Halloween (1978)
Directed by John Carpenter
Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.
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What critics compared Halloween to
This is Sidney Prescott in the mode of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018). Unlike Curtis’ character, however, Sidney is not portrayed as emotionally damaged or obsessive.
…this film is, as mentioned, committed straightforwardly to functioning as an uninspired riff on the Halloween reboot.
…una dinámica muy similar a la que Jamie Lee Curtis interpretó en las recientes secuelas de Halloween…
Sidney Prescott as a mother is a compelling character, even if it feels like a bit of a retread of Halloween 2018.
She's rehashing the generational trauma theme we've seen in recent horror reboots, especially in Halloween (2018), which is name-checked here to really hammer home the similarity.
For Scream 7, the unenterprising screenwriters Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick lifted the premise from the rebooted Halloween (2018), which involved the killer Michael Myers setting his sights on the next generation and attempting to slaughter a mother-daughter combo of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her estranged daughter, Karen (Judy Greer).
His opening shot, with its placid suburban street, reminds you of Haddonfield, Illinois, where Jamie Lee Curtis was pursued in “Halloween,” and the director of that movie, John Carpenter, supplied a throbbing electronic score that is constantly echoed here.
Alongside knowing visual echoes of Halloween , there’s a deep vein of John Carpenter in the simple but unnervingly effective electronic score by Disasterpeace, which runs from almost subliminal background booms to crunching, sometime strident dissonance (I’ve just listened to some on my laptop, and even heard this way they’re still deeply troubling).
But there are also times when the camera itself turns threatening, prowling the quiet suburban streets in eerily smooth tracking shots that hark back to John Carpenter's slasher classic, Halloween.
The teenage cast gives subtle, sympathetic performances, grounding this wild terror in reality, while the cinematography and assaultive score openly recall the cinemascope suburbia and savage synths of John Carpenter’s Halloween while building on the influence and deepening it.
The inspiration from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978), extending to the eerie, electronic musical score, is unmistakable and used to great effect.
By echoing John Carpenter's Halloween (not in terms of narrative but it nearly every other way that matters), director David Robert Mitchell has announced that he won't be bound by the limits of modern multiplex horror tropes.
Camp Miasma is an 80s slasher franchise once revered and since revived to the point of zombification. Think Friday the 13th, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a hot young indie-film director tapped to remake Camp Miasma, a slasher film series in the vein of Friday the 13th or Halloween.
If, in the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th, titillation and puritanism went hand in hand—so that sex, especially as experienced by horny teenagers, was gruesomely punished—Camp Miasma sees the slasher itself as a perverse pathway toward sexual satisfaction.
…creating a mash-up of the better-known canon — Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street (in order of appearance)…
…one that not only satirizes 1980s horror franchises such as “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th,”…
In doing so it makes one recall the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween franchise (including a killer joke about her lore), and the journey she and other final girls have taken in being the inspiration for generations while acknowledging the toll this fame has had on them.
It’s a moment that recalls a similar scene in John Carpenter’s Halloween…
Ben smashing through a louvered closet door where Lucy and Kate hide seems direct homage to Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!” moment from The Shining or Michael Myers destroying the flimsy closet shielding Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.
There are plenty of visual horror franchise homages: “Alien,” “Jurassic Park” and “Halloween.” Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode would kill for these closets.
Roberts’ homage to King’s Cujo, with lots of notes of Carpenter’s Halloween…
It'd be reductive to suggest that this was King Kong by way of Halloween…
…but Primate also does itself no favors by cribbing from Halloween, Scream, A Quiet Place, and other tired horror tropes.
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The teen villains are so monstrous, from a toxic female cohort dispatched in a ridiculous cryotank (think the cold version of what Michael Myers does with a hot tub in Halloween II , 1981) to a group of gang rapey boys and even Alan Ruck as an extremely rude shop teacher, there’s never a moment to pause at the violent audacity of whatever or whomever the Blissfield Butcher is or what his motivations for incessant slaughter might be.
The killer’s mask is a gruesome mix of Jason’s and Leatherface’s from the “Friday the 13th” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchises, and one of the butcher’s early kills (and his reaction thereto) emulates Michael Myer’s impaling of Bob Simms in the original “Halloween.”
Nonetheless, Freaky is also his most skillfully directed project so far, not just in the way of gruesomely creative kills (there’s a sadistically fun woodshop murder) but also in terms of photography with moody lighting and thoughtful shots playing homage to the classics that paved the way (there’s a great Halloween nostalgia pull involving a knife going through a door that made me smile).
After we witness clueless teens get the bloody axe in the opening sequence (a nostalgic throwback that pays homage to “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween”) we meet 17 year old Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) still coping with the loss of her father one year prior, and who hasn’t made plans to commemorate Homecoming with her pals Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich).
