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My Favorite Horror Movie: Alex Napiwocki on John Carpenter’s Halloween

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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.

My Favorite Horror Movie: Matt Mercer on John Carpenter’s Halloween

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With the re-release of 1978’s Halloween taking place next week (the film returns to theaters on September 27th via CineLife Entertainment/Trancas International Films/Compass International Pictures), we’re continuing at HalloweenMovies.com our celebration of the John Carpenter classic, via a series of essays on the subject.

Culled from the 2018 best-selling book My Favorite Horror Movie, which features 48 essays by horror creators on the films which shaped them, they serve to explore just why 40 years later, The Shape still terrifies.

Second up (on the heels of our first essay is a piece by Beyond the Gates and Contracted star Matt Mercer, who found that as a child his all-encompassing fear of that shark from Amity was supplanted by that of a featureless masked murderer from Illinois, during one simple VHS viewing.

HALLOWEEN
by
MATT MERCER

In July of 1986, ABC aired Jaws as the Sunday Night Movie. I was six years old, visiting my grandparents in Culpeper, VA, and, with my mom’s “okay”, they let me stay up late to watch it to the end. It changed my life.

For the next few months, I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I convinced my mom to buy the VHS cassette of Jaws and I watched it constantly. Watched it until certain sections of the tape (mainly the attack sequences which I replayed over and over) were so demagnetized that one couldn’t make out what was happening on-screen entirely. Adjusting the tracking on the VCR didn’t make a lick of difference. Just as Bryan Adams played his guitar until his fingers bled…I played Jaws until the tape was in shreds.

I became a shark fanatic. I wanted to be Matt Hooper, the Richard Dreyfuss character. I projected a future in which I became a marine biologist – specifically an ichthyologist – who studied all kinds of sharks. I’d get myriad scars from my encounters with them. I’d live the Hooper Life, traveling the world to find giant sharks and study them. Amity Island, Brisbane, aboard the Orca or the Aurora… bring it on. I’d read every book about sharks. I was ready.

I tried to convince my mom we needed to switch our summer beach trips from Myrtle Beach, SC to Amity Island. It’d be safe… they didn’t have a shark problem anymore. The issue I encountered was when I looked on a map to find Amity Island, I could only find an Amityville in New York. The heck?! Where was the island? Must be some mistake.

We had a fish tank and I cruelly tried to tie a soda can to one of my pets with a string to see if I could recreate the yellow barrel scenes from the film. It didn’t work. Beta fish are slippery. And fast. (As Hooper would say, “Fast fish.”) I also “recreated” several attacks from Jaws in the bathtub with little green plastic army men and a rubber Great White. These reenactments came to a halt when my stepmom couldn’t find her McCormick red food coloring and I got in trouble for stowing it under the sink in the bathroom, having used almost all of it for the attacks.

When the school year started, my first grade teacher Mrs. Jones expressed concern when, for the first show-and-tell of the year, I didn’t share my shell collection from a summer trip to the beach, or cookies I’d baked with Mom, or a wood shop project made with Dad… No. No, no, no. I performed Quint’s death from Jaws in all its glory. I laid on the floor in front of the entire class, and while kicking and screaming, slid down the stern of the Orca into the shark’s mouth. In my mind, it played beautifully. I flailed wildly. I kicked at the imaginary chomping maw of the shark. I maneuvered my body to make the slide seem natural, as if the floor were at an angle. I aped Robert Shaw’s giant blood- puke. And, I very clearly recall the army of blank stares I got in return from my classmates when I was done.

Further explanation of the scene and the events leading up to it didn’t help, and Mrs. Jones quickly invited me to sit down before the details became more grotesque. Enough already. I wanted to yell at them, “Don’t you get it?! I’ve experienced this incredible thing, and so help me God, you’re going to take the journey with me!”

What had this movie done to six-year-old me? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it and wanting to relive and recreate its thrills over and over in any way possible? Was any of the movie real? How did they make it? Was Robert Shaw really killed by that shark? What was the path to more of these thrills?

