31 Days of Knife: See anything you like?

LOOMIS: Just try to understand what we’re dealing with here. Don’t underestimate it.

MARION: I think we should refer to ‘it’ as ’him.’

LOOMIS: If you say so.

MARION: Your compassion is overwhelming, Doctor.

Sometimes you’re just too close.

In the past 22 years, I’ve seen John Carpenter’s Halloween more times than I can count. I have a great memory of seeing it at the theater with John Carpenter himself sitting near-by. It’s a ridiculously effective film, and sometimes I take for granted all the myriad elements that make it such a rewarding movie for me because every scene is so ingrained in my headspace.

I have Rob Zombie to thank for giving me some much needed perspective.

Many people have made some pretty convincing arguments for why Zombie’s Halloween remake is such a clusterfuck of a film (here’s a pretty fair take on it). I will say that there are moments in the remake that work for me, and I’ll point those out a little bit further in here. But anyone who has any affection whatsoever for Carpenter’s original film, or even good storytelling in general, would be hard pressed to call the remake anything other than a failure. On one hand, I feel it’s unfair to hold Zombie to standards he doesn’t seem to have any interest in maintaining. His film is obviously intended to be less of a thrill ride and more gritty and unsettling, ala Texas Chain Saw Massacre, perhaps. That said, Zombie sabotages any chance of critical separation between his work and Carpenter’s with a mind-bogglingly ill-conceived third act.

Most people fixate on the fact that Zombie removes the supernatural element from the Myers character. I don’t think this would be as big a problem if Zombie hadn’t made the third act of his film such a direct riff on Carpenter’s film. By using a simplified yet bastardized version of the original film in the third act, Zombie forces comparisons that don’t do his work any service. The first two thirds of his movie firmly establish that he’s not shooting for the same tone as Carpenter’s original, yet then he goes and tries to apply his contrary approach to an almost verbatim take on Carpenter’s story. It’s head scratching.

What emerges is a pretty lucid picture of just why Carpenter’s film really works so well; as Roger Ebert has said more than once, “it’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” Carpenter’s film works through atmosphere, dread, and the unknown, while Zombie wants to rip off the mask and show us everything.

Beyond the detrimental impact of his additions to Myer’s backstory, Zombie’s filmmaking can’t hold a candle to Carpenter’s in a scene-by-scene comparison. Carpenter relied on timing, tempo, and most importantly, a clear idea of how to how to compose scenes with an eye on how they’ll lock together in the editing bay to tell the story; it was telling the film as much through the thoughtfully composed shot as it was with the careful cuts. Zombie’s film, in contrast, is all wild cuts and haphazard angles. The cinematography and lighting are exceptional, however, and the gore works given the more gritty tone of Zombie’s world, but it further accentuates just how powerful Carpenter’s film was in its restraint.

I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s sloppy filmmaking, because there are some strong moments here that show Zombie has some intuitive sense when it comes to some particular moments, but in terms of building the overall narrative he simply doesn’t connect the dots. His work on The Devil’s Rejects is much more coherent and far more satisfying.

Zombie also takes a page from the latter Halloween mythos and makes Laurie Michael’s sister. I thought this move was utterly self-sabotaging when Carpenter and Hill made it in 1982’s Halloween II, but because Zombie actually spends two-thirds of the film tracking Michael’s evolution into The Shape, it’s not nearly so egregious here; the guy has already done his best to demystify Michael Myers, so adding the familial ties doesn’t do any more harm.

Zombie seems to be trying to give us a really American monster, i.e., one that is born out of the ugliness under the floorboards of the American dream. His Michael Myers comes from what could arguably be called white trash, although I think that Zombie was playing up a family structure that could be more representative of how fucked the American family dynamic can get. Carpenter’s Haddonfield is the “typical” American suburb – tree-lined streets, babysitters, etc. Oddly enough, Zombie gives us a similar view of Haddonfield in the third act of his film, but it’s a class distinction here – the Strodes are upper middle class and the Myers were lower class. Tellingly, Zombie has Michael attack and kill Laurie’s adopted parents, smashing furniture and destroying the illusion that they’re immune to the violence that is the Myers legacy.

This also carries through in the climax of the film, when Michael takes Laurie back to the Myers home, where the final scenes of the film take place. It’s a reversal of what Carpenter did – instead of having the Other invade our world, he brings us back to the world of the Other. Myers home is stripped of paint, the walls crumbling, the foundation rotted. Don’t need a class in film theory to see what all this is meant to represent. Unfortunately, it’s more interesting from a thematic standpoint than it is from a visceral one.

