Review: Halloween (2018)

The latest Halloween movie, directed by David Gordon Green, is technically a sequel to John Carpenter's slasher masterpiece Halloween (1978). The new film ignores and supersedes all other Halloween franchise films from Halloween II (1981) onward, wisely erasing the first sequel's backstory that there is a blood relation between Myers and his target / nemesis Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). This shift restores the original film's notion that Michael Myers is an impersonal killing machine, not a slighted brother looking for psychological vengeance. This is a good change that, along with its evocative visuals and (mostly) tight storytelling, makes this new quasi-"requel" a worthy successor to Carpenter's influential, entertaining horror classic.

Halloween (2018) looks higher-budget than Carpenter's film, with more sets and settings and more nuanced lighting and set design. Yet on the whole, it is aesthetically of a piece with the spare 1978 original. The camerawork, all superb, seems like it almost could have been shot by Carpenter, especially if he had a budget like this one. Produced by Universal Studios and Blumhouse, this new iteration is a slick, precise, exciting, terrifying slasher movie that works on its own terms while providing a satisfying "bookend" to the narrative of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. As the Red Letter Media guys say about nine and a half minutes into their video review, "we didn't even need this movie, but we have it, and it's pretty good, and now we need to be done. It's nice closure."

I agree with most of what the Red Letter Media reviewers say about the new Halloween, i.e.:

• Michael Myers (here played by James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) is scary.
• The movie doesn't "do anything too stupid" (as Mike suggests here).  
• As usual, Halloween co-producer Blumhouse, the company also responsible for recent horror hits Get Out (2017), Split (2017), and the Paranormal Activity franchise (2009-present), "knows what they're doing."

"Hi, my name is Jason Blum. If you're a horror fan, just give me all your money now."

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

The best thing about Green's Halloween is how it makes Michael a genuinely menacing, evil, frightening presence. He is genuinely scary every minute he is on screen, and his first significant attack, in which he brutally kills two true-crime podcasters in a gas station washroom, is one of the finest murder scenes I've seen in a horror movie in a long time. On this basis alone, I really enjoyed this movie a lot and feel more in harmony with Jay's enthusiasm for Green's Halloween than with Mike's more reserved response to it.

I like the film's sporadic comedy moments, especially those provided by young Julian (Jibrail Nantambu). Despite liking most of Julian's bits, Red Letter Media Mike claims that in general the film's humor "weirdens the tone" and breaks the mood of horror and fear the movie otherwise maintains so well. I don't fully agree, though I concede that the offbeat "bahn mi" dialogue between the two oddball cops late in the film is not as effective as would have been some serious talk about what's going on in Haddonfield, which surely the two cops, soon to die, know of via their police radio. Mike's dialogue idea (which he discusses starting here) would definitely work better there.

Mike and Jay also correctly assert that the twist that brings Michael within spitting distance of Laurie's fortified home feels contrived and clunky -- it sure is a lucky break for Laurie that Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) is a psychopath! However, despite its clunkiness, that twist moment works for me, or at least it did upon my first viewing. I like the idea of a "mad doctor" in this movie, since Loomis was always kind of an obsessed loose screw in the original anyway.

Yet I wanted to see Laurie take an even more active role in tracking Michael down and luring him to her isolated compound. That would be more compelling and thematically on-point than watching her driving around somewhat aimlessly in certain parts of Halloween's back half.

Haluk Bilginer as Dr. Sartain, the late Dr. Loomis' protege, Michael's new keeper, and the character whose story arc provides Halloween's major plot twist. 

That said, in addition to its depiction of Michael, Halloween's other greatest achievement is to give Laurie Strode an appropriate revisit and sendoff after 30 years' (ret-conned) hiatus. Though the previews for Halloween make Laurie look like a Sarah Connor-in-T2, gun-toting badass, the film's portrayal of her is more complex and rewarding than that. She is, in fact, frightened and traumatized to the point of being more or less totally unhinged. As Red Letter Media's Mike says, the scene where Laurie shows up at a celebratory dinner for her granddaughter and breaks down crying is basically the best (non-murder) scene in the whole film. And Laurie's hunting of Michael through her own house in the film's climax is a terrifying nail-biter that tops Michael's washroom double murder scene for intensity.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode.

I assume that anyone who likes well-made slasher movies and/or Carpenter's original will enjoy this sequel. It will never be 1978 again, so don't expect quite the same low-budget scrappiness in this version. But slick though it may be, this sequel has it where it counts: it is an exciting, scary, tightly paced horror movie with a top-notch soundtrack, newly composed by none other than John Carpenter (with collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel A. Davies).

In short, Halloween (2018) is a must-see for slasher horror fans.

Leatherface's Easter Egg Alert: Keep your eyes open in Halloween for at least two distinct homages to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The first one involves Laurie's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) only. The second involves all three generations of Strode women and happens right at the very end of the film.

Bonus Afterthought: The release of this latest "requel" in the Halloween franchise has kicked up some internet talk about Rob Zombie's generally maligned duo of Halloween films released in 2007 and 2009. Despite being a Rob Zombie film fan, I am no great defender of Halloween (2007), Zombie's Zombie-ified reboot of the 1978 original. The first portion of the film, about Michael Myers' white-trash upbringing, is interesting and well crafted but unnecessary, whereas the back half is simply a hasty, uninteresting rehash of Carpenter.

Yet as Richard Newby argues, "as a film lacking the beautiful simplicity of Carpenter's, Halloween '07 made a case for itself as an inelegant, raw and dirty psycho-fantasy drawn out of the idea that, as the Zombie-utilized Nazareth song goes, 'love hurts.'" Indeed so -- the Michael-Laurie family connection established by Halloween II (1981) and rejected by Green's reboot is front and center in Zombie's take. And Zombie builds upon and improves his focus on this theme in his criminally underrated 2009 sequel. As Newby contends:

It's in Zombie's Halloween II that the director is at his most interesting and assured as a filmmaker. Michael Myers takes a back seat to Laurie Strode and the trauma she's endured. [Scout] Taylor-Compton's girl-next-door vibe from the first film is stripped away and replaced with something damaged and genuinely human in its fragility. It's a performance, one of the best and most surprising to come out of horror in that decade, that rejects former notions of the final girl and her invulnerability.

