CARPENTER IN FOUR TONES

I really love this.

Art by Kid Eternity via Deviant Art.

BLU-RAY REVIEW: SHOCKING DARK (1989)

Italian horror director Bruno Mattei, who died in 2007, once said, “I don’t think any of my movies are good.” Having seen just a handful of them, I’m…starting to believe him. If he were being fair, however, he should have added, “but they’re entertaining as hell.”

My introduction to Mattei was thanks to a little ditty called Cruel Jaws, a killer shark flick that was actually released in some foreign territories as Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws. Not only is it a beat-for-beat rip-off of Jaws (with some mobsters thrown in for good measure), it also brazenly lifts footage from the entire Jaws series, mostly shots of explosions, sharks, and exploding sharks. The degree of plagiarism going on was so absurd that Universal, rights holders of the Jaws series, issued a cease and desist the minute producers began testing the waters for a U.S. release. (A few years ago, Shout Factory very prematurely announced they would be releasing the title on Blu-ray, but anyone aware of Cruel Jaws’ litigation history predicted the distributor would inevitably walk back that announcement. They did.) For the freakishly curious, Cruel Jaws can be watched in its entirety on Youtube. (Bring your laughing face.)

Then came Rats: Nights of Terror, in which a group of punks surviving in a post-apocalyptic world fell victim to…rats. It was quite the night(s) of terror.

Finally, Mattei put his mark on the zombie sub-genre with Hell of the Living Dead, which I did see at one point and remember absolutely nothing about. It was probably pretty good!

Shocking Dark, my latest immersion in the world of Bruno Mattei…might be a new favorite. As its synopsis suggests, and which isn’t an exaggeration, Shocking Dark honestly looks like a $50 remake of Aliens, right down to the lifting of different characters and their very different traits.

Naturally there’s a Ripley (though she’s called Sarah — as in The Terminator’s Sarah Connor), along with a Newt, who recites a bit of Aliens dialogue with, “My mom told me monsters weren’t real – she was wrong.”

There’s a Hicks and a Hudson. There’s also a Vasquez:

Most importantly (spoiler), there’s a hybrid of Burke, Bishop…and the T-800 from The Terminator:

Sadly, however, there is no Jonesy:

Shocking Dark was even marketed as "Terminator 2" (this would be three years before Terminator 2: Judgment Day actually existed), going as far as to use this poster:

There’s shameless, and then there’s shameless, and then there’s that.

Shocking Dark is hysterical right off the bat, and once the hysteria dwindles a bit as the viewer becomes acclimated to its histrionics, the more and more familiar beats of the plot solidify and offer a different kind of enjoyment. Your mileage will vary, but your reaction will likely transition from “I can’t believe how stupid this is!” to “I can’t believe how shameless this is!”

The budget on this thing was probably less than half a Maserati. Most of the action takes place in a “tunnel below the canals of Rome” which looks suspiciously like the basement of a power plant, with a brief finale that unfolds on the city's streets where the film finally goes full-on Terminator. It should come as no surprise that the special effects are also terrible, with the alien looking nowhere near like the Xenomorph from the Alien series. By now it should be assumed that the acting in films of this caliber are quite poor, but for Shocking Dark it bears repeating. Yeesh.

If I were to offer any kind of accolades, it would be the decision to take the Bishop-inspired android and turn him into a carbon copy Terminator. Granted, this is all predicated on the understanding that a couple of screenwriters were forced to rip off two of the biggest sci-fi/action flicks of all time, but let’s be honest: if Shocking Dark were a piece of fan fiction on an Alien message board, it would be commended for its cleverness in tying another popular James Cameron character into the conflict. Yes, Shocking Dark steals, but it steals cleverly.

Severin's spiffy Blu-ray includes the following special features: "Terminator in Venice – An Interview with Co-Director / Co-Screenwriters Claudio Fragasso and Co-Screenwriter Rossella Drudi," "Once Upon A Time in Italy – An Interview With Actress Geretta Geretta," and Alternate Italian Titles.

Look, Shocking Dark is a terrible movie and actually kind of racist, but I can’t deny it was a hell of a good time. A prerequisite for enjoyment of Shocking Dark is an appreciation for trash cinema. You should know this before getting yourself into trouble. And if you’re constantly bored and sad like I am, here’s a fun double-feature idea for you: Aliens, and Shocking Dark. Back to back, their similarities will be far more prevalent, and hence, far more entertaining (though Aliens will be suddenly severely lacking “Arnold Schwarzenegger”).

HIEROGLYPHICS

SUSPIRIA (2018)

Film fans, especially those of the horror genre, tend to take it personally when some of their favorite titles, or those that have achieved classic status, hit the remake block, and I can understand why. To remake a film is to suggest that the source material is flawed in some way, or needs a modern update to connect with new audiences. While films have benefited from a remake, most don’t. (To remind the fettered of the most obvious comfort: remaking a film does not erase your beloved original from existence, although it does make Google image searching just a bit more irritating.)

