SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 77 Discussion - Halloween

[JayPettryMMA]

I had no idea about the Shatner mask thing, by the way, so I got a big kick out of that when I read it.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Watching this right now. It's pretty good so far.

It's from the Biography channel.

Watching this, I'd forgotten about the "speed kills" comment. Maybe that's what triggered Mikey the snowflake to go after them in particular. Presuming that's him in the car, which I always thought it was.

 

[Social Distance Warrior]

One of the most overrated horror franchises of all time

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

One of the most overrated horror franchises of all time

How many overrated horror franchises are there to even compile a list from?

 

[Guestx]

Attn: @clumseygenius @sleepwalk @Cubo de Sangre @Anung Un Rama @sickc0d3r. . .

I know your first notification for this thread took you to the second post, so just be aware the OP has a lot of info in it that you guys may (or may not) be interested in. Just giving you a heads up in case anyone missed it. If not, ignore me.

 

[Guestx]

Watching this, I'd forgotten about the "speed kills" comment. Maybe that's what triggered Mikey the snowflake to go after them in particular. Presuming that's him in the car, which I always thought it was.

Hmm. . . I know the "speed kills" line comes early in the narrative but I can't remember how early. If that really is supposed to be THE reason that he targets them instead some other random girls, then that's bit of an eye roll.

I think by that point he had already picked out his targets, which is why he was rolling by all slow and shit in the first place.

 

[Guestx]

Other than Dr. Loomis obligatory ramblings about pure evil and inhuman qualities, there is very little explanation of Michael's "powers" until part 6 (The Curse of Michael Myers) which is the "Thorn" angle. It's a really ludicrous turn in the story and was not well received except for by a handful of franchise diehards (of which I'm one and would argue that 6 is a fun film).

http://halloweenmovie.wikia.com/wiki/Thorn

You could also say that this storyline was inspired by a speech Loomis gives about pagan druids after Michael breaks into a school in Halloween II. That's where I assume they got the idea.

I guess that's the way it is with creating more and more entries in franchises like this. You have to continue to make the mythology more and more layered until eventually you're just coming up with ridiculous shit.

I mean, Jason went to space. Leprechaun spent time in the hood.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Hmm. . . I know the "speed kills" line comes early in the narrative but I can't remember how early. If that really is supposed to be THE reason that he targets them instead some other random girls, then that's bit of an eye roll.

I think by that point he had already picked out his targets, which is why he was rolling by all slow and shit in the first place.

Just spitballin'.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Fwiw, Halloween 2 is one of the few scores/soundtracks I've bought.

 

[Guestx]

He came back to his ancestral home to kill the people who took his old house over, and that's about it.

I guess this is a point I'm confused on.

Isn't his old house supposed to be the old vacant piece of shit that the doctor is staking out for most of the movie? So what's the significance for him of the house where he kills everybody? Or is there any?

I guess I should ask - is True Lies Jamie Lee Curtis the GOAT Jamie Lee Curtis? Or is it Fish Called Wanda JLC? Freaky Friday JLC? Something else?

Probably True Lies.

Although, I mean shit, to repost the pic from the OP she's looking pretty damn good here too. Looking evocative with just a little bit of attitude.

It's kind of like the Friday the 13th series, and I had a whole bit ready in case we got into those, but nope.

Not even one vote.

But on a related note, I found out that Hulu has Hellraiser and I'm on a Hulu trial right now. So I intend to give it a look.

Compared to other horror films, and the bloody rival series I keep mentioning, this film was relatively tame. A little nudity, some blood and stabs, and a whole lot of tension. It wasn't about seeing the brutality, it was about anticipating what was to come. It's why SPX's trivia piece about people seeing the face of Myers and freaking out despite it being just a normal looking guy, perceiving the character as a monster and seeing his monstrous appearance, makes so much sense.

This film actually kind of reminded me of the original Cat People. Obviously Halloween is more violent, but both were low-budget films that relied far more on mood and suspense than they did on violence.

8/10. I wouldn't go so far to say it's a classic (although it wouldn't be a stretch) but it definitely could be considered as the beginning of the golden age of horror films.

I'd say that it's not a classic in my personal view, but it has to be regarded as a classic when looking at it from a historical perspective and taking into account the love so many people have for it, as well as its impact on horror cinema.

