13 Nights of Shocktober: John Carpenter's They Live

by A.J.

Night 4: John Carpenter Night

They live. We sleep.

John Carpenter’s They Live

John Carpenter’s They Live is a little bit of everything: science fiction, action, horror, comedy, even socio-political commentary. It vacillates from mystery to comedy to sci-fi weirdness to working class drama. Somehow, it does all of this very well. Carpenter fully meant They Live to be a satire of the consumerist culture of the 1980's and a reaction to the effects of the Reagan era on America as a whole. So much about the themes of They Live is relevant today that there’s no need for an updated version. Nearly every line of dialogue about class and economic inequalities and the elite upper class exploiting and benefiting off the work of the lower class feels relevant today. Yet, this is not merely a dressed up diatribe. Carpenter made a thoroughly entertaining and interesting sci-fi film with an important message that never loses its way. 

The plot is pretty simple but also pretty strange. A drifter arrives in Los Angeles looking for work and stumbles across an alien plot for world domination. That’s the simple part. The strange part is that the aliens are broadcasting oppressive subliminal messages through every form of media: TV, billboards, magazines, etc. There are also already numerous aliens living on earth in disguise. The only way to see the aliens or their messages is with special sunglasses that the drifter finds in an abandoned church. The glasses reveal a world in black and white where advertisements of any kind, even labels on food in a grocery store, are actually messages like: OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, SUBMIT, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, STAY ASLEEP.

Carpenter named the drifter Nada to not so subtly emphasize that though he has skills and his own tools and is more than willing to work for his fair share, society at large sees him as nothing (nada). He looks at a wall of job postings at the unemployment office but when he finally meets with a case worker he’s told that there is nothing for him. Nada is played very well by wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. Physically of course, Piper is more than up to the task of being an action movie star, but he does a very fine job with the dramatic side of this character too. He starts out as pretty much a blank with practically no backstory. He also has an innocent optimism about his situation, even though he is homeless. He tells his only friend, Frank, played by the great Keith David, “I just want the chance. It’ll come. I believe in America. I follow the rules.” Piper says these lines with a realistic sincerity that is hard to believably deliver. Piper’s time as a professional wrestler came in handy in perhaps unexpected ways, like having to deliver some pretty ridiculous dialogue. When Keith David asks where these creatures are from, Piper replies with “They ain’t from Cleveland.” His most famous line of dialogue in the movie, which he came up with, is without a doubt, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” And he does this without making the movie silly; instead he makes it fun. 

Carpenter wrote the role of Frank for Keith David, which was something of a relief for David who had not had a film role since John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), his first film. If Piper plays the beat down but optimistic side of the American worker, David plays the beat down cynical, or pragmatic, side. His character says things like, “They put you at the starting line. The name of the game is ‘Make it Through Life’ only everyone’s out for themselves and looking to do you in at the same time.” Like his role in The Thing, he is the supporting character to a stand out leading man, but he is no less memorable. It certainly helps that his character’s comments about economic inequalities and social commentary are delivered in his memorable, authoritative, and booming voice. Arguably the most famous moment from They Live is the extended fight scene between Piper and David in an alley. You’ll hear that this scene has no purpose and that’s why it is memorable, aside from the stunt work and fight choreography. The counter argument is that it is meant to represent how difficult it is to get someone to change their mind, or even listen to a different opinion, since the fight starts when David refuses to put on the special sunglasses. Carpenter has said that the scene is an homage to the 9 minute fight scene in The Quiet Man between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen.

With They Live, John Carpenter both modernizes and pays tribute to science fiction films of the 1950’s. The look of the aliens, designed by Sandy King, Carpenter’s creative partner and later wife, is clearly evocative of sci-fi aliens of the 1950’s and even the EC horror comics that inspired Creepshow (1982) and the Tales From the Crypt HBO series. They might look cartoonish but they fit the heightened satirical tone. Due to the low budget, stunt coordinator Jeff Imada played nearly every alien with a different voice dubbed in afterwards. This explains why certain aliens might seem awkwardly tall compared to Roddy Piper since the short Imada was standing on a box or walking on crates. 

