October 2021
The Halloween Fix From Fix
A review of some of the most spine tingling of films from across the years. — McCartney Fix, News Editor With every subsequent October, another crop of slashers fill the screens of cinemas, all almost impossibly indebted to the little independent slasher that could, John Carpenters “Halloween” Made on a shoestring budget of $350,000, “Halloween” laid the groundwork for not only the archetypal frame of a slashers narrative, but also the production philosophy that drives them, mainly low Dir. John Carpenter budgets and quick turnarounds. Shot over 20 days in Pasadena, California, with a cast of relative unknowns, Halloween follows a troupe of small town, innocuous, kind of unremarkable characters all subjugated to the mercy of the truest embodiment of evil theater screens had been and perhaps ever will be graced by. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the archetypal virginal final girl with a gleaming smile and assuredly nonexistent disciplinary rap sheet, her friends exist almost exclusively to have sex and inflate body counts, but they are not as bland as those they would assuredly go on to inspire. PJ Soles plays the ditsiest of ditsy blondes who totally wasn’t written by a thirty year old man trying his damnedest to put words in the mouth of a woman many years his junior. Nancy Kyes is the fire brand brunette by which all will have been judged over the last 40 years of horror cinema. Donald Pleasence was the closest thing to a notable name attached to the film, having acted in “Thunderball” in a James Bond film before Carpenter offered him the role which would come to define his career. Nick Castle is the man tasked with bringing to life Myers, and his approach is unique, as he opts for a deliberate, almost contemplative pace. He seems more curious than outright adversarial with his prey, as if he is not so much toying with them as studying them, and that, perhaps, is the brilliance of “Halloween”. The film strikes an unparalleled balance between the vagueness of Myers as an entity, and the specificity of him as a threat. He is at once a force of unknowable, almost unfathomable evil, yet in those moments he attacks, the deliberate pace with which he moves gives way to an apex of an attacker, seemingly bred from Photo sourced from Alternate Movie Posters hell to kill. the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes.” I have heard it said that Myers elicits fear because of what he represents- the stalking, looming threat of violence we as humans can never fully escape- as much as the pure horror of his being. But I would argue the genius of Carpenter’s direction is that he keeps his killer truly horrifying either way, whether you think him a singular killer or an allegory of something more.
“Halloween”
“He had
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