everyone's entitled to one good scare

-

Killers wandering the streets. Young people dying when they make the wrong choices. Doctors and sheriffs ineffectual. And, evil never dies.

This is the world introduced to me by Halloween when I was a kid.

Long tracking shots. Deliberate use of the background and the foreground. POV shots to both put us in a role of the killer and to manipulate us into feeling him approach. A simple but evocative score.

This is the cinematic marvel introduced to me by Halloween when I was a kid.


It gave me something to be afraid of, and it gave me something to love.

 

 

 

 

 

One observation, and it only just occurred to me. Who was coming to look at the Myers house? Laurie leaves keys under the mat for her father because people are coming to look at the house. Did they ever show up? Did Michael kill them, too? Or did they get lucky because he was loitering outside Haddonfield High? Later Brackett and Loomis get into the house because the front door is unlocked. Maybe the potential buyers came by, got spooked, and ran. Given the film's focus on fate, it would be interesting to know who came by the Myers House while Michael was out, missing out on being murdered by maybe mere minutes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the rhythm of the dividing pair

-
Image
Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters. (p. 191) That's from Annihilation , the novel. To be fair, I got it indirectly from a Master's Thesis by Audrey Peterson (2016), SUNY . Audrey writes about the entire Southern Reach trilogy (the film Annihilation is built only from the first) so I might not comment on or cite much from Peterson. Except for this, since the identity of the individual is a central idea within the film: "The women are also introduced by their function, and not by name" unlike In the film, where they s
Read more

i've seen it over a hundred times

-
Image
As I write this, it’s Day 2 for Phil Connors on the DVD and my daughters are in the kitchen making a cake to celebrate Day 100 for me... photo should be below. The movie Phil had seen over 100 times (or so he tells Laraine) was Heidi II . It’s a “family classic” according to the Alpine Theater’s marquee. But, as I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t exist. Originally, the movie that Phil could see every day if he wanted to do so was It’s a Wonderful Life . Danny Rubin’s ego—and this is his suggestion, not mine—made him believe Groundhog Day “a timeless quality and had the potential to become a film that could work for audiences for a very long time.” So, he put another such film on the marquee. But, “even believing that Groundhog Day was a potential classic, [Rubin] never was thinking of comparing it to It’s a Wonderful Life “— (I’d say putting that title on the marquee was Rubin deliberately comparing the two, but maybe that’s just me.) . Rubin continues: “But the similarities bet
Read more

nothing bad can happen

-
Image
I don't think I even like(d) today's movie, and I am only watching it because it's free on Netflix. I barely remember the beats of the story, but I feel like we must have watched it a lot because one scene in particular I know I saw a lot when I was young. And, I don't mean like certain "adult" scenes might've gotten extra watches from me when no one else was home. I mean, we just must have watched The Money Pit many times. Even though we had a much better Tom Hanks movie-- Splash at hand. So, the movie starts and already I'm like what am I watching. Some old guy marrying the princess from Gymkata and I guess he's Hanks' father or something. Confirmed on the cut to new scene. Hanks and Long voiceover as we focus on mail. This movie is weird. I know they're going to... Buy? Inherit? A house that turns out to be crap. And, I think Shelley Long is going to have an affair with the blonde dancer-looking dude from Die Hard , and I t
Read more