The Suspiria remake machine has been gunning since at least 2007, with Halloween ‘18 director David Gordon Green amping up to take the reins alongside producer and would-be star Natalie Portman (who had yet to star in another horror-ballet juggernaut, Black Swan). As tends to happen, the project did not materialize and those involved left to pursue other things. But since you can’t keep a good unremade horror title down, the remake refused to die and eventually came to fruition under the tutelage of another unexpected filmmaker: Call Me By Your Name director’s Luca Guadagnino. From the start, Guadagnino was eager to quell fanboy fears by talking up how much different it would be from the original, considering it more of a companion piece than a straight-up retelling.

Forty years after the debut of the original, which split critics right down the middle thanks to its garishly beautiful images, its shocking violence, and its carefree storytelling, the remake was released to nearly the same kind of reaction. And despite Guadagnino’s intent on telling a different kind of story, there are enough similarities within to comfortably label it a remake — along with an additional hour of running time; the remake clocks in at a whopping 152 minutes.

In the press, Guadagnino was quick to bestow his love for Dario Argento’s original, and that love is definitely showcased in his directorial techniques. During the first act, Guadagnino relies heavily on camera movements popularized by the ‘60s and ‘70s era of European filmmaking — the sweeping shots, the quick-zooms — in an effort to coast on the audience’s familiarity with Suspiria ‘77. All the updated characters share the same names of their original’s counterparts, and once again, it’s about an American ballet student studying dance in Berlin and slowly realizing she’s in the company of a coven of witches. But where Guadagnino’s redux begins to drift off into its own identity is with its very muted and institutional colors, its low-key musical score, and its heavy emphasis on the political unrest ongoing in Berlin in 1977 (when the film takes place), even finding a way to include allusions to Nazi Germany and the separation of families (sadly topical, but also almost too “mature” considering the A story).

Guadagnino muse Tilda Swinton takes on three different roles, one of whom is an elderly man (credited to “Lutz Ebersdorf”), and though I’ve done no digging as to why this choice, I’m assuming that Guadagnino looked at Suspiria as a female-driven story and hence wanted a female cast to do all the heavy lifting. (Men take on bit parts where their biggest contribution is to appear utterly helpless and even spiritually castrated by members of the coven.) Guadagnino, too, recognizes that music was a driving part of the original, and tries to convey the same emphasis, only instead of energetic and pounding prog rock, he enlists the help of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who falls back on typically somber ballads and more esoteric instrumentals, as essayed by bandmate Jonny Greenwood for his multiple collaborations with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson.

Guadagnino’s redux isn’t without scenes that safely label it a horror film — if you’ve been reading reviews for this title at all, you’ve likely heard by now of the danced-to-death sequence, which is an excruciating moment that’s legitimately disturbing, but also a little undone by the use of obvious CGI. The dungeon, too, which houses the “heart” of the coven’s evil, feels like a nightmare, and is the sequence where the film comes the closest to feeling like traditional horror.

There’s a lot to respect in Guadagnino’s version, and the filmmaker is clearly respectful of the source material as well as passionate about his take on it (and the cameo from the original’s Jessica Harper is beautifully done, appropriately using her for the film’s most emotional moment). Fearlessly, he’s striving to make a unique, brave, and unrepentant horror film in the same way Argento did, but as time goes on, and like a lot of the horror remakes to have been unleashed over the last two decades, it’s likely that this Suspiria will fade from memories, leaving room only for the bright, colorful, violent, and nightmarish assault on the senses that is Dario Argento’s original masterpiece.

LAST WORD

SKINNER (1993)

Stemming back to when I was a young video-store junkie, I’ve heard of the Ted Raimi-starring slasher flick Skinner, mostly due to two things: its slimy, gory reputation, and its inclusion of Traci Lords, whom the genre and genre fans were enamored with during the early ‘90s. (Ricki Lake’s involvement was a novelty back then, but hardly means anything these days…unless you’re a purveyor of ‘90s pop culture.) Watching Skinner with 2019 eyes, and coming from someone who has just seen it for the first time, I can understand why it gained such an infamous reputation upon its release all those years ago. Moments of it still seem shocking today -- one absolutely more than any other, and for wildly different reasons than you’re thinking. (If you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) However, some of it has bypassed any previous levels of bad taste and now comes across almost charming, thanks to its usage of daring practical effects and an all-around “fuck, let’s go for it” independent mentality.

Skinner charts the exploits of Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi, brother of superstar Spider-Man director Sam Raimi), a drifter who has a habit of hiring prostitutes, killing them dead, and skinning their dead bodies while reminiscing about his shitty childhood. One of these former streetwalkers, Heidi (Traci Lords), who previously survived an encounter with Skinner, has been hunting him down to take revenge for her mental and physical torture. Meanwhile, Skinner has rented a room from Kerry Tate (Ricki Lake) and her awful husband Geoff (David Warshofsky, an actual actor from stuff like There Will Be Blood and Lincoln, just to name a couple). Geoff’s job as a trucker has him on the road a lot, leaving Kerry behind to grow chummier and chummier with the aloof but innocent-seeming Skinner. (Also, I have to point this out: Laurie Strode uses the alias ‘Keri Tate’ in 1998’s Halloween: H20, so are we expected to believe that uncredited writer Kevin Williamson wanted to homage, of all things, the ‘90s video nasty Skinner and attach it to the genre’s ultimate final girl? The world gets weirder the longer it turns.)