These questions started to be answered that Christmas, when my grandmother (who had become aware it was Jaws 24/7 for me, and was also super-cool apparently) gifted me a copy of The Jaws Log, a firsthand account of the making of the movie Jaws by one of its screenwriters, Carl Gottlieb. Now, this book was a bit advanced for someone my age, and although I was a fairly advanced reader, I didn’t entirely get it. My filmmaking lexicon was limited at that age, obviously. But it made one thing clear for me: the movie wasn’t “real” and a group of people had indeed made it. They’d put it together, piece by piece, over a relatively large chunk of time, photographed it, and the process was all spearheaded by one person, a director, Steven Spielberg. Jaws wasn’t some crazy event that happened to get recorded by some folks near the beach. It was manufactured, piece-by-piece, and came out as this scary movie. Great.

So, that means there must be more of these movies. Right?

Not long after finishing The Jaws Log (probably early ’87 by now), I asked my mother one morning while getting ready for school, “Mom, what is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?”

She thought for a moment. “Hmmm. Probably Halloween.”

Halloween? There’s a horror movie called Halloween?! My kid-brain caught fire. My mind started to conjure what the movie might be, and the dream-reel didn’t stop…images of demons in the autumn dark, monsters snatching trick-or-treaters off the street and dragging them into the woods, creatures with glowing jack o’ lanterns for heads…what the hell could this film be? She wouldn’t tell me. And thus began a massive campaign on my part to see the movie. I wouldn’t let up.

I mean, I really begged, and begged, and begged my mother to rent it. I could handle the movie, but I couldn’t handle waiting until I was older to see it. Her answer was a flat “no,” until honestly, I don’t recall how her change of heart exactly happened, but after a few weeks, she finally relented and agreed to let me see it on one condition: she had to watch it first, and I had to turn away during anything involving nudity or sex.

Deal.

Next thing I knew we were headed to Rent-A-Tainment, our local video store in Newport News, VA. It had a bright yellow sign shaped like a strip of unspooled celluloid, the store’s name in big bold letters on top of that – a beautiful beacon at dusk. I remember that night vividly. Prior to the video store, we’d grabbed some dessert, something called frozen yogurt (a fresh concept in the mid-’80s, and a “healthy” alternative to ice cream!) from a new place called Yogurt’s Inn. (Newport News small business owners in the mid-1980s were super clever in the store-naming department.) Walking into Rent-A-Tainment, I went straight to the Horror section, blowing past all the sections (Disney, Family, etc) that had been safe, easy, and allowed in the past…

And there it was. The VHS display box of the Media Home Entertainment release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The iconographic box art with the jack-o-lantern and a big hand with insane vascularity, swooping down with a gleaming butcher knife in its grip where the last ridge of the pumpkin should be… it stared me in the face. Glorious. It held so much promise.

We raced home and popped it in…I don’t recall if my mother ended up doing a pre-screening or not (I think she just winged it from her memory), but I do remember the experience of watching it that night. From the opening credits, as the camera slowly pushed into the glowing, flickering pumpkin, I was completely entranced. I couldn’t move. And it just kept getting more and more intense, every element of the film perfectly calibrated to scare the living hell out of me…out of the audience. It was one of those rare times the movie lives up to the quality you’ve been cultivating in your head…even though it was nothing like the movie that had been playing in my head prior to seeing it.

But watching Halloween was more than just a defying of expectations.

