Friday Filler: Happy Halloween
By Craig Kennedy - October 31st, 2008; 10:03 am
It seems quaint today, but this movie simply scared the bejeebers out of me when I was a lad.
Happy Halloween!
Filed under: Friday Filler, Trailers
Tags: Donald Pleasance, Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter, P.J. Soles
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I still love this film and it still packs a punch as far as I’m concerned.
I remember watching this when I was 10 and I was in a right state, I couldn’t sleep without the lights on!
Thanks and happy Halloween to you too.
The funny thing is I didn’t see the first Halloween until many years after it came out. I was introduced to Michael Meyers through Halloween 2, which wasn’t that good of a film but scary enough to do the trick.
Still, this is one of those classic films in that it completely ruined an otherwise innocuous song for me: Mr Sandman. Can’t hear that song and not think of these films now.
Just as an aside, Hulu has a slew of great horror up right now, including 2 of my all-time favorites: the original Night of the Living Dead and John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The thing that I like about a lot of these older horror movies is that they just couldn’t be made as scary today. I feel like the grainy 35MM adds a lot more to a horror movie than beautiful HD does, as weird as that may be.
I didn’t see this one until a couple of years later when they played it on NBC. Even edited for television I had nightmares for weeks.
Even today, it wakes that little part of me that worries there just might really be a boogie man under the bed on a dark night.
Thanks for the Hulu tip Joel. Free is awesome. It’s my favorite price.
Rob Zombie tried to capture some of the grungy flair of the original with his remake and to a point he succeeded, but too bad the movie itself was otherwise largely wretched.
They certainly do not make them like they used to.
Daniel, good HD shouldn’t remove the grain from the original film but I think you’re getting at the high-tech, CGI look of today’s mainstream horror films.
I think the difference is that our brains have been taught to read digital effects as “not real” where as these older films, relying on analog effects (make-up, practical or in-camera effects, etc) read as “real.”
For instance, the big climax of The Ring and Ringu (the original Japanese version) are essentially the same but in The Ring, I knew it was all a digital fake. It looked impressive, but it didn’t have tactile weight of Ringu’s version, which was also a special effect but done far more simply. Ringu’s scare didn’t feel the need to reveal itself as an effect the way Verbinski’s camera does in The Ring and therefore, was far scarier. Ringu is one of the few horror films I’ve seen as an adult that scared me so bad I had to sleep with the lights on.
I cringe at the idea of a CGI remake or sequel to Carpenter’s The Thing. Part of the visceral terror of that film is that the horrors are really there in the room with them, not added later. Even if you accept that these are animatronic additions in the scene itself, they still have the tangible reality of actually existing in the physical world and their disturbing otherness still renders them terrifying.
I’d go further and state that Jurassic Park wouldn’t have been nearly as thrilling had Speilberg gone with entirely CGI dinosaurs as originally intended. Winston’s creations are real and terrifying, adding real fear to the actors’ hysteria onscreen. I think the JP sequels are less scary, partially because more of the effects work is CGI and therefore subconsciously “not real” to our brains.
Nailed it, Joel! Exactly what I meant to say.
Amen, Joel.