Nothing about They Live is subtle and that is by design. To quote Roger Ebert, “If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn’t.” That the message and the action do not hinder each other but together create an entertaining movie is a testament to John Carpenter’s skill as a filmmaker. 

They Live airs on TCM on Friday, October 25th at 12:30AM CT. It is also available to stream for free on Tubi and Peacock (w/subscription).

13 Nights of Shocktober: In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

by. A.J.

Night 12: John Carpenter Night

“Do you read Sutter Cane?”

In The Mouth of Madness (1995)

With credits like Halloween, The Thing, Christine, and They Live, director John Carpenter is unquestionably one of the true masters of horror. John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is not as famous or widely seen as those movies though it is equally well-crafted and very scary. It opened in February of 1995 to mostly negative reviews and indifferent audiences, but over time has gained somewhat of a cult status and a special edition Blu-ray release in 2018 from Shout Factory (through their special horror label, Scream Factory). Currently it is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Tubi, and The Roku Channel.

The film begins with the main character, John Trent (Sam Neil), being dragged into an insane asylum screaming that he is not insane. He’s interviewed by a psychiatrist played by David Warner and we flashback to see how Trent ended up in a padded cell. They make reference to how bad things are “out there” and it is clear that Trent’s story will also explain the beginnings of that as well. In the Mouth of Madness is part of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse trilogy, along with The Thing and Prince of Darkness, each of which is about how the end of the world, at least as we know it, begins. Here the cause of all the trouble is the latest book by the mysterious horror author Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow).

Trent is an insurance investigator hired to locate Cane, the most famous and best selling author in the world, who has vanished along with the manuscript for his new book, titled In the Mouth of Madness. Cane and his work are so popular and create such hysteria that riots break out when bookstores sell out of copies of his current novel. Trent believes that the disappearance is a hoax and is smugly proud that he’s never heard of Sutter Cane. Cane’s editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) goes with Trent on his search. They end up transported to a town that shouldn’t exist, Hobb’s End, the fictional town in Cane’s novels that looks like a perfect small town but has many strange things and horrors that emerge from every corner. The town residents, starting with the children, are mutating: some have deformed faces, some have tentacles. Trent and Styles find Cane in a red chamber in a Byzantine style church finishing his novel. He reveals that he has merely been channeling his work from ancient otherworldly creatures that once lived on earth and seek to remake the world and return. 

Jurgen Prochnow is very well cast as the mad author Sutter Cane. He is so low-key in his surprisingly few scenes that it only makes his character more frightening. In a very memorable scene he stands in front of a pulsating door covered in slime and then…rips a hole in reality… is probably the best way to describe it. Cane is a villain but there is no ultimate bad guy. The horror of In the Mouth of Madness is in its characters questioning their reality, learning knowledge or ideas that will drive them mad, and the horror that an idea can alter reality and bring about mass destruction. 

Sam Neil gives a superb performance as a man who begins as a smug skeptic and then is driven to madness. The image of him sitting alone in a movie theater with black crosses drawn all over his face and eating popcorn as he finally succumbs to the spreading madness is a haunting and unforgettable scene (there’s little surprise that it has turned into an internet meme). Neil also has one of the great screams and maniacal laughs in movies. No matter what state his character is in, you believe it. Julie Carmen as Styles also begins as a conservative character, then her hair comes down and she too succumbs to madness. She is not just a tag along character either. She witnesses the strange sights first as their car flies through the air to reach the otherworldly, horrific town of Hobb’s End. Once she witnesses the horrors Sutter Cane shows her, she becomes an important part of getting the insidious manuscript to our world. 

