Horror Month: Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

                      I don't watch many slasher movies. They just don't interest me that much. I prefer psychological horror, movies that build tension and use more than just blood and gore to scare their viewers. Despite this, I tried my best to watch Halloween with an open mind, and it turns out I really enjoyed it. It's relatively conventional in some ways, but it really is the ultimate slasher film, the one that set the standard and invented the tropes that are used in countless subsequent films. It's scary, and well acted, paced and directed.

                    The first in the long series of Halloween movies, this one follows the story of killer Michael Myers. At the age of six, he murdered his sister in cold blood on Halloween with a huge knife. After spending fifteen years in a mental hospital, he escapes and returns to his hometown to kill again. The plot of the movie involves him stalking and killing several teenagers, while his former psychiatrist and a reluctant, skeptical police officer search for him. It's not particularly innovative in any way, but it's still scary on several levels. Most importantly of all, it's plausible. Psychotic killers who slaughter innocent people indiscriminately actually exist. Michael Myers is a person that could very possibly be real, and that fact makes this movie much scarier. Another thing that makes Halloween scary is the design of Michael himself. He is huge, very imposing, and wears a white mask, which I found out later is actually a stretched out William Shatner mask. Myers' physical strength allows him to break through doors and windows easily, and throw around his victims like rag dolls. This makes him much more intimidating because no matter where you hide he can likely busy through to door and find you. The mask itself works to dehumanize Myers and strengthen his image as a cold, ruthless, unrepentant killer.

                  I also liked how this first Halloween movie abstains from excessive blood and gore. Most of the horror of the film lies in uncertainty. There are a lot of scenes where Myers is standing somewhere staring at a prospective victim, and then he just completely disappears. It's something that you see in movies like this all the time, but it's freaky because it makes you wonder where he went, and where he is now. Myers is pretty sneaky, and many of the scares in the movie involve him appearing, disappearing, and coming back after he is believed to be dead. He has a feel of immortality about him, because he takes several bullets, a knife wound and a knitting needle to the neck at the end and still survives and disappears somehow, living to kill another day. An interesting easter egg I noticed is that some of the characters watch an old version of the movie The Thing on Halloween, a movie that director John Carpenter would adapt into a hugely successful horror film a few years later.

               All in all, Halloween delivers, even if you're not a fan of the genre it's very successful at what it does.

Horror Month: The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

                  This movie is creepy, man. I don't consider myself very well versed in classic horror movies so I figured that I had better add the original version of The Thing to my list of films to watch this month. I didn't think it would be really scary due to its age and the fact that most of its scares rely on special effects, but I was pretty wrong. The special effects are realistic enough to still be scary thirty years later and it turns out there are aspects of this film that are far more horrifying than the monster itself.

                  John Carpenter's The Thing is about an alien spaceship that lands in Antarctica. It and its contents freeze solid for an unknown amount of time until it is uncovered by a Norwegian science team. The thing that is The Thing is brought to their laboratory and thawed out. And that's where the figurative excrement collides with the oscillating cooling device. The Thing kills everyone there except for two survivors, takes the form of a dog, and flees to a nearby American science base. None of this is really shown onscreen except the dog running from the two survivors who are trying to kill it in a helicopter at the beginning of the movie. Long story short, The Thing eventually reveals itself, possessing/imitating the men at the American base one by one and forcing them to kill each other. 

                   I like the mystery revolving around The Thing itself. All we really know at first is that it's from space and that it can perfectly imitate any living organism. Once it is imitating someone it's very difficult to tell which people are being possessed, which adds a whole new dimension to the horror. Most of the people in the film are opposed to indiscriminate killing, so they must be absolutely sure one of their comrades is being imitated before killing them. And if they're wrong and kill someone who is actually himself, they just killed a friend and potential ally (or enemy). At first our victims have no clue how to tell if someone is possessed, but eventually develop a test to figure it out. The Thing appears to react very negatively to fire, therefore igniting a sample of each person's blood in turn will reveal which people are not themselves. The whole mystery of who is The Thing and who isn't is one of the most intriguing aspects of the movie, and I found it fairly difficult to guess which characters were infected. And the whole concept of human imitation is really scary as well. The Thing is so naturally good at what it does that for all I know my whole family could be terrifying aliens that want to kill me. Better torch them all, just to be sure. In addition to this, the desolate setting of the movie also adds to the terror. There's pretty much no one in Antarctica, and close to the beginning of the movie our protagonists lose their radio communications. So they're basically thousands of miles from civilization with no way to call for aid. There's no possible way they're going to escape, so their only option is to fight. And as far as the action sequences go, they're very good. The special effects really are remarkable in The Thing. Everything looks incredibly real, the creatures are meticulously constructed and look quite lifelike. Even thirty years later, when computers can create monsters that look almost entirely real, the creatures in The Thing still look awesome. 

                No nightmares were had from this one, but from now on I'll be more cautious of people because of that insanely ambiguous ending. The Thing is probably still out there.