 

[europe1]

Its been a long time since I watched the original Halloween. I was struck immediately by how minimalist the presentation is in terms of sets and extras and all the things that go into a major motion picture.

I was thinking minimalism more in the nightscenes. Often it's just darkness and vauge light-sources. With an eerie breeze blowing by.

Even the way the story is explained only gives us the most important details, like when the doctor simply describes Michael Myers as, "the evil." We don't get any long drawn out explanations about what all the events of Myers life was, only the minimal amount to tell the story.

That's one of my favorite things about the original, how simple it is. Before the sister and cult storylines which were unnecessarily introduced. I think it's a great example of the fear of the unknown.

Overall I think the method was effective, it worked for this film because it was uniform throughout, the cinematography, the score, and the script all come together in a minimal,

Carpenter (especially early Carpenter) always had a sense for minimalism. Assult on Precinct 13 is similar in how we learn almost nothing about the villians (a gang), and what we do learn is vauge and sinister. You can even extend this minimalism to something like The Thing, where we learn very little about the titular Thing (where does it come from, what is it, what is it's original form?). The same with The Fog. And of course, his score has always been minimalistic.

Then you have Big Trouble in Little China which is excessive to the core

I think the deal with teenagers might be that, on a physical level, they are pretty much in their prime or close to it. A lot of girls will never look better than they did in their late teens and early 20s.

Yeah but you could say the same thing about models, they're always at the prime too (especially back then when models had an very early expiry date). So why does one country decide to center around school girls while another does models? Obviously physical beauty has to do with it. But if the trends were truly random then we should have seen more diversity in the targets. So I think some sort of cultural tropes are in play.

It's interesting to note that in almost all of human history except for right now it was common for, say, a 25 year old man to marry a 16-year-old girl and it was considered a good match.

Shit you can easily find differences that are way broader than that.

In a movie like Guess Whose Coming to Dinner from the 60's there's an almost twenty years difference and they're considered perfect on that front.

Bruh, all I'll say is that what amazes me is how fucking incredible Jamie Lee's body once was. She's never had the best face, but at least at certain stages of her life her physique was second to none.

It's interesting, because Jamie Lee Curtis never did achieve that "sex symbol" status that so many other actresses did. I think it's her face that already held her back from that. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if being reduced to nothing but that in people's eyes is not something she ever wanted anyway.

Ehm...

Really, my biggest issue with the Rob Zombie remake was the inclusion of an abuse/neglect/bullying backstory that takes some of the mystique out of Michael Myers.

I absolutely loath that fucking sequel. That backstory is absolutely woeful, like something an teenage emo edgelord would have come up with in an attempt to look dark and edgy. And yeah, it just sucks the mystique right out of the story.

It seems that Carpenter wanted MM to be unreadable and mysterious. We aren't supposed to understand his motives; he's doing what he's doing and his reasons are his own.

For me, this works because the film explicitely points in that direction several times. Donald Pleasance is a psychiatrist who has spent over a decade working on Myers, but all he can do to explain the guy is to call him pure evil, all of his scientific knowlage is inadequat to even begin comprehending what this guy truly is. Had they just left it without any hints like this, then it would have been done poorly.

There is a difference between leaving things unexplained and purposfully pointing out that something is unexplainable in human terms.

LOL George Lucas? Damn. That's the last dude I would think had a connection to Halloween.

All of those New Hollywood wiz-kidz are basically on a first-name basis with each other. Though technically Carpenter started in the dying days of the studio system but he tagged along when he saw what the boat was carrying.

But at least in the first film we're just told that Michael is a regular insane human. So how do they explain the fact that he doesn't stay dead?

Donald Plesance seems to believe otherwise.

It's why SPX's trivia piece about people seeing the face of Myers and freaking out despite it being just a normal looking guy, perceiving the character as a monster and seeing his monstrous appearance, makes so much sense.

Interestingly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a similar reaction. People imagined it as much more visually gruesome than it actually was, precisely because what was happening was in their head.

We have to remember, there were other significant horror/killer movies back in 78 for sure, like Texas Chainsaw, Psycho, and Black Christmas, but they hadn't yet experienced the explosion and oversaturation of all these pictures.