That night was the peak viewing experience of my (short) life up to that point. Part of that experience was I’m sure due to the fact that I was a young, impressionable kid watching a truly scary movie for the first time, but I don’t know that another film has worked on me like that since. At least not in that way. It was everything all at once. Every element of the film wrapped around me like a dark blanket of dread and terror that, as the film played on, tightened around my mind and body until I was suffocating. But I couldn’t look away. I just wanted more. Where Jaws had imbued me with a sense of wonder and thrills, Halloween was scarier and more pure…it was perfect, shadowy atmosphere and visceral terror honed from the simplest (but well-crafted) elements. Jaws was my gateway into horror and showed the possibilities of film, but Halloween was the real deal and blew my world apart. I think I watched that two-day rental copy ten times that first weekend I saw it. To this day, I watch Halloween at least three times a year. I’m still obsessed. It still takes me on an incredible journey and inspires me to no end.

So much has been written about Halloween…the making of it, its success as a low-budget independent film, how it ushered in and created an entirely new “slasher” subgenre and era of horror films, and the techniques that made it so effective. I won’t regurgitate that here in great detail. If you’ve seen the movie, and read about it, you know these things already. The techniques Carpenter uses are transcendent and game changing. The music. The mask. Dean Cundey’s cinematography. The way he fills the ‘Scope frame. It’s a flawless intersection of technique, storytelling, atmosphere, and scares. There’s an unrepeatable and unmistakable alchemy that makes the film what it is. In other words, it’s all about how this story is told, not necessarily what it’s about. The style these elements create, added to the simplicity of the film, is the formula that makes it so effective.

In a small Midwestern town, Michael, a six-year-old boy murders his sister on Halloween. Fifteen years later, on Halloween, he escapes the sanitarium where he’s being held, and goes back to his hometown to kill again. That’s pretty much it.

Simple.

Over the years since the first time I saw the film and the countless times since, I’ve often thought about what the key factor is (beyond the aforementioned style) that makes it my favorite horror movie. I think the answer lies somewhere in its restraint. In a way, it’s not what Carpenter did do, it’s what he didn’t do that makes Halloween special. The film is nearly bloodless. He uses the frame to create a visual language that puts us on edge, as opposed to throwing gore at us (not that there’s anything wrong with that…I love a good bloodbath, but I’m glad it’s not here). Carpenter also suggests, but doesn’t overexplain, the subtle supernatural aspects of Myers. Mystery begets better terror. The first of these touches is the fact that it takes place on Halloween. In its development, the film was originally called The Babysitter Murders (which sounds scary already), until one of the producers of the film, Irwin Yablans, suggested it take place on (and be called) Halloween. This idea was a stroke of genius, because although Carpenter (wisely) doesn’t use the dark holiday to explain Michael’s killing spree, the fact that Michael “activates” on All Hallows’ Eve adds a layer of bizarre uneasiness to his motivations. It comes from somewhere dark and inexplicable. Carpenter knew better than to have a ritual or séance or possession aspect to explain the killer’s actions…it’s just simply the date when Michael goes home to kill. And that’s enough.

Another subtle touch: the methods used to make Michael the personification of Evil. As Doctor Loomis says in the movie, Myers “isn’t a man.” Well, he looks like a person, and he’s shaped like a human, but measured doses of strange behavior suggest there’s something more going on there…something more at the wheel inside Michael than just himself. He doesn’t talk, he only breathes. He wears a mask to kill. Later, he wears coveralls taken from a tow truck driver that he’s murdered, his “costume”. He inspects his kills in a curious way; after murdering one kid, he tilts his head back and forth. Later on, he sets up a haunted house of corpses as a gauntlet of terror for the main character, Laurie. He also doesn’t seem daunted by injury. When Laurie stabs him, he doesn’t stop. It’s these touches of character that make The Shape scarier. Where is this weirdness coming from? These traits culminate in the climax, where Michael is shot six times and falls from a balcony…and then disappears.

Thus, by the end of the film, these supernatural hints (and the Myers character) have fully developed and transformed into theme, the idea being that evil never dies. It can’t be killed. It will always be there, looming in the dark, ready to strike without warning.

Halloween started me on a constant diet of horror movies, and there are many in my “favorites pantheon”. Alien transported me aboard a ship in deep space and showed me creatures I couldn’t have seen in my wildest dreams. Psycho catapulted me into the mind of an isolated killer living a double life. Jaws had already whisked me away on an adventure on the ocean and given a glimpse of what lurked beneath the surface of an unknown world.

