Halloween (1978): The Slasher Blueprint, Drawn in Shadow

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The scariest thing in Halloween is an empty patch of the frame. Watch the film again and notice how often John Carpenter composes a wide shot of a sunlit suburban street, or a tidy living room, or a quiet bit of hedge, and simply lets you look at it, waiting — until a pale shape resolves out of the background where a second ago there was nothing. He does not cut to the killer. He does not sting the music. He lets Michael Myers stand there, half-seen, in the part of the image your eye was not watching, and trusts you to find him and go cold. That single instinct, repeated with total discipline across ninety minutes, is why a low-budget independent picture from 1978 became the most influential horror film of the modern era, and why the hundreds of imitators it spawned almost never understood what they were copying.

It Follows: The Metaphor Everyone Argues About

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Every conversation about David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) collapses into the same argument within about ninety seconds. Someone says it is about sexually transmitted infection. Someone else says no, it is about mortality, the thing that starts walking towards you the moment you are old enough to know you will die. A third person insists it is about trauma, the way harm gets passed from one body to the next because the harmed can think of no other way to be rid of it. The film survives all three readings, and that survival is the first clue that the metaphor was never the point. The metaphor is the bait. The craft is the film.

Suburban Horror - vo.rs

Halloween (1978): The Slasher Blueprint, Drawn in Shadow

It Follows: The Metaphor Everyone Argues About