I think the fact that cinemas was so diversified also helped this impact. Before the late 70s, if you wanted so see something really gorey then you had to go to a grindhouse or a drive-in, or similar alternative-theater experiences. The mainstream was remained sheltered from the most gruesome stuff. But when cinemas diversified, started carring every kind of picture, a movie like Halloween reached the suburbian audiences as well.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

Alright. I'm gonna be that guy. The little girl from Halloween 5 (and The Last Boy Scout!) grew up to be hot.

Spoiler

and topless in the Rob Zombie remake.

 

[sleepwalk]

I don't get the connection but funny clip from Apatow's best.

 

[MusterX]

That video has ruined my morning coffee.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

I don't get the connection but funny clip from Apatow's best.

From wholesome child to topless floozy.

A Ho Fa Sho!

 

[sickc0d3r]

Donald Plesance seems to believe otherwise.

I confess I'm not a fan of Halloween, it wasn't that scary and just kind of bored me (maybe my problem was that I was young and I saw Friday the 13th 1 - 4 before I ever saw Halloween, and by that point Myers seemed kind of lame), but I always thought it was interesting that a psychiatrist was leading the hunt to kill his own patient. No way he was just another crazy person. Loomis was like Van Helsing to Micheal's Dracula.

 

[the muntjac]

I must confess, I didn’t actually watch the movie for this week because I’ve seen Halloween numerous times that I’m already locked and loaded to talk about it.

It’s a simple, yet effective story of a psychopath killer stalking teenagers. To me, horror films that could actual happen are the most harrowing, and home invasion stuff is what really hits a nerve for me.

We start with Michael as a young boy who seemingly lives in a nice home with well-to-do parents, yet something compells him to murder his sister. No motive is given, and the best answer is that he’s “pure evil” as Dr. Loomis claims. It’s a very scary thought of seemingly normal everyday people just snapping for really no explanation at all. Take for instance the Vegas shooter, no motive has been found yet and the guy had no criminal background. That’s unnerving as all hell. I like how this film went the route of shrouding his reason of why he started picking up the knife because it came off the most scary this way. Rob Zombie’s remake missed on this notion because he decided to depict Michael as a kid from a broken home, and that’s why he became crazy. Yawn. Also, the Laurie Strode sister element introduced in the second film came off as some last minute twist just for the sake of shocking the audience, and I’ve never liked it. They were trying too hard to give Michael a discernible motive. They should have left it as him being a pyscho stalking a target.

In the original, Laurie and Tommy are walking to school, and on the way, Laurie has to drop off a key at the old Myers house. When she does so, we see from inside that Michael is watching them. Just like that, Michael has chosen a target. Had poor Laurie not unfortunately had to drop of this key in this moment of time, Michael probably would have found another target. She was a victim of circumstance, which once again is another harrowing thought. Much scarier than, “OMG, they’re siblings, derp!”

And so the hunt begins. Michael methodically tracks Laurie and Tommy all day, and bides his time until the right moment to strike. He sees Laurie has a couple of friends, and has found a couple more targets. He’s thinking, “Ah yes, you’ll all be dead soo- Whoa! Did she just call me a creep?!” Slams the brakes, “Oh, you’re dead first, bitch!”

Is Michael invincible? Knowing the sequels exist, it would seem like he is. However, if we just look at this as a standalone film, Laurie is able to puncture him in the kneck with a knitting needle, stab him in the eye with a close hangar, and then stab him in the torso with his knife. Neither of these are necessarily life ending. It makes sense that Mikey would get rocked by them, but him surviving these aren’t unfathomable. Loomis shoots him “six times!” at the end and sends him over a balcony. He’s seen lying there at first, but then gone in another shot. How could he have survived, right? Well, you could believe Loomis that he’s pure evil and evil never dies, or you could believe all the nonsense about the Thorn crap from the sixth film, or how I see it is that he still managed to get up in a moment of pure adrenaline, stagger a few yards, and then collapse dead in the front yard. Loomis walks outside and says, “Oh, wait! Here he is.”

Yes, yes, there is a second film where Mike follows her to the hospital and blah, blah, blah. This sequel, just like the rest of the sequels, never live up to the first, and not only that, they just aren’t very good. I tend to write them all off. For me, it’s all about the self-contained story of the first movie - A high school girl is the victim of circumstance at the hands of a masked cold-blooded killer. It’s the most grounded in reality, which in turn makes it the most scary.