Not only does Zombie's depiction of Laurie gain tragedy and resonance in his second Halloween outing, the film also renders Michael (Tyler Mane) as more of an animalistic wild man. The iconic Myers spends good chunks of the film trudging through the countryside, killing people, and seeing visions of his dead mother. It is weird, hallucinatory, and melodramatic, like Zombie's other hillbilly horror masterpiece, The Devil's Rejects (2005), and it works.

Indeed, Newby concludes that "Halloween II '09 is one of the most original films to come out of the slasher movie subgenre, and [it] ended on a note far more interesting than any of the sequels that had come before it." Agreed -- I would rank Zombie's Halloween II as the third-best Halloween franchise film overall, behind Carpenter's original and Green's.

To again quote Newby: "While so many horror remakes in the 21st century feel like a shadow of the original, Zombie managed to create two films that feel fully formed, even if audiences disagree over whether they enjoy the shape they took."

Horror Film Class Required Movie List

A still from Frankenstein's beautifully shot opening sequence. 

I usually don't blog about academic or teaching-related subjects but I've been blogging about my love of the horror film for some time now. elucidating its roots in German Expressionism, exploring its defining classics, profiling its greatest monster movies, extolling its immortal masterpieces, calling attention to its best recent iterations, effusing about its Gothic incarnations, and even having fun reviewing some of its mid-range entries. So it seems timely and interesting to jot down the list of films I plan to screen in the horror film class I'm teaching this coming spring, with some brief commentary about my inclusions (and exclusions).* Here goes:

The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian). While there is a large body of silent horror cinema I would have liked to include, in the end I narrowed it down to this one towering, influential classic. Would I have liked to show at least one German Expressionist film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), or The Golem (1920)? Yes, for sure.

I even seriously considered showing Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), which, despite its oddball, art-film tendencies, is one of the most unnerving and uncanny horror films I can think of. (It is also one of two films -- the other one is The Student of Prague [1913] -- which would most help me teach the concepts in Sigmund Freud's famous essay "The Uncanny," an early required reading selection.)**

Yet in the end I went with Phantom, for two reasons: (1) It is familiar and easy to follow on the story level, anticipating as it does so many of the monster movies that get made in its wake, and (2) Lon Chaney, its amazing star. With all due respect to German stars Max Schreck and Conrad Veidt, Chaney gets my nod for the most important and talented horror film actor of the silent cinema. He more or less sets the standard for what a truly terrifying yet sympathetic monster should be, paving the way for stars like Boris Karloff . . .

Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) and Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning). Of these two, I think Frankenstein is the better movie -- it's pretty much the best of the early Universal horror films -- but I could not imagine a syllabus without both. Hell, without Nosferatu in the mix, the Tod Browning / Bela Lugosi Dracula is one of only two bona fide vampire movies I've got!

Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) is a low-budget masterpiece produced by the legendary Val Lewton and directed by noir / horror master Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Night of the Demon). I love the psychosexual dynamics of this film -- it makes the connection between sexuality, ethnicity, and horror quite clear. An exotic (and exoticized / fetishized / animalized) foreign woman (Simone Simon) believes that if she is ever sexually intimate with a man, she will turn into a cat and kill her would-be lover. Nevertheless she falls in love with and marries an over-confident, too-rational American man (Kent Smith) who doubts the reality of her ominous beliefs. Insane erotic-horrific antics ensue.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold) is my 1950s creature feature selection. As with Cat People, I chose Creature mainly for its unnerving psychosexual and gender(-ed) dynamics. Although I am personally more partial to 1950s entries Gojira and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there is something tonally and visually special about Creature from the Black Lagoon. The underwater photography sequences in particular are haunting, spooky, and magical -- they get to the heart of the creepy sexuality that drives the whole film. Interspecies lust and sexual terror set in a primeval jungle = thematically rich horror film fun.

Dracula (a.k.a. Horror of Dracula, 1958, dir. Terence Fisher). Great Britain's Hammer Film Productions is such an interesting studio, a scrappy little operation that accomplished much on the strength of tight scripts, economically cheap yet aesthetically bold set design, consistent direction, and the prodigious star talents of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Hammer Films reimagined many key Gothic and horror film staples -- Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the Mummy -- for the late 1950s and 1960s and beyond.

Specifically, Hammer's version of Dracula lends the vampire tale a lurid, feverish edge via full color cinematography and simmering sexuality. It is, simply put, a really fun Gothic horror film. Plus it can be used to discuss remakes and adaptations: after F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and the 1931 Browning/Lugosi Dracula, the Hammer version is probably the next most influential (and best) filmic iteration of Bram Stoker's novel.

I couldn't eliminate either Peeping Tom (1960, dir. Michael Powell) or Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) from the course's required viewing list, so I am making my students watch both of these landmark thrillers over the course of one week (two class meetings).

Obviously, Psycho is the more well-known, canonical choice, a truly great film that every cinema lover should see -- more than once. Although there are certain Hitchcock films (Strangers on a Train, The Birds) I like equally to Psycho and some (Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo) I like even better, Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece clearly holds a well-deserved place at the forefront of his impressive oeuvre. Psycho is also traditionally viewed as an important precursor to the rise of the slasher film in the 1970s.

But Peeping Tom is fucking amazing and I could not imagine leaving it off of this course's film list. So it stays too.

This Psycho - Peeping Tom split decision exemplifies what I call "the Godfather conundrum." A few years back when I was designing a course on 1970s Hollywood cinema, I really wanted to show the students Francis Ford Coppola's overlooked masterwork The Conversation (1974). I also knew that they needed to see The Godfather, because the idea of a 1970s Hollywood cinema class without The Godfather is absurd. And while maybe a third to a half of the students came into the class having seen The Godfather before, the remainder hadn't, so I felt I had to ensure that everybody saw the historically more significant film that time around. And due to The Godfather's extraordinary length, I didn't feel right asking the students to watch both Coppola pictures in one week. But for this horror class I'm doubling down on Psycho and the less-seen yet holistically better Peeping Tom.

Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero). This is not only one of my all-time favorite horror movies, it is without a doubt the single most important and influential horror movie of the 1960s. More than any other film, Romero and company's Night of the Living Dead is responsible for raising the acceptable level of onscreen gore, bringing on the nihilism, and showing a whole generation of North American horror auteurs what could be done on a low budget.

As low-budget maestro John Carpenter says of Night of the Living Dead in a 2002 interview, "Everybody who made a low-budget film has been influenced by that movie, every person. Each and every one of us. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t."†

Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento). Really, my whole syllabus is too English-language-o-centric, and omitting influential works by German Expressionists like F.W. Murnau, New Japanese Horror auteurs like Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and even recent "New French Extremity" mind-benders like High Tension and Martyrs really disappoints me. But in the end I chose to favor the North American horror film tradition, so as to foreground interpretive issues (like gender and sexuality) over a more historical account noting lines of directorial influence, etc.

Yet at no point could I ever imagine a horror film class that omitted Dario Argento, the Italian director whose work, along with Mario Bava's, exerted enormous influence on the post-1960s horror movie.†† The only difficult decision was "which film?" In the end I went with Suspiria because, while something like Deep Red speaks more directly to the development of the English-language slasher, Suspiria is more creepy and interesting and supernatural and Gothic. Its stands out from the pack. And its provocatively ambiguous use of point-of-view camera is unsurpassed in global horror cinema.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper). I've already written about how the original Texas Chain Saw is my favorite movie, ever. So let me confine my comments here to the film's role in my class: as a representative of the "slasher" subgenre.

Many critics and film historians contend that Psycho set the basic template for the slasher film, though the work of the Italian giallo directors is probably even more directly germane to the development of this popular subgenre. I like Texas Chain Saw because, along with Black Christmas (dir. Bob Clark), it essentially launched the North American slasher film proper in 1974. So I am focusing on the origins here, rather than the commercial heyday, which comes later, at the very end of the 1970s and the first several years of the '80s.

Yes, screening Chain Saw means I'm not showing other classic slashers like Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes (1977, dir. Wes Craven), Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter), Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Prom Night (1980, dir. Paul Lynch), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981, dir. Steve Miner), or A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven). So many great movies, so little time . . .

The Fly's Seth Brundle sez: "Help me, I'm masticating!"

Videodrome's Max Renn sez: "Long live the new flesh, muthafucka!"

Videodrome (1983, dir. David Cronenberg) is included because Cronenberg is the most inventive and original North American horror director and his work all but defines what it means to do "body horror." I have on-again off-again considered screening his remake of The Fly (1986) instead, but there is going to be a Cronenberg film and it will be hard to pry me away from Videodrome.

I have been occasionally conflicted about this choice. Videodrome is one of my personal favorite films, period. In the context of my class, I really love its depiction of how violence and eroticism get easily combined and tangled up with each other. Plus the whole premise of the in-movie "Videodrome" show (or signal, ee hee hee) is brilliant -- sexuality as (technologically induced) virus, a theme Cronenberg has been mulling over since his early short films in 1969.

Yet I have a feeling that my students might enjoy The Fly more. Videodrome is like a fervent, macabre manifesto whereas The Fly is more polished and plot-driven.‡ In The Fly, the passion is there but it is sublimated into the love affair between Seth (Jeff Goldblum) and Veronica (Geena Davis). Videodrome assaults its viewer with fourth-wall-breaking scenes of grotesque yet metaphorical sexviolence -- and shows us its depraved dystopia though the eyes of Max Renn (James Woods), a misogynistic, perverted, profiteering scumbag.

Alternatively, The Fly presents us with the slow, horrifying bodily disintegration of a basically decent if overreaching man. The horror consists of seeing him lose his humanity and become a vile insect-monster. The Fly's production values are much higher, and the plot way less twisty and ambiguous, than Videodrome's. While Videodrome may actually be the more cerebral (that is, thematically opaque) of the two, it nevertheless possesses a dark, nihilistic psychosexual streak that makes it more horrifying, if a bit puzzling and confusing as well. (I think I just talked myself back into sticking with Videodrome.)

Ringu (1998, dir. Hideo Nakata) and The Blair Witch Project (1999, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) show that 1999 was a big year for horror. That year, Ringu started a global craze for New Japanese Horror films and consequently, despite the high quality of The Ring (2002) itself, spawned a ton of dull-assed English-language remakes of said films. Meanwhile, Blair Witch made a squillion dollars as a result of its canny, viral internet marketing craze and launched the found-footage subgenre that thrives to the present day.

Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett) is just a great teen horror movie, comedically and postmodernistically self-aware (like Scream etc.) but more interesting in part because of its focus on female sexuality. Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) would be another strong contender with which to explore this theme, but Ginger Snaps is more contemporary and clever and hip. A solid, intelligent, entertainingly gory horror movie.

The excellent The Babadook (2014, dir. Jennifer Kent) is a personal favorite of mine and should pair well with the previous week's Ginger Snaps, dealing as they both do with issues of coming of age and family melodrama. I like that both films tell female-centered stories. The Babadook is my course's only female-directed film.

Horror often vilifies mothers and maternity by making them monstrous: most mothers who appear in horror movies (like Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Voorhees) are evil to the core. The Babadook reverses that trend, giving us a heroic, brave, determined mother who nevertheless must come to terms with her (family's) dark side. The Babadook fuses horror with melodrama to achieve something really special and interesting and cathartic. A must-see.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012, dir. Drew Goddard). This is not a personal favorite though I've enjoyed it both times I've seen it. It's my example of a postmodern hybrid horror-comedy thing -- that is, a "horror film" in quotes. Also, in large part due to the vigorous cult of Joss Whedon fandom, there has been much recent critical ink spilled on the film, some of which I will use to my advantage in teaching the film to students. It's a fun movie with which to conclude the semester.

Films I most regret leaving out:

• Gojira (1954, dir. Ishiro Honda). Though I wrestled mightily between this and King Kong for my representative of a "classic" monster movie, I was leaning pretty heavily toward Gojira when a colleague helped me see that Creature from the Black Lagoon would be the best "creature feature" I could show. Creature speaks to U.S. imperialism and sexual repression from the inside, whereas Gojira grapples with nuclear-age guilt and trauma from the point of view of its real-world victims (the Japanese). Creature also pairs better with Val Lewton's Cat People in representing Golden Age monster movies. Sorry Gojira!

• Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott), a truly great monster movie that, like Gojira, I had to cut for space reasons. Alien is well-executed on every level and stands as one of the best horror / science fiction movies ever made. Furthermore, this is a film I want to expose more students to because I want to weaken or debunk the myth that James Cameron's Aliens is superior to -- or even quite as good as -- its influential predecessor. Alien is much written about in film criticism so I have good analytical essays on it. But I ran out of room, so no Alien.

• The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers). I love this movie, perhaps too passionately and somewhat irrationally. And while screening it could open up interesting discussions about horror film fandom and historical verisimilitude, its main plotline is too similar to Ginger Snaps to warrant its inclusion. (Cue sad trombone.)

• The Thing from Another World (1951, dir. Christian Nyby) and The Thing (1982, dir. John Carpenter). Fuck yeah! Need I even explain why showing these back-to-back in the same week would be cool? Let me add that I am a big John Carpenter fan and it is disappointing not to have Halloween or especially The Thing on this syllabus. 

• Eyes Without a Face (1959, dir. Georges Franju). After Gojira, this is the exclusion that pains me the most personally. As an instructor, I would say that my omission of any German Expressionist films or more J-Horror films or even Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street is more egregious, but as a fan, the absence of Franju's chilling masterpiece really hurts. I just love this movie a lot and it images stick with me and haunt me like few films' do. 

• The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick). Regular readers know that I am a major Kubrick fiend, and while in the early 2000s I considered The Shining to be one of the master director's lesser works, I am currently of the opinion that the Stephen King adaptation stands as one of Kubrick's best, most enduring efforts. It is also the absolutely perfect film for teaching about the cinematic Gothic (described here). But alas, I will instead ask Cat People, Suspiria, and both Draculas to perform that function in a course too crowded to incorporate The Shining or other great Gothic outings like The Innocents or Crimson Peak.   

• Something -- anything -- by director Wes Craven. Sadly, his early shockers Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes got bumped by Texas Chain Saw for slasher week, Scream was superseded by The Cabin in the Woods for postmodern "horror" week, Freddy Kreuger just got fucked over, and even The People Under the Stairs, which works well (alongside the brilliant Candyman) for teaching about horror movies that explicitly depict racial conflict, got nixed for space reasons. I am so sorry Mr. Craven! 

Candyman sez: "What about me, you white devil?"

Count Orlok sez: "What about me, you dummkopf??"

--
* This is a list (and a course syllabus) I have labored over mightily. It has been difficult for me to winnow down the film choices to fit a roughly fourteen-week semester. Ultimately, there are seventeen required-viewing films included -- I couldn't even trim this thing down to my usual one film per week.
** So deep runs my love for Vampyr and so convinced am I that it makes the perfect companion-piece to Freud's "The Uncanny" that in all the early versions of my horror film class outline, Vampyr figured as the first film. But then last spring I had dinner with film studies colleague Dr. Sid Rosenzweig, who asked me if I was starting off my class with Phantom of the Opera. Once he said it aloud, it seemed startlingly obvious to me that Phantom was indeed the best film with which to launch the course. Thanks Sid!
† From "Interview with John Carpenter and Austin Stoker" videorecorded at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, 25 Jan. 2002. Available as a special feature on the Assault on Precinct 13 "New Special Edition" DVD (Image Entertainment, 2003).
†† Jason Zinoman discusses Bava's and Argento's work and importance in his enthusiastic and informative book Shock Value (Penguin, 2011) pp. 35, 38, 123.
‡ Videodrome is among my top four or five Cronenberg films alongside Shivers, The Brood, Dead Ringers, and Crash.

Review: Escape from New York (1981)

John Carpenter's Escape From New York is one of the most tonally sophisticated, visually iconic, and outright enjoyable dystopian action movies of the 1980s.

During the '80s I was a big-time action movie fan, watching stuff like the Rambo movies (1982, 1985, 1988), the Mad Max movies (1979, 1981, 1985), The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Raw Deal (1986), Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), Die Hard (1988), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Aliens (1986), and Escape 2000 (aka Turkey Shoot, 1982).* To this day I love 1980s-vintage dystopian, near-futuristic action movies, especially low-budget ones like The Road Warrior, Escape From New York, and The Terminator.

Escape From New York lies at the heart of John Carpenter's amazing directorial hot streak stretching from 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 to 1986's Big Trouble in Little China or maybe even 1988's They Live. By general consensus, Carpenter's weakest film of this remarkably fertile period is Escape's immediate predecessor, The Fog (1980) -- a film I personally love and robustly defend. In any case, Escape From New York is a standout Carpenter film from a period when "dark dystopian action film" was a prevalent, competitive genre.

Carpenter has a genius for working within the constraints of a low budget -- in Escape's case, a supposed $6 million. I've written before about how much I love low-budget cinema. I like to see what inventive filmmakers can do on a shoestring. Escape from New York deploys many low-budget cheats, such using radar screen images and atmospheric cockpit footage to help "sell" its model work in the Gulf Fire landing sequence. Yet each time I watch Escape I am reminded of how evocative and rich its film-world feels even though you can "see through" many of the special effects. The low-budget feel of the film perfectly matches and conveys the rag-tag nature of the near-future society it depicts.

Keith Phipps writes that "John Carpenter's Escape From New York took Taxi Driver's urban hellscape and projected it onto a cartoonishly savage future." I concur: Escape From New York haunts me in lasting ways, with its dirty urban setting and grim, moody tone. It also entertains me with its cartoony action-movie touches, like the lamps on the hood of the Duke's car and its rather quotable dialogue.

Yet Escape's cartoonishness does not detract from its darker elements or its lived-in mise-en-scene. As Phipps puts it, Carpenter's dystopian action masterpiece "may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past." It is indeed very postmodern in feel, with a bleak, existential edge that few '80s action movies achieve with this much style and meaning.