But Halloween was in my backyard. Every night. Staring up at me from between the clotheslines. It turned the most basic location, the most identifiable place, suburban America, into a terrifying landscape. A place of darkness and danger. Haddonfield didn’t feel like South Pasadena, CA, where they shot the film. No, Halloween felt like it was happening in a small Illinois town. It felt like my hometown in Virginia. The streets in it felt like my street. The houses felt kinda’ like my house.

Halloween didn’t just take me to another world; it turned my own world into something new. As I started my own career, I took that with me.

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Check out the new trailer for the re-release of 1978’s Halloween below, and for theatre and ticketing info, please visit www.CineLifeEntertainment.com

TAKEN FROM THE BOOK
MY FAVORITE HORROR MOVIE
© 2018 CHRISTIAN ACKERMAN/BLACK VORTEX CINEMA
MYFAVORITEHORRORMOVIE.COM

Matt Mercer can be found on Twitter/Instagram @MercerShark

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.

My Favorite Horror Movie: Our Editor-in-Chief on John Carpenter’s Halloween

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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 Fangoria’s revered Michael Gingold to Contracted star Matt Mercer, and beyond), these essays will be published bi-weekly here at HalloweenMovies.com leading up to the October 19th release of the series’ latest chapter, in an effort to explore just why 40 years later, The Shape still terrifies.

First up, the essay which I contributed to the book, and an insight into why this once Star Wars-obsessed kid jumped out of light speed and put down stakes in Haddonfield.

HALLOWEEN
by
SEAN JAMES DECKER

In October of 1978, like most eight-year-old American boys of the time, and well before it would become a hip moniker to attach to one’s self, I was I suppose what people would consider a “film nerd.” I inherited this gene from my father, who had spent his own adolescence religiously attending matinees at the Bayview Theatre in San Francisco, ingesting a steady stream of serials, cartoons and 1950s sci-fi, horror and westerns, which he then imparted to me via network (at the time, we hadn’t yet purchased that very expensive new thing called a videocassette recorder) and local television, the latter portal consisting primarily of horror host Bob Wilkins’ KTVU show Creature Features. (A year later, I’d go on to innocently hold hands with my first girlfriend, the daughter of John Stanley, the latter who had taken over hosting duties of the show: she soon broke up with me for my obsession with her father and his extensive horror collection, but that is another story).

As much as my own father was excited to share with me the films he’d grown up on, from Universal’s classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon to that wonderful giant ant film Them!, he was also as equally concerned at guarding my innocence. When George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made its television premiere on Wilkins’ show, I wasn’t allowed to watch it, although my parents were more than happy to take me to multiple screenings of Star Wars, and to support my interest in all things pop culture related via subscriptions to Marvel Comics titles (I remember fondly the brown paper mailing sleeves they’d arrive in), a million Legos bricks, Mego Dolls (I wonder whatever happened to my glow-in-the-dark Human Wolfman), Hardy Boys books, and much, much more.

R-rated horror films though? They were strictly off the table, no matter how I pleaded.

That was until my father’s dad (who I referred to as “Papa,” as we all did), who I spent every other weekend with, often flying the skies above Half Moon Bay in his Cessna when not attending Saturday Mass or the San Francisco Zoo, offered to take me to see a revival screening of 1974’s Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla, playing in a single screen movie house in the city. Gleefully, I took the street car with him to the theatre for some kaiju G-rated fare, and arriving early, he bought us both popcorn and Cokes and suggested we sit down to watch the end of whatever was playing in anticipation of the Big G’s onscreen arrival.

And it was then that my life was forever changed.