Sutter Cane is obviously modeled after Stephen King. Both have similar sounding names, set their horror stories in New England towns (King uses his native Maine, Cane uses neighboring New Hampshire), and both are extremely popular. However, Sutter Cane is more of a stand in for the extremely influential, and problematic, early 20th century weird and horror fiction author H.P. Lovecraft. Also a New England native, Lovecraft set most of his stories in or around the fictional town, Arkham, Massachusetts. His stories often dealt with ancient monsters that predated humanity and sought to reclaim the earth. He rarely described the monsters in detail but used many adjectives to describe the terrified reactions of the characters. A very Lovecraftian scene happens when Neil peers down into an abyss and sees the creatures approaching the portal to reality. Carpenter keeps the camera on Neil whose expression communicates the approaching horror. The next scene is not only nightmare fuel but the epitome of a nightmare: being chased by a mass of monsters down an endless hallway. We see only quick flashes of the monsters, close ups of mouths and teeth and tentacles and claws. Their anatomy seems to make no sense and that is part of the horror. Carpenter also makes good use of well timed jump scares and more subtle moments of suspense. In an early scene Trent and his boss, played by the late, great Bernie Casey, are having a casual conversation in a diner while a deranged looking man crosses the street towards them carrying an ax. 

This is one of my absolute favorite, top 13 horror movies. The screenplay by Michael De Luca and Carpenter’s direction effectively use many different kinds of horror. This is a horror movie with monsters, gross effects, and jump scares, but also a horror movie with suspense, surreal imagery, unsettling ideas, and disturbing themes. Compared to Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe, there are only a handful of adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories or novellas, which due to Lovecraft’s literary style are inherently difficult to visualize (The filmmaker who has probably had the most success with adapting Lovecraft to the screen is Stuart Gordon, director of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon). Even though In the Mouth of Madness is not a direct adaptation of any specific Lovecraft story, it may well be the best cinematic representation of the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Body Bags

 by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 9: Anthology Horror Night “Ah, body bags. You see, if it's murder, suicide or a nasty accident, they put them in here.” Body Bags

Body Bags is a 1993 anthology horror movie produced by Showtime. It was originally meant to be an anthology horror series, likely to compete with the hit HBO series Tales From the Crypt. When Showtime did not continue the series, the episodes that had already been filmed were put together and aired as a single movie. Regardless of the reason for its cancellation, Body Bags is an entertaining anthology film thanks to the talent involved. 

The setting is the overnight shift at a morgue where a ghoulish, corpselike coroner examines different body bags and shares the details behind the gruesome deaths. John Carpenter directed the first two stories and also plays The Coroner. You can’t help but compare him to the Crypt Keeper from Tales From the Crypt, even though one is a person in makeup and the other is a puppet. The Crypt Keeper is far more decayed and has a bigger personality but both are high energy characters that love death, gory details, and making jokes. There is hard rock music playing in the background of the interstitials with The Coroner and you can tell John Carpenter is having fun with the character.

In the first story, The Gas Station, Alex Datcher plays a young woman working the overnight shift at a gas station. At first she only has to deal with odd customers. Then she finds herself being stalked by a deranged psycho killer played by Robert Carradine. The second story, Hair, stars Stacey Keach as a man obsessed with stopping his hair loss. He seeks out a radical hair growth treatment that actually works but has sinister side effects. In the final story, Eye, directed by Tobe Hooper, Mark Hamill plays a baseball player that loses an eye in a car accident. He undergoes an experimental eye transplant but soon begins to have macabre and murderous visions.

Any horror anthology is likely to feel uneven and Body Bags is no exception. The Gas Station is a well-made but basic slasher story. It's not fresh but not stale either. Things pick up with Hair, which leans heavy into comedy. Naturally this story about a hair transplant gone wrong delves into body horror but it’s watchable because of its fun tone. Though it is not especially explicit with visual or makeup effects, it feels more graphic than it actually is due to the subject matter. Keach, who usually plays a heavy or tough guy, does a good job playing a lighter, insecure character. Eye is similar to The Gas Station in that it is a well-made short film that covers familiar territory, but this story is more of a psychological horror, with some gory effects too. The reason Eye holds together and feels as dramatic as it does is thanks to Mark Hamill’s solid performance. 