As Brian Eggert points out, Escape from New York

comments on how the New York of 1981 has isolated itself to such an extreme that walls, both metaphoric or literal, enclose its inhabitants within the crime-ridden sprawl, itself a symbol for all of America. Carpenter explores a world in which the American Dream has failed, where the increasing crime rates never stopped. In response, America becomes a fascist state and transforms New York into a penal colony. Carpenter's unique dystopian future, set in 1997, exists on the verge of an apocalypse. And though the setting has been enclosed inside of New York Prison's walls, it resembles many post-apocalyptic worlds to follow in cinema.

As a feminist I must mention Escape from New York's most disturbing incidental scene. Using a tracking device to trace the missing President, Snake Plissken descends into the basement of the Fox Theatre. He passes by an area in which three men are manhandling a seemingly inert or unconscious woman. We watch from Snake's point of view as one of the men tears the woman's shirt off, exposing her breasts. We cut to a close-up of Snake, who just walks on by, consulting his scanner. We see and hear nothing of what occurs in the area after Snake leaves (the whole brief scene is eerily quiet and wordless) but imminent rape is clearly implied.

This "incidental rape" scene reminds me of The Road Warrior's very similar scene and of Escape 2000's generally exploitative approach to sexuality. The scene is included to make the film-world seem more harsh and to make Snake look more dark-edged and cruel. He's an antihero; he does nothing to stop the sexual assault. But what, we might ask, of the victim? The film never says.

I can offer no excuse for this. This scene disturbs me. Maybe that's the point -- that it should. But as Karen Valby points out, sexual assault is often misused in television and film as an "easy" go-to device to raise the narrative stakes. This particular scene feels exploitative because we are not encouraged to empathize with the victim -- she is kept silent, anonymous, at a distance. The focus is swiftly returned to Snake, our white male protagonist. The woman's suffering exists to make Snake look more badass.

Adrienne Barbeau, who plays a more compelling and central role as Stevie Wayne in The Fog, is ill-used as Maggie in Escape. Maggie is a one-dimensional, eroticized object whose main role is to be looked at and discussed by men, to be the bearer of the masculine gaze.** The male characters don't even call her by name, they just call her Brain's "squeeze." Her main motivation is to follow Brain around and protect him.

Indeed, most of Carpenter's work tends to be male-centered. This masculine focus, while partially explicable via the writer-director's ties to the action genre, may also explain why his best horror film, The Thing, is so goddamn good. It's Carpenter perfectly in his element, with nary a woman in sight. It is also a Howard Hawks remake. Carpenter is quite Hawksian -- for example, his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is a reworking of and homage to Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo (1959).

However, despite Carpenter's indebtedness to Hawks, and despite the presence of spaghetti western star Lee Van Cleef in the second lead, Escape from New York is not a western. Carpenter infuses western moods and elements and plot structures into Escape but its setting and iconography have more in common with Blade Runner, a science fictional film noir, than they do any western.

Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), whose line about Snake "flying the Gulf Fire over Leningrad" helped inspire William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

Then there's the fuckin' music, composed and performed by Carpenter (with Alan Howarth). Escape from New York's soundtrack rocks, especially its totally badass opening theme.*** Some misguided souls consider keyboard-driven music, especially '80s-era synth-driven music, to be inherently silly or cheesy. What a sad case of affairs for such unfortunates.

For those who either grew up with synth-pop music or have otherwise developed an appreciation for it, Carpenter's early soundtracks, especially those for Halloween and Escape from New York, are absolutely top-notch.

In the end, the appeal of Escape from New York largely hinges on Kurt Russell's brilliant, spot-on portrayal of Snake Plissken. Russell is so goddamn cool as Snake Plissken that I can't really describe it  -- just watch the damn movie.

Or if you prefer campier fare, see one of the other Carpenter-Russell team-ups. Russell's badassery as Plissken is most of what sustains Carpenter's somewhat lesser, not too original, but still enjoyable follow-up Escape from L.A. (1996) -- a film which has its defenders. Hell, despite its myriad pleasures -- and they are many -- Russell is the funniest and most entertaining thing in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) too. His Jack Burton is one of the great American screen protagonists and is the main thing that makes that crazy-ass movie work.

As for Snake Plissken and the fine first movie built around him, if you enjoy male-centered action-movie fun set in a bleak, grungy, existential future -- 1997 as imagined by 1982 -- then check out the artfully constructed, action-packed Escape from New York.

"Call me Plissken."

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* Like most young people, I had rather catholic tastes as an eighth grader, which may explain my appreciation for 1980s action cinema (though it cannot fully explain my ongoing love for Oz-sploitation classic Turkey Shoot). I should also mention Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979), a film that properly belongs to this group but that I did not see until the mid-2000's. I additionally recommend Hill's under-seen Streets of Fire (1984).
** I am using terminology introduced by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her famous, accurate essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," originally published in Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975) pp. 6-18. Mulvey argues that the default gaze of Hollywood cinema, emerging as it does from a patriarchal society and sexist film industry, is gendered masculine. That is, our cinema is sexist, depicting masculine things (like male characters) as active drivers-forward of narrative and feminine things (like women's bodies) as passive objects best suited for erotic display.
*** You simply must check out John Carpenter's recent live studio recording of the Escape from New York theme song, plus its cool video:

Best Movie Ever: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Leatherface family sez: "Join us for dinner!"

Tobe Hooper's low-budget rural horror masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is my single favorite movie of all time. It appears on every iteration of my personal "Top Films" list and is my go-to answer to the question "What is your favorite movie?" 

I love low-budget films and I love horror films. My love for low-budget film aesthetics dates back to my 1990s independent film fandom, spurred by stuff like Slacker (1991), El Mariachi (1992), Clerks, Go Fish (both 1994), and Gummo (1997) but also via the influence of John Waters, whose films I started watching voraciously in the late '90s and 2000s.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the pivotal film that won me over to the horror genre. I had seen Halloween and a few other slashers (including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and the incredibly weird Sleepaway Camp) before I first watched Tobe Hooper's masterpiece in 2002. I enjoyed those films, especially Halloween, but Texas Chain Saw really showed me what a powerful horror film can do.*

There is something special, something charged and electric and more about TCM. I don't like the phrase "this movie transcends its genre" because that is both technically impossible (if it is a genre film, it is a genre film and it ain't transcending anything) as well as insulting to whichever genre you happen to be talking about. Genre-film lovers should never use that phrase.