In that darkened theatre and through my boyhood fingers, raised in an effort to shield my eyes from the utter terror which was unfolding before them, I watched as a plucky young girl named Laurie crossed a tree-lined street before entering a structure similarly darkened. Up the stairs she went, and fearfully I went with her, into a dimly-lit bedroom where a woman lay splayed out dead on a mattress, a flickering jack-o-lantern next to her and a tombstone above with the inscription “Judith Myers” cut into it. And soon other things would also be cut into, by a methodical, shambling shape with a massive butcher knife, who stalked our unfortunate heroine from room to room and house to house, and who while seemingly in the finale was brought down by gunfire by an elderly man in a trench coat with a curious penchant for scaring trick or treaters, would ultimately disappear into the very night, and into my very psyche.

Silent. Unstoppable. Ghostly. For me, without context, and now existing behind every fence in my suburban neighborhood. As for the following screening of director Jun Fukada’s Godzilla film? I don’t recall it. What I do recall are the nightmares scored by that 10/8 piano composition that plagued me in the ensuing weeks, of which I’d wake from, drenched in sweat and screaming, comforted by my concerned parents who were none too happy that my grandfather had taken me to, “That Halloween movie” (they themselves made a trip to the theatre shortly thereafter, more than likely in an attempt to understand what emotional trauma their previously unsullied son had endured).

Marvel Comics didn’t interest me much after that, although EC Comics did. And while I was certainly excited to see the follow-up to that Star Wars movie, I was more thrilled to watch the slasher flicks on Laserdisc which one of my schoolyard chum’s father had amassed (a format now primarily residing in landfills alongside that Bakelite phone which Michael used to strangle Lynda Van Der Klok), when we were left to our own devices. Sean Cunningham’s gory take on Halloween, Friday the 13th, was one of them, but in my mind, nothing could compare to the sheer ferocity of Carpenter’s film.

I was hooked, and it was merely the beginning. Unbeknownst to my parents, Curtis Richards’ novelization was hidden beneath my mattress (I still have that paperback, dog-eared and rag-tag from countless readings), and while I was allowed to see the television cut of Halloween when it premiered on NBC in 1981, I had to sneak into a theatre to see Carpenter’s follow-up, Halloween II, that same month. Thrilling, yes, but for me even then, it failed to replicate the visceral, German Expressionism-influenced elegance of the original (not that I knew what German Expressionism was at the time, or a Panaglide for that matter).

That first iconic film, written in just ten days and shot for a mere $320,000, featuring a killer in a modified William Shatner mask purchased for a buck ninety-eight at Bert Wheeler’s now defunct magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, coupled with my parents’ encouragement of my early interest in writing, would lead to just that, from my beginnings as an editor two decades later at Universal Studios’ Horror Online, to eight years as a writer at the beloved Fangoria, to a decade of journalism at Dread Central, with a few produced films and screenplays peppered throughout.

As for Halloween and my continued fascination with it, over the course of my career I’ve had the distinct honor of meeting Carpenter himself, as well as that young, plucky babysitter, and the knife-wielding madman who assailed her. In fact, in my possession at the time of this writing is a vintage Lamson butcher knife, signed by all three. (Curtis’ written-in-Sharpie signature and message of “Happy Halloween” is still to me is as surreal as the moment in which she signed it, although no more so than when John did the same in his living room, while allowing me to prattle on to him about his film’s resonance, as if he were unaware). And in 2015, and in an interesting turn of events, I nearly portrayed the iconic killer in a proposed San Diego Comic Con teaser for filmmaker Marcus Dunstan’s aborted Dimension feature, Halloween Returns.

Why me, you ask? Because as Dunstan was gleefully aware, for the past half a decade, each year on Halloween, I’ve donned a custom-made, screen quality jumpsuit and mask, and to the delight and often sheer terror of those evening’s trick or treaters, stalked Orange Grove Avenue in West Hollywood: the very street which Laurie traversed on the flickering screen in that San Francisco cinema so many years ago before my terrified, eight-year-old eyes.

After all, everyone’s still entitled to one good scare.

_ _ _

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.