a caterpillar. It’s a terrifying moment precisely because it’s such an innocent, human expression: we don’t expect this emotionless monstrosity to express curiosity, after all, since that makes him more uncomfortably human than we’d like. There’s another fantastic scene (in the same part of the film, ironically enough) where Michael puts on a sheet and Michael’s glasses and goes to see Lynda. She expects Bob while we know it’s Michael under the sheet: her goofing around turns to frustration when Bob won’t end the joke, while our hearts jump from our chest to our throat like a strongman test at the carnival. There are about a million ways this scene could have been played out but only one that achieves maximum chills and Carpenter nails it.

And there, in a pretty huge nutshell, you have it: my rationalization for why Halloween should still be considered not only a forefather to modern horror films but also one of the best examples of the genre that we’ll probably ever see. Like Hooper’s landmark The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the original Halloween is surprisingly light on actual gore: there are plenty of strangulations and off-screen killing but this is about the furthest thing from something like Friday the 13th (1980) that you can get. This, of course, makes the numerous (and increasingly violent) sequels seem even more half-baked than the numerous TCM sequels: while there was some (small) precedent for graphic violence in Hooper’s film, there’s virtually none in Carpenter’s, despite the subject matter.

Despite not really thinking about Halloween in any meaningful way for years, all it took was one good, close viewing to remind me of all the reasons that this film was always one of my favorites. Like eating comfort foods, there’s just something about watching Halloween that seems natural and…well…good, to me. In a day and age where one-upmanship is the name of the game and jaded viewers have seen just about everything short of actual snuff films, it’s refreshing to return to something like Halloween and remember a time when it was possible for a horror film to make you think and feel without battering you into submission. Watching Halloween in this way has only reaffirmed my earlier love for the film: horror films wouldn’t be the same without Carpenter and Halloween wouldn’t be Halloween without…well…Halloween.