The interplay between Skinner and Kerry makes for an interesting dynamic, in that both of them are lonely souls in their own way and could potentially find meaning in each other’s company, and it’s additionally affecting that Raimi and Lake don’t look like typical movie actors – they instead look like real people, adding to the approachability of this subplot. Raimi, too, despite his history of having appeared in his brother’s Evil Dead series in various costumed rules, has generally made a lot of garbage, but he often proves to be a capable actor, and Skinner is no exception. Lords’ subplot as a ruined Heidi, however, leads to absolutely nothing, which is a shame, being that the idea of Skinner’s unfinished business having potentially created its own monster could have been very interesting, had it been handled in a more assured manner. Lords gives her all in her performance as well, and though it never quite gels, in the end it doesn’t matter because it’s ultimately wasted on a go-nowhere character.   

The best friend to the horror genre there ever was, Ed Gein--after inspiring the likes of Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and both Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs--has again lent his visage to Dennis Skinner. For you see, Skinner doesn’t just skin his victims, but he refashions their skin into a full body suit, leading to the astounding sequence that I wasn’t going to get into, but my lord, I think I have to.

For newbies to Skinner, feel free to skip this entire paragraph. Your viewing experience will go off much better if you’re not expecting it. BEGIN SPOILERS: At Skinner’s new job as a maintenance man, he runs afoul of a fellow coworker named Earl (DeWayne Williams), a former (and black) boxer that immediately emasculates Skinner in front of another coworker. Well, as you might expect, Earl doesn’t last long, soon finding the sharp end of Skinner’s blades. However, Skinner not only slips into Earl’s skin, but takes it one step further by turning his costume pageant into a horribly offensive display of racial monstrosity, using a “black” voice and minstrel slang like “Mammy” as he chases down his next victim. This sequence goes on for nearly ten minutes, during which you will be making the post-aftershave Home Alone face the entire time. END SPOILERS.

Skinner is a wild ride, with plenty of gore and over-the-top insanity and it should entertain less discerning horror fans. 

Just leave your political correctness at the door.

SOMETHING TO TIDE YOU OVER

HALLOWEEN (2018)

Multiple franchises have been quick to prove that long-delayed sequels are hardly ever worth the wait, and this ranges across all genres. Twelve years after Die Hard with a Vengeance came a bored, bald, tired, and profanity-free John McClane in the anemic Live Free or Die Hard. Seventeen years between Dirty Dancing and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights proved that studios could reuse a film’s title, but they couldn’t make ’80s-era zeitgeist relevant in 2004. Even the horror genre, where sequels are king, and thus have more opportunities to create a worthy follow-up, often shit the bed. Just ask the The Rage: Carrie 2 (and don’t even mention Phantasm: Ravager in front of me).

This year’s Halloween isn’t technically a forty-years-later sequel, considering the franchise has remained active since the 1978 original, but it does embark on the ballsy move of pushing aside alllll those other sequels and remakes and pretending they never happened (something many fans already do) in favor of branching off from the best and least complicated entry in the franchise. (Easter eggs abound, however, for the sharp-eyed franchise fan — there are nods to every single Halloween entry, including the much maligned Halloween: Resurrection.) It’s additionally ballsy because 1978’s Halloween is so beloved — by both critics and fans of the genre and film in general. Halloween is that rare title that transcends its place in horror — a title that most people would say is simply great, and not just great “for a horror film,” which is like saying that cheeseburger you just scarfed down wasn’t bad “for McDonalds.” (Horror don’t get no respect, I tells ya!) If a director says he’s going to make Halloween 11, expectations are pegged pretty low from the get-go. At that point, most fans just want a solid slasher. But when a director — scratch that, a filmmaker (yes, there is a difference) — enters the scene and says he wants to make a direct follow-up to a legendary title, expectations are reset. There’s less franchise baggage and mythological mud to wade through, and when said filmmaker doesn’t come from a world of music videos but rather a world where his previous films have been released by the snooty Criterion Collection, that’s a big deal for a slasher series. That’s unprecedented territory.

Halloween ‘18 isn’t as good as the original, but only because that’s an impossible feat — not because the original is a flawless endeavor, but because it became the new watermark to which all subsequent slasher flicks have been compared. Halloween didn’t create a handful of the tropes and techniques for which it’s celebrated, but it did perfect them, popularize them, and marry them together in a splendid genre film that was part slasher, part supernatural terror, and part haunted house spookshow fun. Halloween wasn’t the first slasher film, but it was the first to take the world by storm. John Carpenter’s film endures because it’s pure, well-made in the face of a meager budget, and contains horror’s most iconic masked killer whose creepiness has yet to fade. For a long time, most fans felt that 1998’s Halloween: H20 was the last respectable entry in the franchise, which saw a returning Jamie Lee Curtis once again doing battle against the boogeyman, who in that timeline was still her brother. Halloween ’18 has now rendered H20 as being near-irrelevant, proving to be the best entry since the original.

