With director David Gordon Green’s 2018 feature Halloween fast approaching, we thought it time to further celebrate John Carpenter’s 1978 classic of the same name via a series of essays on the subject.
Culled from the 2018 Amazon best-selling book My Favorite Horror Movie, which features 48 essays by horror creators on the films which shaped them (from our own Editor-in-Chief Sean Decker to filmmaker Matt Mercer and beyond), they serve to explore just why forty years later, The Shape still terrifies.
HALLOWEEN
by
ALEX NAPIWOCKI
How does one pick a favorite horror film when there are so many? I love the exploitation of the ‘70s, the pure slashers of the ‘80s, and the gory melt movies of the early ‘90s. How do I narrow it down to just one? The only fair way seems to be to choose the one that started this horror obsession in the first place. The granddaddy of them all, the slasher that defines the genre – John Carpenter’s Halloween.
I grew up as a sick kid – allergies, asthma, the works. This left me with a lot of down time while the other kids were getting brainwashed at school. I’d run the gauntlet of late ‘80s and early ‘90s daytime TV. It was cheesy and I was already beginning to hate commercials. They bring you out of fantasy and back into reality, totally ruining the experience. This is why, at a young age, my tastes started moving from television to movies.
My sister, being seven years older, definitely had an impact on the movies and music I would find myself chasing. Through her, I found punk rock at nine, and horror films not long after. One particular illness left me home for a long haul. I had my tonsils removed and I was allergic to the anesthetic they used to put me under. During the surgery, my heart literally stopped. I was on bed rest for weeks. Blockbuster couldn’t keep up with me and I was running out of new releases left and right.
My sister had a best friend with quite the movie collection. He also had two VCRs hooked up to each other. One day, he sent a stack of VHS tapes through my sister to help me heal. Little did I know that they would change my life forever. One tape had a couple skate punk flicks, Thrashin’ and Gleaming The Cube, both of which I still love to this day. But those are guilty pleasures, not the Holy Grail. Halloween 1-6 were also in the stack, and holy shit, was life about to be worth living.
I’d seen some horror flicks and had an idea what the Halloween movies were. I knew about the Jason movies and the Chucky movies. Most of the horror films I’d seen were part of the ghost, vampire, or werewolf genres. None of those prepared me for what was about to take place. I began watching Halloween. Seeing Michael Myers take the screen was the first time I was truly terrified while watching a film.
Halloween is not a movie that requires gore. It’s the fear of what’s behind you that makes this film truly terrifying. Michael doesn’t move like a man. He doesn’t move like a maniacal monster either. He moves like only Michael Myers can: smooth, stealthy and calculated. He doesn’t have any cheesy catchphrases. In fact, he never says a word, and it makes him so much creepy than any other horror icon.
There’s more to Halloween than Michael Myers to make it my favorite. Jamie Lee Curtis is the quintessential final girl. No one can match her innocence and strength. Following Laurie Strode (played by Curtis) through Haddonfield is how we viewers became locals. The town and Michael are both viewed through her eyes. Her cat and mouse game with Myers is among the best in horror history.
I spent a couple weeks just watching Halloween over and over. I had the whole series up to the Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle one, but the first flick, I watched twice as much as the rest combined. It has the best characters and the best scares. The music is next level, the lighting is eerie, and the locations are haunting. It’s everything one should strive for when making a horror film.
When the curator of this collection of essays, Christian Ackerman, gave me this task, I don’t think he knew how much he was involved in making Halloween my favorite horror film. He accidentally (or knowing him, quite purposely) taught me the fundamentals of film. He did this by giving me a bunch of VHS tapes in the ‘90s, and it all started with this one perfectly scary flick.
Flash forward to 2015: I filmed my first short film as a writer and director. A trash comedy Halloween slasher titled The Curse Of The Glamulet. My inspirations at the time were definitely more John Waters and Troma than classic horror or even slashers, but the model was Halloween. My film turned into its own take on the final girl and the Halloween slasher. I was even compelled to name the main character Laurie. Forty years later, the film industry still pays homage to this flick. I literally wouldn’t be making films or writing this essay without it. Sorry Jason. Sorry Freddy. My favorite horror movie is, without a doubt, Halloween.
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Check out the new trailer for the re-release of 1978’s Halloween below, and for theater and ticketing info, please visit www.CineLifeEntertainment.com
TAKEN FROM THE BOOK
MY FAVORITE HORROR MOVIE
© 2018 CHRISTIAN ACKERMAN/BLACK VORTEX CINEMA
MYFAVORITEHORRORMOVIE.COM
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Trancas International Films or any other agency, organization, employer or company.