Body Bags uses some early CGI effects, which like most early CGI effects do not hold up, but the rest of the horror sights are practical visual effects and special makeup effects which go a long way. It might not be for everyone, either because of its light but macabre tone or the horror visuals, but it’s clear that Body Bags wants you to have as good a time as The Coroner is having. Watch for cameos and appearances by: Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, Debbie Harry, Twiggy, Tom Arnold, Charles Napier,  Tobe Hooper, David Naughton, David Warner, and legendary B-movie producer-director Roger Corman. I love horror anthologies but I’ll admit that most are made up of more misses than hits. Body Bags is better than most and makes for spooky fun Shocktober viewing.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Christine (1983)

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 11: John Carpenter/Stephen King Night

“You better watch what you say about my car. She's real sensitive.”

Christine (1983)          

John Carpenter’s Christine, based on Stephen King’s novel about a demonic classic car that kills people, is a hard sell. The story has an undeniably ridiculous premise, but it is excellently crafted and well worth watching. The approach taken by director John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips takes the premise as seriously as a movie about a haunted car should be taken. That tone is serious enough to allow for legitimate suspense and scares but never gets desperate for believability. Thanks to the skill at work behind the camera and a great cast, there is no trouble believing the characters or the unbelievable situations in which they find themselves.

Christine is a cherry red 1958 Plymouth Fury that was just born evil; she killed someone even before she came off the assembly line. Twenty years later, Arnie (Keith Gordon), a stereotypical teenage nerd—thick glasses, clumsy, low self-esteem, relentlessly bullied—finds the rusted, broken down Plymouth Fury for sale in the yard of a creepy old man. As Arnie fixes up Christine he changes too. He stops wearing glasses, slicks back his hair, and goes from put-upon wimp, to brimming with confidence, to an entitled sociopath. His best friend, Dennis (John Stockwell), a popular but level headed jock, is puzzled and troubled by Arnie’s change and suspects it is linked to Christine. 

Arnie begins dating Leigh, the attractive and demure new girl that every boy at school wants to get with, played by Alexandra Paul. When they are at the drive-in, Leigh finds herself alone in Christine for just a moment. The radio turns on by itself, glowing green and playing a 50’s pop song, and Leigh is choking suddenly.

The special effects in Christine are impressive to say the least. Scenes of the car on fire chasing down someone or smashing itself into a narrow ally to get one of Arnie’s bullies are surprisingly scary. The big showcase scene comes after Christine has been completely destroyed by Arnie’s bullies. Out of the corner of his eye, Arnie sees that the rearview mirror is fixed. He walks in front of Christine, says “show me,” and watches as Christine repairs herself to perfect condition. It is a titillating sight for Arnie and the score goes from eerie synthesizer to a salacious saxophone; it’s a sort of love scene. Needless to say, the special effects hold up so well because they are all practical. Christine’s impressive self-repairing scene was achieved by crushing the car and running the footage in reverse. When Christine smashes into something, a real car is really smashing into another car or through a wall. The sight and sounds of real twisted metal make the danger feel real.  

A lot of small touches add up to give Christine an eerie, uncanny tone: the soundtrack of synth music and 1950’s rock and roll, the out of time feel (made in 1983, set in 1978, but feels like it takes place in 1958), the understated approach to the supernatural scenes. My favorite eerie element is Christine’s green glowing radio that only plays music from the 1950’s. There are good performances all around. Keith Gordon gives a great and believable performance as Arnie becomes more and more dangerous. John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, and Harry Dean Stanton, as a state police detective, give solid performances that ground the movie in an acceptable reality.

There is very little blood and no gore in Christine and since the monster is a classic car you could easily watch this with someone squeamish. Christine doesn’t get talked about as much as other Stephen King adaptations, or John Carpenter movies, or horror movies in general, but it should because this a top tier horror film from two true masters of horror.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Prince of Darkness

by A.J. 

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober. 

