Chapter 10: Horror Comes to the Suburbs

Carrie (1976) – Brian De Palma

Carrie is the best high school horror film. The acting across the board is spectacular. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both received Oscar nominations for their performances as the bullied girl with telekinetic powers and her religious nut mother respectively.

John Travolta shows up as a young thug. Nancy Allen is aces as the bad girl. P.J. Soles never takes off her baseball cap as the Allen’s henchwoman. Bill Katt charms as most popular boy in school who invites Carrie to the prom.

De Palma proves that he’s a horndog with the masterful slow motion opening in the girl’s locker room. The climax at the prom is slightly dated but still incredibly powerful. Some of the split screen shots haven’t aged well. The earlier optical printer shots still wow and look much better the CGI that would be used today. The final scene is still a scream; watch the birds and the car on the perpendicular street.

Stephen King once talked about seeing an early screening of Carrie in a black neighborhood. He thought the film wouldn’t fly because it’s about a white girl’s experiences. When he heard the crowd cheering he realized how universal a good story really is.

Halloween (1978) – John Carpenter

The night he came home. Halloween is the first real slasher film. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas back in 1974 was a Yuletide thriller. This is a slasher film, although it lacks the high level of gore that would come to define the genre in the 1980’s.

The plot is fantastically simple. When Michael Myers was six years old he killed his sister on Halloween night. Fifteen years later, on October 30^th, 1978 he escapes from the asylum, and travels back to his home – Haddonfield, Illinois. He is trailed by his doctor. His victims are babysitters and their boyfriends. The virginal Laurie Strode will be the final girl – the good girl – the only survivor.

After all these years, and a ton of imitators, Halloween is still a taut enduring thriller. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.” Roger Ebert believes that director John Carpenter is cut from the same cloth. He writes, “Halloween” is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho” (1960).

Let’s explore what Carpenter does so well:

Halloween begins with a shot of the Meyers’ house. The camera moves in from the side. The camera movement suddenly shifts to the left; too perfect for a human sidestep. For a split second the audience is induced into primary identification.[1] After a beat, the camera begins to march forward, bobbing slightly, attuned to the breath of an unknown protagonist.

Two teenagers necking in the hallway are quickly glimpsed through the front door. The unseen protagonist, and the audience aligned with his[2] gaze, moves silently and smoothly to the side of the house.

The protagonist moves to a window at the side of the house and peers through. He watches the teenagers make-out on the couch in the living room. The object of his gaze leaves the room. The voyeur is unsure of his next move, he glances back and forth, then walks back to the front of the house. He watches without moving until the light turns off in his sister’s room.

The soundtrack plays a non-diegetic orchestration, alerting the audience that the hint of sex springs the voyeur into action. Suddenly, he moves to the back door. He enters the house, examines the kitchen, opens the door and grabs a butcher’s knife. The audience follows his gaze to the stairs. The voyeur hides in the darkness of the living room as the boyfriend leaves the house. The soon-to-be-killer slowly climbs the stairs. At the top of the stairs a clown mask, that the boyfriend was playing with earlier, lies on the ground.

Michael picks it up and puts it on. He enters the bedroom and watches his naked sister brushing her hair. The mask does not hide his identity from those around him. When his sister notices him she calls him by name. “Michael!” She tries to cover up, breaks his scopophilic (sexual excitement through looking) gaze.

[1] During primary identification the audience is aligned with the gaze of the camera. In this shot, all that is on the screen is the house. There is nothing else but the camera’s gaze to relate to. In secondary identification the audience identifies with a character as their stand-in for the imaginary world.

[2] The audience would unconsciously assume that gaze is male because it is active.

KIMT 3

Throughout the film, Michael only attacks when his gaze is broken. In the opening scene he stabs his sister ten times in the breasts, clearly a sexual act with the knife as a physical representation of the psycho-analytic fantasy phallus. However, the act itself is not entirely a result of the castration complex.

With the mask on, Michael is not a subject of language, he has blurred his own identity, and has thus distorted his stage in development. In his gaze, the audience and Michael only see his sister. It is only when she notices him, and says his name that he strikes.

Through the murder, Michael is denying his own existence. He is unwilling to see himself as a separate entity in the figurative mirror. He walks down the stairs and exits the house with the mask still on. As he stands in the yard his parents approach him.

His father is closer. His father rips off the mask thus forcing Michael to acknowledge that he is his own physical entity in front of his mother. His father stands closer to him. His mother refuses to approach any closer. Michael has been forced into the symbolic. Yet, he will not accept that he is a subject of language.

Michael has “no reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong…” Michael does not say a word for the next fifteen years.

Specticast

During the opening scene the audience has identified with a pre-pubescent child. In the next scene, Michael Myers escapes from a mental institution. The audience is soon re-united with his now adult male gaze.

The object of his gaze and the audience’s gaze is Laurie, the film’s virginal heroine. Dr. Loomis may be the male authority figure, but, his gaze is extremely limited; Michael Myers drives behind the doctor as Loomis waits to talk with the sheriff. It is not until the end of the film when Dr. Loomis hears the screams of Tommy and Lindsey that he is alerted to the killer’s location.