Ultimately, Zombie’s film is brutal and ugly, savage and crass. It’s a hostile film that slaps us around for a couple of hours before it finally gives up the ghost. The dialogue is unimaginative and confrontationally vulgar, with only Ken Foree’s cameo standing out in any way (“I’m Joe Grizzly, Bitch!”).

Yet, having said all that, I’m thankful that I saw Zombie’s film. It has given me cause to really consider why I love Carpenter’s film so much.

Carpenter’s film is scary, but it’s not disturbing or unpleasant in the way that, say, Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Lustig’s Maniac are. It’s a thrill ride, but in the best use of the term – it’s well-built, well-paced, and exciting. It’s also pretty well-written, with likable characters and some pretty great comedic beats. Donald Pleasance’s Loomis has some wonderfully arch moments , as does the too-sexy P.J. Soles (“See anything you like?”).

Above and beyond all that, Carpenter’s film is filled with truly memorable moments of great, nightmarish imagery. Michael Myers is himself a brilliantly evocative horror image, and his presence in Carpenter’s calm, serine suburbia makes his appearance even more otherworldly and unsettling.

Consider his almost brazen appearance standing next to the hedge as Laurie walks home…

…or how he appears under her window just behind the blowing sheets on the clothes line.

The film is filled with moments like this, images that have gone on to enter a lexicon of iconic horror shared by horror film fans. Much of it has to do with Carpenter’s compositions and manipulation of foreground/background elements, of course, as well as the fact they all threaten, anticipate, or follow violence…but there’s more to it than that. These are images that have a dream-like, surreal quality, and arguably qualify as ‘monumental’ horror images. In his paper, Collins cites one example of a monumental horror image as “the sudden appearance or discovery of a being in a place where no one ought to be,” and he goes on to provide some very specific criteria for what qualifies as a monumental horror image (lighting, framing, surroundings, relation to a character who is seeing the object/image, etc.). While admittedly many of these moments don’t fall within his definition in the strictest sense (although I think the images above come darn close), in broader terms I believe scenes such as these deserve some consideration for their ability to evoke very discernable feelings of unease and even horror that linger well past the roll of the credits.

My all-time favorite moment in Halloween, however, comes when young Tommy hides behind the curtain preparing to scare Lindsey as she watches Forbidden Planet on the couch a few feet away. He calls her name in a hoarse whisper a few times, creeping her out. Satisfied, he turns to move from behind the curtain when he happens to glance outside the window. Tommy watches as, across the street, Michael Myers, black with shadow, carries the lifeless body of Annie Bracket across the front yard and in through the front door of the Wallace home. The scene is scored to the eerie space synth from Forbidden Planet on the television, giving the moment this utterly amazing, otherworldly feeling that sends chills down my spine just thinking about it!

Ultimately, that’s the thing that makes Halloween unique for me – it’s a movie I just really enjoy watching. I love prying apart Carpenter’s craft and his nods to other films like The Thing from Another World, and I never tire of watching Donald Pleasance give his little speech about how he “spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… *evil*.” I love how wonderfully the score compliments the film, particularly in the quiet scenes early on where Laurie is walking through the streets to and from school, not to mention the best use of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” until this came along.

I love how Carpenter plays “trick or treat” with the audience…

…and I love how utterly American the film is, how completely reliant the story and atmosphere are on our familiarity and childhood memories of this particular holiday. Watching Halloween just last week (on a really great Blu-Ray transfer that made the film look better than I’ve ever seen it, to be honest), it occurred to me again that this is a film that delivers a truly Halloween-like experience – – babysitters and scary movies, cheap costumes, candy, pumpkin carving, and later practical jokes and drunk teenage hook-ups in the dark.

You don’t find any of this in Zombie’s film. None of it. Zip. Zero. Nada. It is an utterly unpleasurable experience. Even the moments in the picture that did work for me (such as young Michael beating the bully with that big ol’ tree branch or the shaky camera as Michael follows his sister Judith as she crawls down the hall to get away from him) work by virtue of their disturbing hyper-reality; they’re moments that work because they actually accomplish what Zombie is trying, but fails, to do with the rest of his film. There’s nothing that I connect with in the remake, and there’s certainly nothing that lights my imagination or delights my cinephilic sensibilities the way that the original does. The holiday Zombie’s film evokes is a Halloween no one would ever want to celebrate.

Next up, Crystal Lake. Until then…