🎃 Halloween 🎃 Special 🎃 Featuring 🎃 Michael 🎃 Myers 🔪

It's Halloween week (!) and I'm getting to the heart of things by thinking about John Carpenter and Debra Hill's genre-defining Halloween. Then I cover a certain heartland clown and recommend a tiny 2018 indie (light-to-medium spoilers for all) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

Nothing says "Halloween" like Halloween, and I took some time this week to rewatch the classic.

1. [heavy breathing under mask]. I watched a good portion of Halloween with captions on and was struck by a regular, repeated phrase on screen: "[heavy breathing under mask]." Now I want to read a book about slashers called "[heavy breathing under mask]." It's a phrase that distills the slasher experience into as few words as possible: the classic slashers are not big talkers (Freddy, of course, a big exception), but breathing heavy beneath a mask just about sums up what they're all about.
2. Stillness. Michael Myers is famously called "The Shape" in Carpenter's script, a perfect name for a character who derives such power from stillness. Myers is so often just standing there—among hanging clothes, on a front lawn, across the street from Laurie's school—watching. It's the kind of thing most of us never do, and it suggests the brokenness of his mind. But he's also striking a pose, making a creepy image of himself, and taking his place as an icon.
3. The Devil’s eyes. What would it be like, in reality, to encounter Dr. Loomis when he arrives in Haddonfield on Michael Myers's trail? He's talking about a patient in a way that might set off alarm bells. "This isn't a man," he tells us. Michael has "… the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes.” What he saw in those eyes "was purely and simply evil.” This is the language of a religious fanatic not a doctor. If Dr. Loomis showed up in my city looking for someone, I'd probably make it my first order of business to protect the target from the raving doctor. The film, of course, takes Loomis's view. Michael is not a man but evil in human form. Does it makes sense, though, to dehumanize him? Men do awful things—"inhuman" things even—all the time.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. Corn-fed dread. The unforgettable image in Eli Craig's Clown in a Cornfield is the appearance of, not one, but several evil clowns emerging out of a cornfield. It is, no shock, one of many cornfield-set horror sequences in the movie, and they all got me thinking about other cornfields in horror history: from classic franchises like Children of the Corn, to the Twilight Zone's "It's a Good Life" (where little Anthony Fremont can wish anyone who displeases him into "the cornfield"), to the absurd Sharks of the Corn. The cornfield has quietly taken shape as a classic horror setting. The cornfield evokes the heartland and offers an instant labyrinth, a place to get lost in, a place where anything could be hiding. There's power in these twin aspects—a setting laden with meaning (of an American rural center) and that offers all the horror possibilities of the maze.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. Simple Supernatural. Elle Callahan's Head Count, for the most part, settles into the familiar grooves of a low-budget indie about young people menaced by a supernatural entity in an isolated location. I can't quite offer a wholehearted recommendation, but for horror-heads looking for deep-cuts or, especially, for filmmakers, this one is worth watching for one reason alone. Head Count creates horror effects out of the simplest of techniques. There's a recurring scenario where a person appears to be in two places at once. For instance, a group is hanging out, and one among them—one who's right there with them—comes in from the other room. Confused, they look around, and he's no longer in the group. The entering friend is also confused. No, he tells them, he hasn't been in the room until right now. In an era of big effects and CGI, Head Count finds spooky possibility in filmmaking's basic elements—in its ability to arrange people and to structure space. When things get wilder—when the CGI finally does make an appearance—it's a letdown. There's more joy, often, in cinematic sleight-of-hand than in the visual rendering of the supernatural, especially at modest budgets.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. A recent Pro Publica article found that over 170 American citizens had been detained by immigration agents. "Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them." I want to be clear that no one deserves ICE's brutality, regardless of their immigration status—migration is a human right—but the warning here is clear: brutality and immorality anywhere is a threat to all of us. No one is safe. The moment to resist fascism is now.