Laurie is introduced leaving her house on the way to school. As she walks from her driveway to the street she is objectified by the male gaze of the camera in much the same way that Michael objectified Judith Myers through his point of view early in the film. At first she is a passive observer, she neither has her own ‘gaze’, or the ability to see Michael. On her way to school she drops a key off at the Myers house.

Unbeknownst to Laurie, as she walks up the path towards the Myers house, Michael is watching from inside the house. She doesn’t see him. The scene is shot from within the house. The audience can hear Michael’s breathing. However, the shot is not from his perspective, he enters the frame right before Carpenter cuts back to Laurie. Michael has a new mask, the white William Shatner mask, the face of his childhood self, as Loomis says “blank, pale, emotionless.”

Where's The Jump?

Myers objectifies Laurie and her friends by the force of his gaze. The audience objectifies the girls through their identification with the male gaze of the camera. Yet, as the narrative develops Laurie begins to sense the presence of Myers. She sees him behind bushes, in backyards in between clothing lines, most importantly she sees him when her friends cannot.

Nevertheless, she is not yet entirely an active participant in the narrative. She does not see Michael clearly, only in glimpses so fast they may well be imagined. Laurie becomes an active character when she wanders over to the house across the street to investigate the disappearance of her friends.

Laurie’s entrance into the upstairs bedroom (shot in first person as she pushes the door open) not only forces spectatorial alignment with Laurie, but is also eerily reminiscent of Michael’s entrance into his sister’s room.

Inside the room, Michael has designed an elaborate scene clearly created for viewing. Annie is lying on the bed, Judith Meyers’ gravestone has been placed above her head. Michael Myers’ ‘artistic’ posing of the dead teenagers is his way of reconnecting with his original masked gaze.

By alluding to his first murder scene, Michael regresses to the imaginary toddler phase. Laurie inherits a gaze because of Michael’s spectacle. For the first time she sees clearly.   According to Carol Clover’s final girl theory, Laurie by developing a gaze has attained a phallus and is ready to return to Tommy Doyle’s house and fight the monster.

Pop Horror

Carpenter does not entirely agree with the final girl theory. He sees Laurie as repressed. The other girls, the ones having sex, are the normal ones. Laurie can stand up to Michael because she is just as repressed as he is.

I will not give away the film’s ending, but I will say that it is brilliantly unsettling and has been ripped off by many slasher films since.

Also, the simple score Carpenter wrote to the film rocks!

Additionally Carpenter fans should watch his first film Assault on Precinct 13, a re-interpolation of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. The ice cream scene still gives me chills. His remake of the The Thing with Kurt Russell is masterpiece of isolation and paranoia, not to mention goopy practical effects.

My two favorite Carpenter films are Big Trouble in Little China, a supernatural kung-fu extravaganza also starring Russell (See if you get the joke); and his adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine (1983).

Phantasm (1979) – Don Coscarelli

Growing up in Southern California, Don Coscarelli became infatuated with movies.  In middle school and high school he was making short films with his friends in his hometown of Long Beach.  Many of his shorts won prizes on local television.  

In 1976, Coscarelli became the youngest director to ever have a feature film distributed by a major studio.  He was only nineteen years old.  The movie was called Jim the World’s Greatest.  Three years later he would release a low-budget horror flick that would become one of the most popular cult videos in horror circles for over thirty years.  That movie is Phantasm.

Phantasm, made for around $300,000, is a classic of old-school low-budget ingenuity.  This movie was a labor of love.  Coscarelli shot and edited the film himself.  His family helped out in the creation of the effects and the sets.  The cast and crew were mainly his friends.  The script was barely finished at the time that filming began, large swaths of the story were improvised.

The film’s ace in the hole was actor Angus Scrimm, a tall serious distinguished man, who if you had told him at the time that he would become one of the horror genre’s great icons, he would have scoffed, and maybe warned you that you were in need of psychiatric help.  

Scrimm was a music writer by trade.  He wrote liner notes (for vinyl records) mainly for classical music, and, by yet another strange twist of fate, for the Beatles’ debut album “Meet the Beatles”.  Scrimm had answered a casting-call for Jim the World’s Greatest, and was cast again by Coscarelli as The Phantasm‘s villainous Tall Man.  A role that made Angus Scrimm an overnight horror icon.

Phantasm is a messy film, either surreal or disjointed depending on your perspective.  Nonetheless, it is endlessly creative.  It’s the adventure of a boy named Mike who decides to investigate an evil seemingly supernatural mortuary worker – the Tall Man.  I feel like Vincent Canby of The New York Times got it right, saying the film is like a ghost story told by a bright imaginative eight year old.

At the very least, the flying spears that cut into people foreheads will permeate your dreams, which I find oddly touching because the always young-at-heart Coscarelli says the spheres came to him in a nightmare.  Sometimes, a movie can allow us to tap into the director’s unconscious.