Ed Copeland on John Carpenter’s Halloween, which turned 30 years old last Saturday.
And Jeremy shares some screenshots from Halloween (some of them which give me a chill of remembering just looking at them. It’s always the most BENIGN image that freaks me out, more so than any gore or bloodshed. The laundry on the line? TERRIFYING.)
maybe more for its unintentional humor than anything else, but i LOVE the halloween movies. i have 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 on VHS tape and i watch #1 and sometimes #2 every halloween.
I recently got really, really into The Fog, which was Carpenter’s follow-up to Halloween. You’re right about the benign stuff being the scariest. He actually pulled off a chase scene with fog. A CHASE scene. It’s like Michael Myers – slow, creeping, with perfect detail paid to creating the believable tension that, yes, even something *that* torpid can catch you.
I note that beth, wisely skips Halloween 3, which had nothing to do with the rest of the series and really had an unintelligible plot
I’ve watched both They Live, Escape From New York and The Thing in the past couple of weeks. One of the things about which I’ve always been most impressed with Carpenters work is that he does his own scores for his movies and they are always so spot on to the context. Can you imagine any other theme music for Halloween? I mean, it’s iconic. They Live’s bluesy, downtrodden soundtrack was equally great and the cheesy synth of Escape From New York just made the movie that much more surreal.
In the liner notes for the criterion edition of the Halloween laserdisc Carpenter wrote that the reason he did his own scores is because he’s the cheapest person he could find to do them.
Another of my favorite things is that Carpenter almost always either names characters or finds a way to mention George Romero and David Cronenberg in all of his movies, at least since Escape …
There is a lot of stuff going on in Carpenter’s movies. He’s on my top-10 directors list.