I recently saw a movie that made me furious– the new Halloween. Sitting in the darkened movie theatre, I could feel myself become more and more outraged as the scenes progressed. What little plot there was revealed itself, and character after character proved to be so obnoxious that I couldn’t muster any compassion whatsoever when super-villain Michael Myers finally took them out in increasingly uncreative ways. Horror movies in our time are definitely in a downward spiral, and I think it’s time to look at the reasons why.
I wanted to see this picture because the original Halloween, the independent film-turned-phenomenon starring Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut role as Lori Strode, remains one of my all-time favorite horror flicks. What made this original so fantastic were two key elements of scary movie making: subtle build-up and a twist.
First, let’s look at subtlety. Now, the original Halloween is, admittedly, probably the first of what we know today as slasher movies. What’s so subtle about brutally stabbing a bunch of sexually rambunctious teens? But the actual murders are besides the point. What’s important are the countless scenes building up to those murders, scenes filled with nerve-wracking music and walks down too-quiet, creepy suburban streets. Due to excellent film-making, the perfectly normal houses and neighborhood seem fraught with danger. Finally, there’s the breath-taking final sequence in which the camera re-visits a series of now-empty rooms, rooms Michael Myers has visited throughout the course of his murderous evening and which are so full of shadows that he seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He becomes a constant presence that’s just waiting for the right opportunity. (Poor Lori will never be the same.)
This new film, which consisted of screamed, curse-filled dialogue, up-front stabbings, bludgeonings, and stranglings, and one “eh, ok,” twist, (the impact of which gets lost in how annoying everything else has been up to that point,) fails to build any suspense or fear. I remember learning in college how Shakespearean tragedies always include a “clown figure,” since without a laugh here and there, the tragedy would get lost. There would be nothing to put it into perspective. The same principal applies with a horror film. If it’s only killing and screaming, the killing and screaming cease to be anything but boring and meaningless.
Let’s move on to the second key element of horror, the twist. If you’ve never seen the original Halloween and plan to, I suggest you stop reading now, since one of the greatest twists in horror film-making is about to be revealed. Much has been written about the opening scene of Halloween and how harrowing it is for the viewer. This is because it is shot from the killer’s point of view, which wreaks havoc with your movie-going brain because, instead of watching someone else commit a horrible act, it puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s you who spy on the sexually active teenagers, sneak into their house, and then go up a narrow flight of stairs to butcher the teenage girl. After committing this unspeakable act, it’s you who fly breathlessly down those stairs and out the door where a car’s pulling up. People get out of the car and approach you, they reach for the mask you’re wearing… And it’s only then that the point of view switches and you see that the killer is only a seven-year-old boy. And the victim? His big sister.
This opening is so brilliant because, in addition to putting the audience in the bone-chilling position of murderer, it also lets them imagine who it is that’s doing this – and a seven-year-old boy isn’t what they’re likely to picture. Now, they’re left stunned and with a million questions. Why has he done this? What has been going on in his family? What will happen to him now?
The original film made Michael Myers the ultimate villain because no real answers are given. By the appearance of his house and parents, he seems to have been born into an upper-middle-class life. With a normal upbringing, what could have set him off? No one knows, and over the course of an hour and a half, during which a grown-up Michael returns to his childhood town of Haddonfield to finish what he started at the age of seven, the only semblance of a reason seems to be that he is pure evil. His psychiatrist dubs him “The boogeyman,” a concept that suddenly becomes very real for the babysitters of Haddonfield trying to convince their young charges there’s no such thing.
The new Halloween bragged that it would show Michael Myers’ life prior to his childhood snap. Intrigued, I had to see it. But from the get-go, nothing matched up with the original. His mother, a stripper, lives in a run-down house with her inexplicably disgusting boyfriend who verbally abuses her to no end and seems sexually attracted to her daughter. He’s also horrible to Michael, who is suddenly ten, not seven. In fact, everyone’s horrible to Michael, so you’re glad when they get killed, and Michael’s monster status is reduced to “Well, of course, because look at his life.” What was truly scary about the twist in the original is ruined. Then the entire second hour of the movie loosely re-created, scene by scene, the original Halloween, but with new lines and shots that fail to be scary. Classic death scenes from the original get mangled into ridiculous scream-fests you roll your eyes at and hope will soon be over. When a twist is revealed – Lori turns out to be Michael’s baby sister – the entire thing is already so obnoxious and overblown that it’s hard to care.
I’m sick of seeing potentially good horror films destroyed for various reasons. First, most studios just want to make money, so no real thought is put into crafting a good movie. Second, since they figure people go to see horror movies just to see girls get topless and then massacred, the movies become just a sequence of sex and blood. I think it’s almost expected that the horror genre crank out terrible films for those very reasons, but I say there’s an art to making a brilliant horror movie. Unfortunately, it’s an art that, like so many bare-chested, screaming Hollywood starlets getting stabbed on the big screen, is dying.