In these last forty years, cinema has changed, including the horror and slasher genres. Audiences have different expectations. Charming, near-bloodless thrills just won’t do — not in a film where the bad guy wears a mask and carries a huge knife. Halloween ‘18 is obviously the bridge that connects the classy and pure intent for terror of the original with modern-day audiences, who expect a certain amount of viciousness and grue in their slasher offerings. Yes, Halloween ‘18 is violent — perhaps as violent as Rob Zombie’s gritty, immature, and white trashy take on Haddonfield. But (head stomps aside), the violence in Halloween ‘18 works to its favor, because this isn’t Zombie’s take on Haddonfield — it’s still Carpenter’s, and now Gordon Green’s (and co-writer Danny McBride’s). Their Haddonfield is idyllic, quaint, even boring. In their Haddonfield, murderous rampages aren’t supposed to happen, and it makes those moments — like that gorgeous, unbroken tracking shot which sees Michael walking and slaying from one house to the next — much more shocking. In Zombie’s Haddonfield, where everyone is terrible and exists in a pit of despair, we’re waiting for the violence to unfold. In Gordon Green’s Haddonfield, where the events of 1978 are barely a memory and life seems just fine, we’re hoping the violence never comes, because we’re not sure if we can take it.

Halloween ‘18 is being referred to as the series’ #MeToo entry, and while that wasn’t the intention, that’s not wrong, either. It’s one thing to see, and to have become accustomed to, the “final girl” in the slasher genre, but we don’t often get to see that final girl return for another bout of bloody murder committed by her foe, and we certainly don’t see an adult actor return to her teenage stomping grounds as a haunted, ruined shell of a final woman. Halloween ‘18 is absolutely, positively, without question, Jamie Lee Curtis’ movie — one that honors and acknowledges her legacy in the horror genre, cements just how underrated of a performer she is, and boasts quite possibly her greatest performance in any genre. The Laurie Strode of 2018 is not the Laurie Strode you remember from the original; she’s now a grandmother, baring her scars both physical and emotional from her Halloween encounter forty years prior. She’s the genre’s ultimate defacto heroine, so naturally she’s still strong and tenacious, but only to a degree. It’s not often you see your hero break down in tears throughout his or her journey, and in Halloween ‘18, you’ll see that more than once. If you’ve invested yourself in Laurie’s struggles over the course of the franchise, and in Curtis’ real-life struggles over the years, your heart will break seeing her steely resolve crumble, leaving her a heaving mess in the arms of her somewhat estranged granddaughter. Judy Greer and a new-coming (and an excellent) Andi Matichak also bring life and complexity to their roles as next-generation Strodes, with the latter naturally drawing the most parallels with circa-1978 Laurie. They’ll prove essential to the inevitable sequel, and it would be to the series’ continued betterment that they return for another round of Halloween carnage.

As for Laurie’s pursuer, Michael Myers, aka The Shape, he’s scary again — not because he’s nine feet tall or cutting off entire heads and throwing them down the stairs, but because Gordon Green utilizes him the way he should be. For the most part, he’s back in the shadows, and he’s also back to playing his cat-and-mouse games — but sometimes he’s captured in blinding, brilliant light, mask or no mask, as a reminder that evil exists all the time, everywhere, and not just in the dark. The aforementioned tracking shot puts you directly at Michael’s back as he walks, unnoticed in his mask on Halloween night, up Haddonfield’s sidewalks, eyeing its people for his next target. You witness his decision-making in real time and see him veer off his path like a great white shark spotting an easy meal, and this extremely eerie and pulse-pounding sequence reinforces what made the original so disturbing: Michael’s murderous motivations weren’t based on him and Laurie being siblings, or because he was being controlled by an evil Celtic cult, or because there were a bunch of MTV douche bags wandering around his house and only Blackberries and the internet could save them. The original Halloween was horrifying because Michael’s motives were unknown, and his attacks were utterly random — the horror came from the not-knowing-why. It came from Michael watching Laurie approach the front door of his long-abandoned childhood house as he hid inside its dimness and thinking, “Okay. Her.”

Bolstering Michael’s presence is the phenomenal score — the best since the original and perhaps the best of the franchise — by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies. It’s a marriage of old themes and new, which perfectly complements Halloween '18, because that’s exactly what the film is, too. The original’s film score, by itself and without any visual representation of Michael Myers’ mask or knife, is scary. Appropriately, free of its haunting visuals, the score for Halloween '18 achieves the same result. (Don’t believe me?) Not to mention, Carpenter and sons have pulled off the unthinkable: during the climactic showdown between good and evil, they’ve taken the most recognizable horror theme in cinema history (respect to JAWS) and re-imagined it to be free from fear and tension and re-orchestrated it to sound almost…hopeful. If music has ever made a moment work, it’s this one.

