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Michael Gingold

My Favorite Horror Movie: Michael Gingold on John Carpenter’s Halloween

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With 1978’s Halloween currently in theaters (the film returned to cinemas 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 (from our own Editor-in-Chief Sean Decker to Contracted star Matt Mercer and beyond), they serve to explore just why 40 years later, The Shape still terrifies.

In our final essay from the book, horror luminary Michael Gingold digs deep into Haddonfield.

HALLOWEEN
by
MICHAEL GINGOLD

All through my preteen years, I couldn’t handle horror films. I was that kid who was freaked out by scary  stuff. Forget watching through my fingers; I would actually stand while viewing genre flicks on TV, just in case they got to be too much and I had to run from the room. I was a big fan of Godzilla and similar monster movies, but the harder-core stuff—even the ones that were rated PG—was too intimidating. I did want to see Jaws when it first hit theaters just because I was so into sharks at the time, though the “May be too intense for younger children” note on the ads forestalled that possibility.

Things began to change around the time I turned twelve. I went to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers with my family and made it through unscathed (though today, I’m stunned it got away with a PG rating). Through the following spring and summer, I began getting curious about horror, and seeing a few of the R-rated examples—like Phantasm and Alien—along with Jaws, finally. They all had the desired effect, and I hid my eyes during Phantasm’s silver sphere scene and Alien’s chest-burster. Still, I began not only getting comfortable with being frightened by film, but enjoying the sensation—the natural high it created. My intrigue was fueled by a cover story in Newsweek called “Hollywood’s Scary Summer,” and the emergence of a new magazine called Fangoria (which featured my old friend Godzilla on the front of its first issue). And later in 1979, I saw the movie that made me love being scared.

I was vaguely familiar with John Carpenter’s Halloween, having seen a television ad or two when it first opened in October 1978. At that time, a newspaper-workers’ strike had shut down The New York Times, the paper in our household, so I didn’t read much about the movie then; in fact, I read more about it during a family vacation to England in the summer of ’79, when it had opened in the UK to lots of positive attention. Back then, however, before the video market took over, popular movies were rereleased all the time within a year or so of their initial openings, and so it was with Halloween, which returned to theaters in October ’79. That’s when I first saw it, and I didn’t know what hit me.

Never mind the now-classic opening single-take shot from young Michael Myers’ point of view; the damn music frightened me before the film proper even started. Carpenter’s simple but chilling 5/4-time theme had my hackles raised within the first minute, and the movie had me in its grip from then on. I don’t recall if I screamed out loud, but my grandmother, who took me to the movie (my parents just weren’t into the horror stuff), was genuinely concerned afterward at how frightened I had been.

She needn’t have worried. I had indeed been scared half to death by Halloween, more than by anything I’d ever watched before, and yet I had found it exhilarating. It was a huge change in the way I experienced movies. A year before, I had barely been able to take a made-for-TV schlocker like Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell; now, a movie that was originally advertised with the tagline “When were you last scared out of your wits by a movie?” had completely lived up to that promise—and I enjoyed the hell out of it. (The reissue ads, conversely, were stocked with laudatory quotes from critics. Contrary to popular belief, Halloween attracted a number of positive reviews from the start; one of my favorite excerpts—I can’t recall the source now—was “It’ll scare the seeds out of your pumpkin.”)

Part of the reason Halloween was so effective was that it literally got me where I lived. I grew up in exactly the kind of suburban town where Michael comes home to do his dirty work, and what makes the scenes between his prologue slaying of his sister and his All Hallows’ Eve rampage work so well is how ordinary, and thus relatable, they are. There’s nothing special about Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie and her friends, nor are they the hopped-up sex and party monsters of so many subsequent slasher films; they’re just typical teenage girls with typical teenage concerns. Producer and co-scripter Debra Hill reportedly wrote most of the heroines’ dialogue, and demonstrated a remarkable skill at capturing the tone and tenor with which young women conversed—not to mention that Lynda’s (P.J. Soles) favorite expression “totally” anticipated Frank and Moon Zappa’s hit song “Valley Girl” by four years.

Once we’ve gotten to know our central trio, along with young Tommy (Brian Andrews), whose dread of Halloween and “the boogeyman” helps amplify our own, Carpenter tightens the screws with merciless precision, demonstrating a remarkable handle on composition, framing and pacing. Even as I was caught up in Laurie and co.’s escalating fright, Halloween was the first time I was aware that a movie was directed, and I was able to admire Carpenter’s craft at the same time it was holding me in a death grip.

I became an instant Carpenter fan, eagerly anticipating each new film from the director (I didn’t have to wait long; The Fog debuted only five months later). I reviewed Halloween for my junior-high-school newspaper; one of the first pieces of criticism I ever wrote. I attempted to teach myself Carpenter’s Halloween theme on the family piano, and almost mastered it. I read Curtis Richards’ novelization and was puzzled by why the author felt it necessary to throw in the distracting backstory about Samhain (if only I knew…).

And when Halloween II opened in 1981, three friends and I went on Halloween night. This was back before sequels and franchise pictures had taken over the movie scene the way they have now. We weren’t dutifully catching the latest entry in an established series, we were getting more Halloween! The entire audience was primed for it, and we all responded with screams and laughs at the right places, shouted advice to Jamie Lee Curtis and “Shut up!” when that dumb cop says something stupid during the climactic action. Some consider Halloween II unworthy of its predecessor, but I’ll probably never be able to judge it objectively, because seeing it that first time was one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life. Part of the thrill was that we all went in costume, figuring the disguises would help our 14 and 15-year-old selves get into this R-rated movie without a parent or adult guardian, and we were right; seeing it unchaperoned was part of the excitement.

In the years since, I’ve seen hundreds (thousands?) of horror films, but none will ever hold the place in my heart that Halloween does. Halloween was the movie that crept into my psyche and unlocked that area where the fascination with the dark, scary and unknown resides. It transformed me from a casual fan of fright cinema to a passionate follower of the genre – just at the right time, when horror had its explosion of popularity in the very late ’70s and early ’80s. It was the film that I held all subsequent scare films up against. And it led me to a career in the horror field, fulfilling the dream that Halloween first inspired. One of my proudest achievements is the 8,000-word-plus history of the cinematic Michael Myers saga that I wrote for the booklet accompanying Shout! Factory and Anchor Bay’s Halloween: The Complete Collection deluxe Blu-ray boxed set. (On the other hand, when I took a gig scripting a very-low-budget movie called Halloween Night, my attempt to honor Carpenter’s legacy was completely stymied by the execution.)

I’ve seen Halloween countless times since that first viewing back in ’79, and while it doesn’t frighten me now like it did back then, I am still in thrall to what a relentlessly well-crafted film it is. To me, it’s one of those perfect movies, one that doesn’t have a wasted moment, in which all the elements click together perfectly. From the performances to the music to Dean Cundey’s mobile cinematography, which draws us right into the action (though it does not, as commonly thought, take Michael’s point of view at any point after his childhood prologue), every part of Halloween works in concert toward one goal: To terrify you, to leave you shaking when it’s over, yet to make you feel elated rather than worn down. Halloween did that to my 12-year-old self better than any other movie has since, and that’s why it remains my favorite horror movie.

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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

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: 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: 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.

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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.