I will say instead that TCM is a superlative example of the rural slasher genre. Along with Peeping Tom, Psycho (both 1960), Black Christmas (1974), and Deep Red (1975), TCM helps set the template for the "classic" slasher which fully emerges by the time of Black Christmas or surely Halloween (1978).

As far as the specifically rural slasher goes, TCM is the best of the best -- its only close rivals are Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and the intense, well-shot The Descent (2005). Other more distant (but still worthy) runners-up include Motel Hell (1980), Pumpkinhead (1988), Wrong Turn (2003), Wolf Creek (2005), the even better Wolf Creek 2 (2013), and Rob Zombie's underrated Halloween II (2009).**

Despite (or probably because of) its low budget, Texas Chain Saw's camera work is effective and inventive, its mise-en-scene artfully insane. Its performances are all-out. It is tautly edited and incredibly suspenseful. It is, in every aesthetic category, a triumph of scrappy, compelling, no-frills filmmaking.

One of Texas Chain Saw's great strengths is that it trusts its imagery to convey its ideas. The shot compositions and blocking tell the story without the need for dialogue. That said, the dialogue, particularly about the Leatherface family's history in the slaughtering industry ("My family's always been in meat" brags Hitchhiker), is believable as spoken by the characters and simultaneously freighted with deeper thematic implications.

Chain Saw uses many images as "free motifs," that is, as abstract imagery that suggests, rather than outright denotes, meaning. For example, there are several recurring images of circular objects: the sun, the moon, a windmill. To me these suggest cyclical time, prehistoric time, the centripetal energy of the Leatherface family devouring itself. The windmill in particular hints that the Leatherface family is "spinning its wheels" -- see also the generator that endlessly runs, powering nothing. All these circular images rhyme with each other, with certain circular camera movements as when the van pulls into the gas station, and with Leatherface's twirling dance that ends the film. When Sally flees Leatherface, her journey is also circular, from the house to the gas station then back to the house. Circularity abounds.***

Chain Saw's experimental soundtrack contributes much to the film's overall tone of terror. The minimalist score consists of weird pitch-bent tones resembling metal scraping against metal, plus occasional staccato percussion including cymbals and gongs. The diegetic music, especially the plinky little ditty "Fool for a Blonde" by Roger Bartlett is eerie and effective during Hitchhiker's bizarre ride in Jerry's van.

Along this same line, pay close attention to the sound design throughout Texas Chain Saw's opening vignette and opening credits -- it's creepy! -- and note how the radio announcer, whose lengthy report about local grave robbings is important, sound bridges us into the film's first scene in the van.

Hitchhiker sez: "I have this knife -- it's a good knife."

In addition to all its artistic and cinematic virtuosity, I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because it is an important cultural document, an ecstatically truthful reflection of early seventies American culture. Written and shot by college-aged youths in summer 1973, the original TCM captures U.S. malaise during the period of our national post-Watergate "nervous breakdown." According to historian Andreas Killen:

In 1973 America was jolted by three shocks, following on one another in rapid succession. First, the war in Vietnam ended in the first-ever military defeat for the United States. Second, the Watergate cover-up unraveled, and the presidency of Richard Nixon became engulfed in scandal and, by year's end, calls for impeachment. Last but not least, Americans were hit hard by a collapsing economy: 1973 was also the year of the Arab oil embargo and the beginning of the long slide into stagflation that lasted until the 1980s. Any one of these events alone would have challenged America's image of itself; together they shook the national psyche to its very core.†

In short, Chain Saw is a succinct, powerful snapshot of that shakedown of the national psyche. Screenwriter Kim Henkel and director Hooper confirm this interpretation on their DVD commentary, explicitly calling the movie a response to the Vietnam war and the Watergate crisis. While all films carry ideological meanings and can be analyzed as reflections of and responses to the cultural concerns of their time, the 1974 Texas Chain Saw is a particularly rich and multi-layered cultural looking-glass. Embracing the tropes of the just-burgeoning slasher genre, Hooper, Henkel and company commit to their project with abandon, infusing their despair and anger over the loss of life in Vietnam and the lies of Nixon into their depiction of the Leatherface family's impotent yet deadly rage against the privileged teenagers who invade their homeland.

Which is probably why I keep returning to the film in my writing. I advise my film studies students not to write about or critically analyze films they are too close to as fans, and I usually follow that advice myself. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an exception: I have published one article about the film and plan to include more Texas Chain Saw analysis in a chapter of my (slowly) forthcoming book.

In that article of mine, "Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films," I point out that low-budget rural slashers like Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre

present their cannibalistic hillbilly "villains" in extremely sympathetic terms and, due to the emerging conventions of the slasher horror film genre to which they belong, may even present the rural killers as the ultimate "heroes" of their scenarios in a way that a critically acclaimed Hollywood studio film like Deliverance does not attempt.†† 

Indeed, in TCM, the teens who intrude upon the Leatherface family property, especially the males, are presented as insensitive, oblivious jerks who think nothing of entering the Leatherface house uninvited. Even wheelchair-bound Franklin, who has a strange affinity for Hitchhiker and an appropriate sense of foreboding about the threat the rural family represents, is so whiny that he drives his sister Sally -- TCM's protagonist and Final Girl -- to distraction. Franklin is easy for the viewer to pity but hard for most viewers to like. Of all TCM's teens only Sally and maybe Pam are relatable.

Meanwhile, despite his violent, psychotic tendencies, Leatherface in particular is shown to be emotionally vulnerable at certain key moments of the film. His two brothers bully and mistreat him when they're all at home together, and the viewer sees Leatherface's fear and worry after the third teen, Jerry, walks into his house unannounced. This provocative, finely nuanced ambiguity about who we're supposed to feel for and root for places The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the highest echelon of successful horror movies, alongside other masterpieces like Peeping Tom, Psycho, and King Kong.