Night 5: "Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows." John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness 

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is the second film in his Apocalypse Trilogy (the first is The Thing, the third is In the Mouth of Madness), which are films that focus on a small group of people dealing with the beginnings of events that could lead to the end of the world. We get the set up for the movie in scenes interspersed with one of the longest opening titles sequences of any movie; John Carpenter’s director credit comes about 10 minutes after the movie starts. Donald Pleasence plays a priest who enlists the help of a physicist, played by Victor Wong, and his graduate students to stop an otherworldly evil from being unleashed on the world.

The movie takes place in the basement of an old church in Los Angeles where a mysterious and evil cylinder containing a green liquid has been hidden away by the Catholic Church. It is transmitting a signal, so Professor Birack (Wong) and his team of grad students set up equipment to decipher the message. As you might expect, creepy stuff begins to happen. An army of zombie-like homeless people (led by Alice Cooper) surrounds the church. We learn from a conversation between Father Loomis (Pleasance) and Professor Birack that the origin of the 7 million year old cylinder is an alternate universe made of anti-matter, ruled by an Anti-God. The liquid in the cylinder is the physical form of an Anti-Christ attempting to bring the Anti-God into our universe. It’s an interesting attempt to blend quantum physics and Christian dogma. For a physics and horror nerd like me, their conversation is the highlight of the movie.

The green liquid infects some of the scientists and turns them into essentially zombies. This is when the real horror of the film kicks into gear. Prince of Darkness turns into a siege movie when the heroes barricade themselves from the zombie-like homeless outside and the possessed team members inside. In a nice twist on the siege movie because these people have no arsenal of weapons since all they brought with them is their lab gear. The scientists having no weapons is more exciting than you might think. They fight off the zombies with pieces of lumber or just outrun them which heightens the sense of danger the characters are facing. Also, they still have to prevent an evil Anti-God from coming into our universe. 

There are good and gross visual effects in Prince of Darkness, including a pretty famous one in which Alice Cooper impales someone with a bicycle. One character becomes more and more monstrously decayed as she becomes possessed. The grossest part to me are the insects that swarm the building. Another special effect that holds up quite well is mirrors turning into liquid portals between universes. 

Prince of Darkness takes its time with the set up and zombie climax. It has interesting ideas about religion and mirrors being portals to other dimensions. It has fun playing with concepts from quantum physics (each particle of matter has an opposite antiparticle) and  horror/sci-fi riffs on those ideas (our God has an opposite anti-God, different from Satan). Those ideas are interesting, but are not explored as much as they could have been. Some things are never explained; for example, what do the zombie homeless people have to do with any of this aside from menacing the scientists? Despite its flaws, Prince of Darkness is still an interesting take on the apocalyptic horror subgenre. This is a lesser seen John Carpenter movie and though it is not his best (it’s hard to top films like Halloween and The Thing) it is still a good scary, creepy movie and contains a lot of interesting ideas that make this movie worth watching. 

Classic Movie Picks: May

by Lani

Each month, I scour the Turner Classic Movies Now Playing guide for upcoming films that I can't miss. The highlights are posted here for your reading and viewing pleasure! (All listed times are Eastern Standard, check your local listings or TCM.com for actual air times in your area. Each day's schedule begins at 6:00 a.m.; if a film airs between midnight and 6 a.m. it is listed on the previous day's programming schedule.)

5/4: John Carpenter Double Feature
2 AM - They Live (1988)
3:45 AM - Escape From New York (1981)
Multi-talented filmmaker John Carpenter isn't often mentioned alongside the greats of cinema; however, the more I see of his work, the more I'm convinced that Carpenter is some kind of genius. He excels at setting atmosphere, creating memorable characters, and devising inventive solutions within low-budgets. It's no surprise that many of Carpenter's films have been remade (Halloween, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing,  and coming soon - Escape From New York); however, despite bigger budgets, the remakes can't match the craftsmanship of the originals. And you can't beat lines like "I came to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

5/8, 10 PM - AFI's Master Class-The Art of Collaboration: Russell-Wahlberg
This is the 2nd installment in a series by TCM and the American Film Institute in which well-known collaborators discuss their films. Director/producer/writer David O. Russell seems to bring out the best in actor Mark Wahlberg, and vice versa. Their three films together (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, The Fighter) all have a dark sense of humor despite falling into very different genres - war/crime caper, satire/detective story, family drama/underdog sports tale. I'm interested to hear how they came to be such successful collaborators.
BONUS: AFI's Master Class-The Art of Collaboration: Spielberg-Williams
After an encore of the Russell-Wahlberg episode at 1:15 AM, watch the first in the series featuring director Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams at 2:15 AM.