Though not without its problems (the Dr. Sartain subplot should have been entirely dropped, as it deviates the main story to a distracting degree), Halloween '18 gets so much right that to laundry-list its faults seems like salty tears. The fact is, a slasher sequel forty years in the making shouldn’t be as good as it is, so instead of dictating faults, let’s instead celebrate that this Halloween dream-team of David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, Jason Blum, Jamie Lee Curtis, and John Carpenter have achieved the unthinkable: they revitalized one of cinema’s longest-running horror franchises and rebooted not just the property, but the respect it once carried. I’d give anything for this to be the final entry in the series, as it’s doubtful such a sequel could ever live up to what Gordon Green et al. managed to do, but they’ve proven one thing at least: if anyone can do it, they can.

[Reprinted from The Daily Grindhouse.]

OH, HAI BLOG

Hello?

Is there anybody in there?

Just nod if you can hear me.

Is there anyone home?

Hi everyone. After some recent hemming and hawing, I've decided to embark on a soft resurrection of the ol' blog. For the past few years, I've been writing for a handful of different movie sites, but I'd like to start grouping together all my crazy thoughts and opinions in one place again. I haven't quite decided if I'll return to the old format of daily posts, or only post intermittently if I've got some thoughts on a recent flick.

Whatever readers I once had all those years ago, I hope you're still out there!

More to come...

A TIME TO KILL: ANTICIPATING AND DREADING THE NEW 'HALLOWEEN'

As a kid, I was a devout Michael Myers disciple. Granted, I already was a horror junkie in general, but there was something about that white-masked boogeyman that fueled my imagination and struck fear into my bones like lightning. And the memory of when I first made his acquaintance still lives gleefully in the back of my brain where all the best memories are stored. It was Halloween, somewhere in the latter portion of my elementary school years. I sat in the living room, in costume, waiting impatiently for my older brother and his friend, who had both chosen to trick-or-treat as dead/undead hockey players, to finish tediously gluing half-pucks to their faces. Understandably, I was beyond antsy to hit the streets and fill my pillowcase until the seams threatened to burst, so I flipped on the TV hoping to find distraction in the cadre of Halloween-appropriate titles sure to be on. While surfing, a burst of screams and frantic chaos in the dark caught my attention. Feeling good about my choice, I put down the remote and began to watch.

That was how I first discovered John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Though it was only the last ten minutes or so, as a young horror-loving fiend, what better time to tune in? The film was at its frenzied peak, and the suddenness and ambiguity of the terror heightened the experience. Who was this man in the mask? Who was this old man in the trench coat trying to stop him? Why here, why now? What is this?

I saw it all: Laurie Strode fleeing and shrieking across the street from masked maniac Michael Myers; her frantic pounding against the locked front door; the couch attack, the closet attack, and the final confrontation where Michael was unmasked and Dr. Sam Loomis shot him directly in the jumpsuit.

For a moment, everything was quiet. The shot had knocked Michael offscreen into a back room. Surely he was dead, right?

Loomis ran into that same back room after him. Michael waited in the darkness — still, and very much alive.

At that moment, seeing his unnatural stillness framed by darkness, I was petrified. Beyond petrified. I couldn’t move — something so simple as a scary mask in silhouette, with a bit of inhuman breathing, and I couldn’t fucking move.

After five more gunshots rang out, Michael flew backwards off the balcony and landed with a crash on the cold hard October ground. Finally, he appeared dead.

But after a quick cut away, his body was gone.

And thus began a forty-year legacy.

After that fateful television viewing of Halloween, I was hooked. One by one I sought every remaining sequel, skipping Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which I’d learned didn’t feature the babysitter murderer I'd come to love. (I eventually matured and warmed to this entry, and while there have been past seasonal celebrations in which I may not have watched many or most of the main Halloween series, I've never not watched Halloween III.) This love for the series persisted. I bought every Halloween available on VHS, including multiple copies of the original. (I about had a heart attack at the local Suncoast Video when I saw a pre-order announcement for Anchor Bay's double-tape twentieth anniversary edition of the original.) I bought every magazine or novelization or figure or poster or comic book or anything that bared the mask of Michael Myers. Had there been a Halloween secret society, I’d’ve been a charter member.

1995 rolled around and I was in the fifth grade. One Friday in September, a childhood chum named Barry and I were casually swapping weekend plans on the bus ride home.

“My sister’s taking me to see Halloween 6 tonight,” Barry said casually.

My face went full :O and I begged him to take me along.

He did, and soon after, he became a boyhood best friend.

Flash forward a few years. It’s springtime, 1998. Now up to eighth grade, my love for horror continued and sometimes I was successful in forcing my friends to go along with it. Scream 2 had proved such a massive box office success that Dimension Films re-released the sequel for encore showings. And so of course I went. It was then, in the popcorn-smelling dimness of the auditorium, that one particular trailer stuck out among all others:

From the audience’s point of view, we glided down long hallways as heavy winds made curtains billow and dry autumn leaves dance across the floor. The legendary Don LaFontaine's perfect trailer voice growled, “he has pursued her relentlessly…”

Meanwhile, I immediately recognized the tick-tock piano music in the background as Don continued…

“He has hunted her… everywhere…”

Could it really be...?