I’ll leave you to discover just how all this leads to a climactic chase through a Halloween maze in a high school gym with dry-ice machines at full tilt, set to a nerve-jangling synth score that evokes John Carpenter’s Halloween (to which Wingard, whose previous features have been low-budget horror films, explicitly pays homage).
The film is a worthy heir to the horror traditions of “Halloween” auteur John Carpenter, whose work is referenced via a tense electronic score and the occasional shot of a jack-o’-lantern, and Joseph Ruben, whose 1987 “The Stepfather” provided the template for this story in which a figure who should be worthy of respect and trust insinuates his way into an all-American family under false pretenses and with deadly consequences.
The camera partakes of the gliding reframing in movies from John Carpenter’s 1970s Steadicam heyday, and while there is full-frontal homage to movies ranging from “Halloween” to “Carrie” to “The Stepfather,” “The Terminator” and “Taxi Driver,” the movie holds its own with gleeful élan.
An expertly orchestrated final battle leaves us wanting more, much like John Carpenter's Halloween.
Where “You’re Next” was a punchy love note to Wes Craven (“Scream”), “The Guest” is a full-on wet kiss to John Carpenter (“Halloween”), atmospheric in the extreme and gilded with slithering synth lines and unnerving camera work.
John Carpenter’s Halloween…
The latter two examples are what the brothers draw from specifically (those and, oddly enough, “Halloween”/John Carpenter’s expansive early oeuvre) in creating an ’80s set homage to the decade, complete with bad haircuts, an electronic synth-driven score and Reagan-era paranoia.
It's not by accident that by minute five of the show you've already caught homages to E.T., Poltergeist, and Halloween.
From the opening minutes of Stranger Things, it’s obvious that creators Matt and Ross Duffer want to put you in mind of ET, Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street and, most of all, Stephen King’s It.
In short, Stranger Things is sort of like if E.T. took a left turn into It, with a stop along the way to pick up a bit of the small-town terror of Halloween.
There are lens flares, dolly zooms, and Spielberg Faces galore, and the score is an explicit nod to Carpenter’s Halloween music.
Were the picture not well-made, it would be but a footnote in history, and subsequent copycats (e.g., " Friday the 13th ," "Prom Night," "Silent Night, Deadly Night"), satirical treatments (e.g., HBO's "Tales from the Crypt" and the " Scream " series) and spoofs (e.g., "Student Bodies" and the " Scary Movie " franchise) would cease to exist.
Halloween was the film that earned Jamie Lee Curtis the infamous title of "Scream Queen."
The constant references to Halloween in particular are more hamfisted homage than plot device, and the aforementioned video camera gimmick is wasted.
References to Carpenter's original Halloween abound; several minutes of footage from that film are used here in a uniquely effective manner.
"Scream" may be a cut above the gore fests that line the dimly lit back wall at your video store, but it is a far cry from genre classics like "Halloween" or Craven's own "Nightmare On Elm Street."
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John Carpenter's Halloween and The Fog…
Widow’s Bay has plenty of other influences, of course. It’s been compared to Jaws, Twin Peaks and horror films like John Carpenter’s The Fog and Halloween.
…producing a tasteful homage to a classic inspiration, such as Jaws or Halloween…
…a creepy masked killer sloooowly stalking a victim through an empty alley, Halloween-style…
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the later episode, “Your Baggage,” which is, in no uncertain terms, a reference to Carpenter’s seminal slasher film, 1978’s Halloween.
Dippold blends the warmth and humor of Parks and Recreation with Stephen King’s New England tales, Twin Peaks, Jaws, Halloween, and The Wicker Man, among others.
The two houses where the second half's action largely takes place don't offer the variety of, say, the isolated summer camp's various areas in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th, and the characters act a whole lot dumber than in Cunningham's picture -- after discovering bodies in one house with the slow-as-molasses-walking Myers in pursuit, Laurie foolishly puts herself and the two kids she's babysitting in jeopardy by forever knocking on the other house to be let in; and when Myers is supposedly dead after having already proved himself resilient to Laurie's defenses, she still opts to stay in the house after sending the kids out of it to contact the police.
Nor, despite its remarkable box-office returns, did Halloween ignite the giant wave of 1980s slasher films - it took another two years for the Halloween-tinged Friday the 13th to get that party started.
A self-consciously avowed knock-off of John Carpenter’s masterful nightmare Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th has always been a scorned and derided film, with its mixture of shallow characters, boogeyman clichés, and gory spectacle making it an easy target for middlebrow critics to tear to pieces while boisterous teenage audiences lapped it up and asked for seconds (and thirds, and fourths …).
Producer-director Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller had a plan (and freely admit it): rip off John Carpenter's Halloween for a quick buck.
It doesn't have the merciless style of "Halloween," or the gnashing sadism of "Last House on the Left," or the sweaty lunacy of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
The original "Friday the 13th" is a skillful, if by-the-numbers, horror pic, its very existence resting upon the huge success of 1978's " Halloween ."