5/9: A Day of Robin Hoods
6:45 AM - Red River Robin Hood (1943)
8 AM - The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936)
9:30 AM - Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964)
11:45 AM - A Challenge for Robin Hood (1968)
1:30 PM - The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
3:30 PM - The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946)
5:00 PM - Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950)
6:30 PM - Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)
This seems like a fun day to stay home and watch movies. From dawn to dusk, you can watch tales of Robin Hood, Robin Hood-style heroes, and even a couple about Robin Hood's "son."

5/11, 3:30 AM - Zigzag (1970)
In January, I decided that I would try to watch a "new" classic film each month - one that I've never seen before. Late nights on TCM are a great resource for films that I've not only never seen, but ones that I've never heard of either. This film looks like an interesting little thriller and it comes with a great cast of character actors including George Kennedy, Anne Jackson, and Eli Wallach. Kennedy plays a dying man who frames himself for a murder so that his wife can collect the reward money; however, his plan goes awry when his illness is cured.

Star of the Month: Joel McCrea
TCM salutes the career of handsome leading man Joel McCrea each Wednesday this month. I'm drawn to the comedies on 5/2, including Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and The Richest Girl in the World (1934). However, he made some fun adventure films, too, like The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), both airing on 5/9. Though for many people McCrea is indelibly associated with Westerns, I don't think I've ever seen him in one; so, I'll also be looking forward to the two nights of Westerns on 5/23 and 5/30. Ride the High Country (1962), co-starring Randolph Scott, is a classic of the genre that I definitely want to see.

Horror Movie Month: The Supernatural

The movies that always scared me the most as a kid, and even now, were not about killers with knives and agendas, but the ones about things you cannot see, things that were not of this world—the supernatural. As a kid the things everyone told you weren’t real always felt like they could be real. Was there really a way to prove there wasn’t anything under the bed, or outside the window? How did you know for sure that the time you went into the house all the other kids said was haunted wouldn’t be the one time something out of this world really happened? There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the light, but how do you know? It’s too dark to see that.

In my search for good horror movies John Carpenter has come up more than a few times. He directed the original Halloween, which is, for my money, the best of the slasher sub-genre. But he has also made some very effective and spooky supernatural horror movies. In the Mouth of Madness is a movie I wanted to see but was too afraid of when it was released in 1994 and I was 9 years old. When I finally saw the movie, it gave me the creeps, but it a good way. In the Mouth of Madness is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft though no specific work is credited. The story is about an insurance investigator John Trent, played by Sam Neill, who is hired to investigate the disappearance of the ultra popular horror novelist Sutter Cane. Sutter Cane is a combination of Steven King, Clive Barker, and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. His macabre works seem to be driving people insane and the further Trent investigates he finds that things from Cane’s books appear to be real, and he appears to be a character in Cane’s latest book. The movie has a dated soundtrack and some obvious spooky music cues, but the visual effects, all practical as far as I can tell, are still realistic and effective. The movie plays on the line between reality and fiction, sanity and madness.

11 years after making a movie about a book that makes people insane, John Carpenter took on the next logical step, a movie about a movie that makes people insane, or rather a short film. John Carpenter's contribution to the short lived Showtime series Masters of Horror in 2005 is called Cigarette Burns. It's only an hour long, but it's a very spooky, creepy 60 minutes. In the movie, a young theater owner, who also finds prints of rare films, is hired by a wealthy, and creepy, film buff and collector to find a print of the rarest film in the world, "Le Fin Absolue du Monde." The rare few times that the film was shown all those who saw it when insane. It might be hard to find at the local video store, but if you are able to find a copy I highly recommend it for a great spooky night.