Man, the music is so good in this. Every piece is memorable and a classic. Carpenter really knew how to envoke dread with a keyboard.

Jamie Leigh Curtis is great in this. She comes off completely natural whether it be when she’s talking with her friends, hanging out with Tommy, or screaming for her life.

Donald Pleasance is also great as the terrified and frustrated doctor who is the only one who understands what Michael is capable of. The smirk he gives after scaring the kids away from the house always gives me a chuckle.

This is one of my favorite horror films, and I think it’s so well done that it transcends just being a horror film. It’s a genuinely great movie. The slow-burning tension of Mike stalking them is good, the shots of him hiding and creeping around in the dark are good, the way Michael looks is memorable, it’s got quotable dialogue, good characters, and it never strays into being hokey. When Michael starts running wild, the tension is through the roof. Yes, many slasher films have come afterwards and have emulated Halloween, but they have never duplicated it. Halloween is in a class of its own.

Now, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t talk about some of my gripes about this film.

1st:
Six-year-old Michael was pretty damn tall for a six-year-old in the POV shots. If you go back and watch the opening scene, the camera is mounted from a height of an adult and not a small child. This always stands out to me.

2nd:
There’s a scene where Laurie is back home in her bedroom, and she looks out the window and sees Michael standing in the backyard looking at her. The shot order goes as the following:

-From Laurie’s perspective, we see Michael in the yard
-Close up of Laurie’s face
-From Laurie’s perspective, we see same yard shot, but Michael is gone now.
-Close up of Laurie’s face

To the audience it seems as though Michael quickly disappeared, but from the way the movie presents it, Laurie had to have watched him walk away because she’s always looking at him. I’ve always found this to be weird.

3rd:
Michael can drive a car. Not only can he drive it, but it seems he can drive it well. I know that Loomis throws out a line of somebody might have given him driving lessons, but I hope this is not meant to be taken seriously. In horror films, the trope is usually that the car won’t start for the protagonist, but Halloween flips that by making an antagonist who shouldn’t know how to put it in gear be able to use it as a tool to methodically stalk his victims.

Anyways, I feel I’ve written too much, but this is a film I greatly enjoy.

 

[the muntjac]

Yea we know when he escaped the psychiatric prison he went back to the same town and back to the same house where he committed the murder from the opening scene. What we don't know is his obsession with that particular house. Seems like a pretty important detail to leave out.

I never did understand his motivation. WHY precisely did he want to come back to this town and do this? Why did he target who he targeted? Why did he gravitate toward that house?

I have no idea.

His victims are purely of chance. He sees a target, he sees red, and he wants to kill them. He came home because it's the most familiar place to him. There's no place like home. Seeing Laurie coming up to his stoop to drop off the key triggered something inside him that she now has to die. Whether because he felt she was trespassing and saw her as a threat, or because he has an abnormal brain that when he sees a pretty girl, instead of wanting to kiss them, he wants to kill them. Who knows? That's what makes him scary.

And other North American proto-slashers like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Chrismas feutured school girl victims as well, though under a fairly different context.

As much as Halloween gets the credit for starting the modern day American slasher, I would argue that Black Christmas deserves that honor. The plots are very similar in that they depict an escaped mental patient terrorizing a small group of women in a house. Although, I do believe that Black Christmas is credited for introducing the red herring element into slasher films because for awhile in Black Christmas it cues us to believe that the one ex-boyfriend is really the killer, but we see at the end that he isn't. Black Christmas is a fine film, I enjoy it too, but I think Halloween has the leg up on it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the other hand, I have mixed feelings about that one, but that's for another discussion.

 

[the muntjac]

The thing is, in Halloween he doesn't even really come for her until she enters her friend's house. Why didn't he just go straight after her?

Like I said, that sounds retconned. I wonder if Carpenter was thinking that when he made the first movie.

Annie called him a creep and pissed him off. Loudmouth gets it first then.

As for the whole brother/sister storyline, I addressed my feelings of that in my post.

 

[JayPettryMMA]

Interesting how this discussion has brought in a lot more non-members than usual.

Halloween has mainstream appeal. I hate to say it, and no disrespect to the next week picks, but a FL horror film more than likely won't get the kind of discussion this one is getting. I want to be proved wrong though.

Posters can walk in off the proverbial street and chime in about a movie they've seen a few times.

But I love learning about movies I've never heard of.