“Twenty years later, the face of good and the face of evil will meet… one last time.”

The music was a track called “Laurie’s Theme” from the Halloween soundtrack, and the trailer, which suddenly flashed to Jamie Lee Curtis looking directly into the darkened eyeholes of Michael Myers, ended with the Halloween theme and the title Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later shrieking across the screen.

What I felt at that moment was indescribable, an insane amount of shock and surprise and excitement that I still haven’t felt for a movie to this day. It was euphoric, like meeting a superhero or winning the lottery. A franchise that had seemed all but dead after the abysmal Curse of Michael Myers was suddenly back with a vengeance, and not only that, it was hailing the return of Laurie Fucking Strode, the ultimate final girl.

In the dark, my friends looked over at me and made their own :O faces. They didn’t care nearly as much for horror and the Halloween franchise as I did, but I could feel their excitement for me. At that moment, I didn’t care about anything else. Once I regained my composure, I excitedly ran out of the auditorium and to the nearest payphone. (Yep, you read that right. The only people with cell phones in 1998 were Mulder and Scully.) There was one person who needed to know—Barry, my horror movie/Halloween partner in crime—and he needed to know NOW. I was overjoyed, over the moon, and not thinking clearly. I felt like a celebrity, as if I had been the first person in the world to experience such groundbreaking news and it was my privilege and duty to alert the masses.

Seeing that trailer was magical. To be taken completely by surprise like that still lives on in my mind as one of the happiest moments of my life. And here I am, twenty years later, and the idea behind what I am saying—undying devotion for, essentially, Halloween 7—sounds completely ludicrous. But that’s the kind of magic I suspect dies off as your childhood does.

By the time I got back to the in-progress showing of Scream 2, Jada Pinkett was already dead. I was so excited by the revelation of Michael and Laurie's imminent return that the exploits of Ghostface and the stabbing of Sarah Michelle Gellar barely registered. Suddenly, that particular slasher sequel didn’t mean shit in the face of Halloween: H20.

For months after that, I prowled theater lobbies waiting impatiently for the poster to appear, to confirm that it wasn’t all just a dream. And once it arrived, hung there in its light box like a work of art, I stared at that poster and marveled at the Shape’s mask, taking in the pure pleasure of knowing it was coming soon…

Consumer-grade internet had just become a thing (we’re talking AOL 3.0), so naturally, leading up to Halloween: H20’s August release, I Ask-Jeeved and AOL Netfound everything I could about this new sequel. I clicked over and over on distributor Dimension Films’ official website, transfixed by the primitive Flash animations, to watch trailers and look at publicity photos. Every fold of my brain needed to be saturated with every bit of info I could find. Though I’m now of the age where I depend significantly on an internet lifestyle, I can also remember what life was like before it. Back then, if you wanted to know about the next installments of Phantasm or Halloween, your "internet" was Fangoria Magazine. And all you were allowed to know about their productions was what Fangoria allowed you to know: a quote here, description of a scene there, and topped off with a publicity still that often wasn’t indicative of the final film. Back then, I wasn’t in the habit of bookmarking film sites and receiving daily news updates about projects in production. Nowadays, as a grumpy adult with the internet on his phone, I can assure you that finding out about a new Halloween sequel from an article by an online pipsqueak isn’t nearly as magical as seeing that same sequel’s trailer in a theater for the first time—the very first sign to you that it existed.

Always the pioneer, I began assembling my own version of Halloween: H20 “special features” on a VHS tape based on material recorded off television; it included a Sci-Fi Channel hour-long making-of special; an MTV thing where the cast and storywriter, Kevin Williamson, hosted Dawson’s Creek trivia in between music videos for Creed and Puff Daddy; and multiple appearances of the cast on late-night talk shows. That tape singlehandedly kept me satiated until I saw the film for myself.

Opening weekend, I finally did — alongside a whole host of my chums I’d likely strong-armed into going. And it was everything I could've wanted. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis holding an ax and furiously bellowing her brother’s name during her third-act confrontation set to an orchestral rendition of the Halloween theme gave me chills and was worth the price of admission alone, and I was legitimately shocked and a little heartbroken to see Michael lose his head. As the credits rolled, I was on a high. After months of foreplay, the big moment had arrived: the rolling out of Halloween: H20 felt like the successful culmination of a plan I had nothing to fucking to do with, yet I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself. At home I put together a framed Michael Myers memorial, complete with birthdate and death date, because I was a silly nerd/psychopath. Too young to understand the concept of commerce over creativity, I felt assured Halloween: H20 would be Michael Myers’ final hurrah (ha!), and while that made me sad, I felt it was a perfect finale: indisputable death at the hands of his sister and longtime target. (Twenty years later, though Halloween: H20's shortcomings are no longer veiled by childhood romanticism, I still think it’s one of the better sequels, cheesy dialogue, inevitable Screamification, and continuity-be-damned mask swaps notwithstanding.)

What might be the longest intro in the world leads us to the point of all this.

