This week on Midnight Screenings, I’m looking at the two finest films from one of my favorite modern horror directors, and one of the men who brought midnight cinema to the mainstream: John Carpenter.
Update early 2019: Never a fun time reading these college-age early reviews, especially when you don’t have time to write-up a new take in full, but I’ll say after a rewatch that Carpenter’s film remains one of the quintessential films in its genre, and its decade: a portrait of geographic seclusion as abyssal isolation that doubles as a study in the breakdown of democracy, all while replacing the proverbial conservative “Other” of horror with the Other within. It’s greatest trick, then, is that it turns one’s opacity to one’s own self into a truly terrifying dispatch from the fringes of society, both a final transmission from flickering-out ’70s ennui and an inaugural howl of ’80s malaise. And it achieves this inward turn, forcing us not onto an outsider but back onto our own frightening selves, without ever resorting to any “psychological horror” tools to launder the horror by ensconcing it only within one character’s head-space. Truly disquieting stuff.
Original Review:
John Carpenter’s recently re-appraised The Thing works on many levels. But most fascinating is that it works in a way completely, and seemingly intentionally, divorced from Carpenter’s other horror-masterpiece, Halloween. As I am not the first to observe, his 1978 game-changer centers an almost eternally faceless horror that can infiltrate mundane suburbia at a moment’s notice, like an ever-present shadow we’d prefer not admit is there. In The Thing, the horror belongs all too well. It’s not faceless. It’s quite the opposite: it has “the” face, in that its face is humanity, or rather, as I’m not the first to notice, it has any face. And not in a metaphorical “we’re the monster after all” sense, although that atavistic stone can be overturned for those looking. It’s primarily interested in something more earthy and visceral that is nonetheless profoundly human and lonely. The monster’s face is quite literally the human face – it enters into the human body and takes it over while occupying the human form. In doing so, perhaps as a none-too-happy accident, it causes us to question identity itself, whether we are our bodies or merely have our bodies on loan from the world.
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Halloween was writer-director-composer-producer-fanboy John Carpenter’s introduction to the world of the cinematic masters (befitting his name, he probably is a carpenter too for god’s sake). It is, above all else, a master-class in pure style as well as a reminder that in horror, filmmaking skill and raw dread drive the narrative rather than the other way around. It’s economical, ruthlessly efficient, and spare. There’s a sense that every shot holds a purpose, and that Carpenter knows how to stage his camera for maximum impact. The film feels planned, rigorously so, and ruthlessly composed to a point bordering on obsession. It’s a masterpiece of slowly unnerving tension that builds at just the right amount throughout – every image adds to the film, and edits don’t so much transition as ransack the previous shot and take control. It’s fitting that its creator bears the last name of a craftsman – this film is all ruthless, clinically potent, monstrously well-constructed craft. If, in fact, he did hold the profession of his surname, this would be an oak chair assembled guerilla style and with little funding or time (the film was shot on an extremely meager budget), but which would bear the love and care of someone who truly loved woodwork and put every ounce of his skill and passion into making that one chair. That it would be the devil’s throne is just the other half of the fun.
Edited May 2016
Preface: Now that I’ve finally decided to go “old” with the blog, I’m doing it in style with not just a regular “old” film, but two, and two that have ripened with age. For this week’s Midnight Screenings, the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, and ’40s wouldn’t do. I’m taking it back to two of the granddaddy’s of filmmaking from the early ’30s, two of the earliest “talkies” and two supreme influences on Midnight Cinema from a time where films could be more openly playful and subversive as filmmakers were still trying to prod and poke at the medium to expose its limits and possibilities.
filmEdited
Maniac is a difficult film to review. As a remake of a notorious Video Nasty from 1980 of the same name, this film sets out to drag us through the mud and generally make its audience feel not just uncomfortable but nasty. It is a relentlessly, oppressively difficult film to watch, but it also extremely, even uncomfortably, well made. Maniac sets out to do something that favors a pure lurid affect over anything else, and it succeeds entirely at meeting and even possibly exceeding those goals. Many viewers, however, will be so fundamentally turned off by the goal they won’t care.
Director Ti West has become something of a cult sensation in recent years among the horror film-going crowd, beginning with his 2009 genre pastiche The House of the Devil. That film was consummately effective, if less than ethereal or skin-crawling. Nonetheless, it worked, and a film that takes all of its skill and put it out on the screen simply for the purpose of working these days is rare. But with The Innkeepers, West really proves his credentials as a horror filmmaker worth following, emerging out of his shell of repackaging horror to truly creating it.
The Long Take 