Of course there are a number of other sub-genres that fall into the category of the Supernatural, but I wanted to highlight these two particular films because I feel that they're largely unseen but very effective, well-made scary movies. Ghosts and demons are two other supernatural creatures featured in many movies. The best haunted house/ghost movie, in my opinion, is, of course, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. People will say, and I agree, that The Shinning isn't so scary as it is creepy, but that's all this movie needs to be. Rather than going for easy scares Kubrick sets a tone of dread and fear best exemplified in the scene that follows. Steven Spielberg said that in this scene if Kubrick had not used the point-of-view shot and instead had Jack Nicholson just appear over Shelly Duvall's shoulder, he'd have had people jumping out of their seats. But Kubrick used the point-of-view shot to created that feeling of impending danger. It's not meant to create mystery, we know that Danny is in their room, so it must be Jack. This shot means that her husband, whom she is trapped with in this hotel, is now a predator.

Horror Movie Month: The Slasher Film

“I didn’t mean to put an end to the sexual revolution, and for that I deeply apologize.”
-- John Carpenter, on Halloween

It’s hard to find praise for a subgenre that became such a crystallized formula in the 80’s and has since devolved into what has been dubbed “torture porn.” The formula is simple: a masked man (sometimes a woman) with a knife or bladed weapon kills young adults one by one until only the lead female character (whom pop culture has dubbed “The Virgin”) is left alive and she kills the slasher, or the male lead comes in saves her. From the plethora of films that simply followed this formula it became just a fact that the teenagers that did drugs and had sex were the ones to get killed and only the “good girl” would get to live. This led to these movies being likened to campy urban legends intended to keep teens away from premarital sex. But these 80’s slasher movies weren’t aiming for any kind of moral commentary; they just lifted the plot of Friday the 13th. In Friday the 13th Mrs. Voorhees is killing the counselors having sex and doing drugs because Jason drowned while the counselors were having sex and doing drugs. Her motivations make sense in the story of the movie. In Halloween Michael Myers is a psychopath obsessed with killing his sister; the other teens he kills were just doing what teens do- having sex and doing drugs.

Pop culture has also erroneously dubbed Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the first slasher movie. I can only pretend to see links between Psycho and the slasher genre: the killer uses a knife, that’s it. Prototypes for the slasher movie come with Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), all of which are good, effective movies, but it wasn’t until John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 that the slasher film as we know it came to be. Not only was Halloween the first real slasher movie but it may also be the only one of real quality. John Carpenter, rather than going for blood and effects, uses almost Hitchcockian techniques to set tone and atmosphere and build suspense.

The structure of Halloween was taken and used effectively, though on a campier level, a couple years later in Friday the 13th. That movie went more for shocks and thrills, but it did its own thing. That’s more than can be said for Sleepaway Camp; My Bloody Valentine; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Prom Night; He Knows You’re Alone; Happy Birthday to Me (which actually has a great final image and closing titles song); and the anti-slasher movie April Fool’s Day. Most of those have been remade and most were named after dates.

Slasher movies have since turned into geek shows like the Saw and Final Destination series where gore effects and gruesome scenes of horrendous violence are more pivotal than story or characters. As much as Eli Roth’s Hostel is reviled I believe it’s a well made film and has a story that unfolds, like a movie should. Unlike in the Saw franchise where the slim plot exists only to frame the scenes of torture and gore. Slasher movies have always walked a fine line between campy entertainment and exploitation, but in the last decade they've lacked such quality and merit that they can only be exploitation films. I think my friend Gene Siskel would agree.

I think the appeal of slasher movies is that for all the slicing and dicing at the end of the day the villain is just a person wearing a mask. If you get close enough to take the mask off you’ll find a flesh and blood person that can be killed just like anyone else. Even Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger can be killed, till the next movie anyway, and that, for what it’s worth, can be comforting.