I was born in 1984. By then, the original Halloween was six years old, though I wouldn’t know it existed until the mid-’90s. That’s ten years. And when you’re a kid, ten years is forever. THough Halloween: H20 was the twentieth anniversary of the original film, to me it was basically Halloween: H4VR. Anything that predated my existence didn’t jive with the timeline of my life. I couldn’t appreciate the full sense of that anniversary because I didn’t exist or wasn’t cognizant for most of it.

Halloween: H20 may as well have been the bicentennial.

Here were are, in 2017, just a couple weeks away from 2018. And with it comes the twentieth anniversary of Halloween: H20, and the fortieth(!) anniversary of the original. A new Halloween film is in production — for the intent of my point, let’s call it Halloween: H40. And like its first anniversary sequel, this new film will be ignoring all the sequels and getting back to the original’s roots. And most significantly, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as the embattled Laurie Strode.

If you can avoid getting caught in the petty trappings of the internet, Halloween: H40 has a lot going for it. The production is in good hands with Jason Blum, who has been keeping the horror genre alive and thriving over the last decade by sacrificing multi-million dollar budgets in exchange for handing off full creative control to the films’ talented writers and directors (a refreshing change of pace from former rights-holding and extremely meddlesome Dimension Films/the Weinstein brothers), with this approach resulting in new classics Insidious, Sinister, and more. (Dude might also be nominated for an Oscar for producing Get Out — you read it here first.) Jamie Lee Curtis is returning, of course, but the casting of Judy Greer as her daughter and the always dependable Will Patton shows that the production is more interested in talent than vapid Facebook-level recognition value. John Carpenter returns to compose and consult. And it’s being directed by David Gordon Green, an actual filmmaker who, comedies aside, has a solid body of work, including the very underrated Night of the Hunter-ish stalker thriller Undertow.

As of this writing, not a single frame of Halloween: H40 has been shot, but it’s already as terrifying to me as the original was all those Halloween nights ago. Because, to me, Halloween: H20 is only a few years old. How could it not be? I still remember everything about the excitement I felt in the months leading up to its release. I still remember going to see it on a warm Saturday afternoon, that my mother drove us to the theater, that all my boyhood chums came with me, and what each and every one of them said about it after the credits rolled. I even remember, upon Michael’s first on-screen appearance, my friend Kevin jokingly whispering to me, “It’s the guy from the ad!,” quoting from an episode of The Simpsons — something we did constantly.

Within the confines and timeline of my life, Halloween: H20 feels like it just happened to me. There’s no possible way it’s been twenty years. Yes, I’ve lost friends and family, I’ve moved multiple times, I’ve gotten numerous jobs, I’ve been lucky enough to have fallen in love a couple times. Those childhood friends who went with me to share in my excitement of Laurie Strode’s return, all of whom I miss dearly, eventually scattered to the wind, and it’s been years since I’ve spoken to any of them. All of that makes a solid case for a two-decade timeline. But there’s just no way. I can’t fathom it. And I don’t want to.

As a film fan, a horror fan, and a Halloween fan who has weathered some serious mediocrity over the years, I’m more excited than anyone for the coming of this next anniversary sequel.

But as a mere mortal keeping a wary eye on the clock and the calendar, it just might be one of the most terrifying films I ever see.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

BYE

I'm formally announcing that this shall be the last post on The End of Summer. I opened this blog a million years ago back in July of 2011 (my first post was a review of Insidious, if you're curious) and since then have done my best to provide you with insights on every horror-related thing I could conjure. Now, nearly four years later, I've said everything I have to say and am looking forward to seeing what else may be out there for me to pursue. This blog has allowed me to "meet" a wonderful array of people, some of whom whose contributions to horror cinema I've respected for way longer than I've been blogging for TEOS, whereas other people I've met I now consider to be my friends. 

TEOS itself isn't going anywhere - it will remain upright and fully-stocked for your late night reading; though I did my best to provide you with daily updates of constant oddness, think more of the blog as an archive of the creepy and the morbid for you to scroll through at your midnight leisure. 

For anyone who ever stumbled upon TEOS at random and decided to check in from time to time, I thank you. For anyone who ever bookmarked TEOS with the intention of checking in every day, or "followed" the blog for that same reason, I thank you more. 

If it's midnight, stop by. You never know what you'll find.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANTONIO BAY

For those who have stuck with me over the years, you know that The End of Summer goes all out every year on April 21st (at midnight) in honor of John Carpenter's The Fog.

Sorry to tell you: I don't have anything planned for this year. Instead, please enjoy one or all of the following celebrations from previous years:

FLIGHT

In 1930s Detroit, a man named Joseph Figlock was to become an amazing figure in a young (and, apparently, incredibly careless) mother’s life. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother’s baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby’s fall was broken and Figlock and the baby were unharmed. A year later, the same baby fell from the same window, again falling onto Mr. Figlock as he was passing beneath. Once again, both of them survived the event.

FREESTYLE FRED

TAKE YOUR CHILD TO WORK DAY

Run fast.