Leatherface sez: "I'm frightened and upset and deserving of your sympathy."

Beyond singling out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as my personal favorite film, I am also quite serious (if hyperbolic) when I call it the "Best Movie Ever" -- that is, I would definitely place it on any more "objective" Top 100 Films list I had a hand in creating. Like so many canon-generating lists, Entertainment Weekly's is, in my view, disappointingly light on horror movies, including only seven: Psycho (#5), King Kong (#11), Jaws (#18), Rosemary's Baby (#36), Frankenstein (#55), The Shining (#66), and Night of the Living Dead (#79) -- all of which I'd keep.

But where is Nosferatu (1922)? Vampyr (1932)? Halloween (1978)? Videodrome (1983)? Peeping Tom (1960)? Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960)? John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)? Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977)?

John Carpenter sez: "Not a single movie in your Top 100, EW? You're fucking kidding me!"

What about Alien (1979)? Gojira (1954)? Wait a minute, EW, you're really putting The Fucking Dark Knight and Return of the Stupid King on your Top 100 Films list and not Gojira? That's completely fucked up.

Furthermore, any "Top 100 Films" list that excludes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre -- one of the most terrifying, visceral, brilliantly crafted, culturally significant, and influential American horror films ever made -- needs serious revision.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Gunnar Hansen, the original and best Leatherface actor.

Bonus Afterthought: Why the 2003 remake is a worthless abomination. I hate to waste any space at all discussing the 2003 Marcus Nispel Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, a formulaic, boring, worthless piece of shit that completely misses the point of what made the original scary or compelling. Instead of creating truly horrific situations arising from the motivations of the characters, the 2003 version goes for cheap jump scares -- yes, a cat even jumps out at one point -- lots of gore, and improbable, ill-motivated plot twists.

Besides its bland aesthetics, abuse of cattle prod cinema techniques, and crappy plotting, the remake's worst offenses are its decision to give the Leatherface family a surname -- Hewitt, which I guess is supposed to be "funny" -- and to fully explain the hillbilly clan's (hackneyed, pedestrian) behavioral motivations.

You see, in the 2003 version, the Leatherface -- er, Hewitt -- clan kidnaps babies because they want to expand their brood and be parents. Sadly, this is a stupid and disastrous miscalculation on the filmmakers' part, for it makes the Hewitts comprehensible to us in a way that deflates their power to horrify. It completely negates the powerful structural social critique of the original. The 1974 Leatherface clan kills because, as professional meat slaughterers, it is all they have ever known. They have been displaced from their jobs by the advent of the air gun stunner. Their family pride in their profession has been stripped from them, so they just keep on butchering -- now humans instead of cattle.

Their insanity and cannibalism is therefore a logical extension of the core principles of capitalism -- they are simply small business-people doing what they need to to survive.††† The inappropriateness of their choice of raw materials serves as a savage critique of the capitalist system, showing the desperate, horrific lengths to which the economically disenfranchised must resort to survive.

The 2003 version offers no such critique or thematic nuance. It is simply about a family who wants more babies and who isn't horrifying or scary at all. Yawn!

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* Perhaps due to the early influence of Halloween and Texas Chain Saw, to this day I generally prefer slasher and serial killer-based horror films and thrillers. Along this line, let me recommend the raw and terrifying Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and the criminally under-seen Peeping Tom (1960). And, on the horror-comedy side, Man Bites Dog (1992). And of course Hitchcock's classic Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
** The elephant in the room here is Deliverance, which at least indirectly inspired the rural horror slasher cycle and the figure of the monstrous hillbilly. But that film itself is not precisely a horror film. It's more of a dark male melodrama with higher artistic pretensions than most slashers. Psycho also (again) sets an important precedent for TCM via the rural locale of the Bates Motel. Rural locales, from Dracula's castle to Night of the Living Dead's farmhouse to Them!'s California desert, pervade the horror film.
*** I noticed this circle motif due to reading Christopher Sharrett's "The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Sharrett says some really smart and insightful stuff in that indispensable article, found in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, Scarecrow Press 2004).
† Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (Bloomsbury, 2006) p. 2.
†† Carter Soles, "Sympathy for the Devil" in Ecocinema Theory and Practice (ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, Routledge 2013) p. 237.
††† This idea comes from Robin Wood, in his "An Introduction to the American Horror Film." also found in Planks of Reason (Scarecrow Press 2004). 

Review: The Fog (1980)

Hal Holbrook as Father Malone in The Fog, John Carpenter's underrated 
supernatural revenge thriller.  

I am a major John Carpenter fan. He is an enormously talented and consistent genre filmmaker whose string of 1970s and 1980s films, including Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Halloween (1978), Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Starman (1984), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and They Live (1988), establish him as one of the key figures of the Hollywood Renaissance. However, due to his somewhat lower budgets and propensity to stick to "low" genres like horror, action, and science fiction, he often gets short shrift in accounts of this uniquely fertile period in American filmmaking.*

Carpenter's revenge-of-ghosts thriller The Fog was a somewhat troubled production, requiring extensive reshoots late in the process and receiving mixed reviews upon its release in early 1980. But it fared okay at the box office and is by no means despised, just somewhat overlooked, especially in comparison to the bigger hits that bracket it.

I am a pretty big fan of The Fog, rating it my third or fourth favorite Carpenter film overall, behind Assault, The Thing, and Halloween. I feel great love for the Carpenter / Kurt Russell collaborations Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China, yet I confess that I re-watch The Fog far more often than I do either of those two pictures. I probably even re-watch it more frequently than I do Halloween these days.** Why do I enjoy The Fog so much? Let me explain.

Darwin Joston, who played the second lead in Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, makes a cameo appearance as medical examiner Dr. Phibes in The Fog. 

Like The Thing, Carpenter's 1982 career masterpiece, The Fog is a true ensemble film, and both the specific individuals involved and their onscreen performances here are absolutely superior. We're talking about Carpenter regulars Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Loomis, and Adrienne Barbeau, plus legendary performers Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook, and John Houseman making impressive late-career appearances (though the latter only appears in a very brief cameo, essentially introducing the film). As if that weren't enough, Carpenter himself makes a cameo in front of the camera as church handyman Bennett, something he rarely ever does. His line delivery is not terrific, but it's neat to see him in there. And his early scene with Father Malone is the only one in the film in which the performances (specifically Carpenter's) are anything less than stellar.