CRAPPYPASTA: THE THING THAT LIVES IN YOUR MIND

The thing that lives in your mind

A young girl stares at her reflection in the mirror. A voice in her head talks to her slowly, in words she can understand.

“Who are you?” She asks the voice slowly.

“I am your friend.” the voice replies. “I can play with you when you get lonely.”

“But what’s your name?”

“My name? I am the Un-you. I live in everyone.”

“How do you do that?” The little girl asks slowly?

“Would you like to see me?” The voice asked.

“Sure.”

The girls reflection began to move.

 

Run!

Crappypasta.

LUNGE

OLD MIKE

“Old Mike put to rest after 64 years,” the front-page headline in the now-defunct Nevada County Picayune trumpeted after the burial. Even though no one knew Old Mike’s real name or much of anything about him, his burial was big news — it had been a long time coming. Old Mike died Aug. 21, 1911, his death bringing with it notoriety he likely would never have experienced while living. Actually, what happened after he died accounted for his macabre celebrity status.

For 64 years, Old Mike’s embalmed body was on public display at Cornish Mortuary in Prescott, the wizened figure in its glass case becoming a fixture in the Nevada County seat as townspeople and tourists alike gawked and speculated. Some said Old Mike — a name bestowed upon the corpse by the mortuary staff — had been a traveling salesman who hawked pencils and other small items. Others thought he was a man down on his luck, who had been forced into the life of a hobo. Whatever his profession or origin, this man no one really knew was found leaning against an oak tree in the Prescott City Park with nothing on him offering information about who or what he was.

More.

MADAME

"Contemporary sources mention the death of the young slave girl who hurled herself from the roof and confirm the discovery of seven chained and maltreated slaves in quarters near Lalaurie's kitchen, but confirm none of the more lurid allegations regarding buckets of genitalia, makeshift sex-change operations, brains stirred with sticks, women nailed to floors by their intestines, tongues sewn together, mouths stuffed with excrement and stitched up, females flayed to resemble caterpillars, suits of human skin, sliced penises, 'human crabs,' bottles of blood or 'grand gore chambers'; nor do they detail scores of victims, no evidence for which can be traced in accounts published at the time."

 

 Delphine LaLaurie.

THE UNKNOWN LAND

Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922): The Unknown Land

THE FIGURE

The house I grew up in was built in the 1880's and my family lived there until 2004 or so. At the time of the first experience(that I'm aware of), I was only about 3 or 4 months old and my parents were in the middle of a kitchen remodel. My dad says he woke up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep and had an overwhelming sensation that someone was in the house. So he grabbed his .357 from his night stand and took our lab and did a perimeter check of the house. Nothing was out of place and everything seemed to be in order. But our dog would not go into our basement. My dad tried pushing him down but it still wouldn't budge. So my dad picked him up and carried him down and soon as he put him down he ran back up the stairs. SO my dad cleared the basement by himself. After realizing everything was fine, he grabbed a drink and decided to go back to bed. As my dad was walking back up the stairs to the second story, he looked up and saw the figure of an elderly man standing at the top of the stairs looking at him. My dad said he was close enough where he tried to grab the figure thinking it was an intruder but it simply vanished. A few weeks after that, my dad had another experience. Again he woke up and felt a presence that had the hairs on his neck standing up. He rolled over and looked through the doorway and saw the same figure staring at him from the hallway. My went to reach for his .357 and when he looked back the figure was gone. He checked the house out for an signs of a break in and could not find anything.

My dad never told my mom about what he had been seeing until my mom had an experience for herself. My dad was gone on a business in Kentucky and she was home alone with me. She woke up in the middle of the night and felt something heavy on the end of the bed. She looked up and saw a figure fitting the same description sitting on the bed looking at her. She quickly turned on the light and the figure was nowhere to be seen. She called my dad panic stricken around 3 in the morning and told him what she had saw. He played it off as a dream and there was nothing to be afraid of. After my dad returned, he told her what he had seen.

We never did figure out what the figure was. My parents have two theories on who the figure might be. One is that it is the original owner of the house not pleased with his house being worked on and the other theory is the figure being my grandfather, who passed away before I was born, checking on his son's first child. After the work was completed the figure was never seen again but every once and awhile you get the feeling like you were being watched. Especially in the basement.

The house is now abandoned and condemned. The local dump bought the house and tried renting the property but had trouble keeping tenants. The next door neighbor who I still deer hunt with said one group of renters said the house was haunted. One winter they did not winterize the house while it was empty and the pipes burst and the basement filled with water. Evidently water was coming out of the basement windows. Now the house is filled with mold and is scheduled to be demolished soon.

Source.

HAUNTED MANSION

CURSE

In 1893, Henry Ziegland ended a relationship with his girlfriend. She didn’t take it so well and ended up killing herself. Her brother blamed him for her death and went to Henry’s house and tried to shoot him. Henry was lucky and the bullet only grazed his cheek and embedded itself inside a tree nearby. In 1913, Henry decided to use dynamite to uproot a tree in his garden. The explosion propelled the embedded bullet from the tree straight into Henry’s head, killing him on the spot.

BUY ME THIS: MICKEY MASKS