Indeed, like Jaws 2 or other films of the 1970s, The Fog's more relaxed moments of character development -- which it is unafraid to embrace at length, allowing the movie to "breathe" in ways few post-1980s mainstream genre films manage -- are especially good, and feel especially "real." I know the word "real" is an extremely subjective, slippery, and historically contingent term to use in reference to complex storytelling media like movies. All films are fiction films, and none -- not even documentaries -- represent true, lived reality with particularly great fidelity. So maybe the adjective I'm looking for here is "lived-in," an appearance of comfortable, easy familiarity that connotes psychological depth and emotional richness using only a few briefly sketched details. The best example of this from The Fog (though there are many, including every conversation between Nancy Loomis and Janet Leigh) is the scene between Nick and Elizabeth at Nick's house in Antonio Bay.

One of my favorite scenes in The Fog: Nick (Tom Atkins) and Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) discuss her drawings and their lives in a wonderfully natural and intimate sequence. 

This naturalness or lived-in-ness carries over into the film's brilliant use of locations, especially the lighthouse from which Stevie Wayne's radio show broadcasts nightly. Carpenter's use of actual northern California exteriors really pays off in The Fog -- the film looks like few other Hollywood productions do solely on this basis. The choice to shoot at least partially in northern Cal subtly evokes that other uncanny thriller associated with the region, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). By saying this I do not mean to compare The Fog to Vertigo in terms of artistic accomplishment, emotional impact, or overall quality, for in all these areas, Hitchcock's film is superior. I simply mean to point out that Carpenter uses his locations very well. They lend a visual richness and depth to The Fog.

Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) hikes down the stairs to her lighthouse radio station. This exterior was shot on location on the northern California coast. 

The Fog also does a lovely job paying homage to other films and narrative traditions that have come before. As I've said, The Fog's scenery vaguely reminds me of the locales of Vertigo: Antonio Bay evokes the highway leading to the redwood forests and Father Malone's church substitutes for the Spanish mission. Beyond that, Janet Leigh's presence in this film obviously recalls Psycho. The film's climactic showdown in Father Malone's chapel, with our ensemble of heroes fighting off murderous ghosties coming in through the windows, is surely a deliberate callback to similar scenes in Night of the Living Dead. And Stevie Wayne's concluding admonition to "Look for the fog!" is a direct echo of The Thing from Another World's final line, "Watch the skies!" Lastly, The Fog's whole central narrative arc about vengeful, supernatural creatures emerging from the sea to kill a bunch of clueless townspeople evokes, well, every scary story about hook-handed murderers you've ever heard around a campfire.

Indeed, Houseman's opening pre-credits vignette, depicting just such a story being told to children around a campfire, makes clear that The Fog knows it is treading well-worn narrative ground here, revealing that its main purpose is to have us sit back and enjoy the ride while it offers us an occasional scare accompanied by a nudge and a wink. I think that this knowingness, the film's touch of intentional camp, is one of the central pleasures to be had in viewing The Fog.

Sandy (Nancy Loomis) and Kathy (Janet Leigh) discuss the curse that has fallen upon their town with the gloomy, inconsolable Father Malone.

Along this line, the film's greatest triumph is the casting and performance of Hal Holbrook as Father Malone. In contrast to the scenes with the rest of the cast, none of the scenes involving Malone feel "lived-in" or real, but rather hyperbolically melodramatic and symbolically overdetermined. If everybody else in Antonio Bay is going about their daily lives in a relatively pedestrian way, Malone feels like he has been dropped into the proceedings from the set of a histrionically overcharged morality play. However incongruous this may sound as I write it, trust me: Malone's every scenery chewing moment is absolutely delightful. Malone is both the moral center of the town (and the film) and the most entertaining single element to be found in The Fog.

The only elements that compete with Malone for sheer entertainment value are some of the juicy murders committed by the film's verbally reticent sea-ghosts.

[Note: This next paragraph contains SPOILERS so if you want to avoid them, skip down past the screenshot of the Antonio Bay coastline.]

As Halloween aptly demonstrates, John Carpenter knows how to stage thrilling, horrific-but-not-too-gory death scenes. As with Halloween, in The Fog there are relatively few actual killings (only six people die) but most of these folks' final moments are pretty memorable. The best and most brutal deaths are the first ones, on board the ill-fated trawler Sea Grass, but my personal favorite killing is that of over-confident, wisecracking weather reporter Dan (Charles Cyphers) -- the buildup to that particular death is priceless. And as with the little girl murdered by gangsters early on in Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog demonstrates that Carpenter is unafraid to brutally kill off innocent, good-hearted, sympathetic characters we care about in order to raise the stakes. The deaths of Dan and Mrs. Kobritz are the best examples of this.

Mrs. Kobritz's last stand. 

Antonio Bay at twilight, an example of The Fog's top-notch scenery and cinematography and a signal that "the coast is clear" regarding SPOILERS in this review. 

Discussing The Fog's killing scenes brings to mind the film's one possible weakness, the element that motivated its eleventh-hour reshoots and serves as a key criticism for its detractors: its somewhat inconsistent tone. Most of the explicit parts of The Fog's murder scenes were added late and feel more slasher-ish than uncannily ghost-like. The aforementioned character-development scenes, like those between Nick and Elizabeth, feel more like they belong in Hal Ashby's Shampoo than they do in a John Carpenter-directed horror film. Contrasting with both of these more "realistic" elements are the supernatural, glowing fog and the ghosts it brings with it, which are uncanny and creepy but not truly very shocking or scary. For some viewers, these three different tones may not cohere well or add up to anything particularly impactful by the film's last reel.

Yet for me, The Fog's disparate elements weave together well, aided by Father Malone's relentless hammering of the vile motivations behind the revenge plot and the film's frequent, highly adept use of cross-cutting to suggest simultaneity and thematic linkage between its various story strands.  

In sum, The Fog is a glorious mishmash of casting choices, genre conventions, and film references that somehow jells in a way that really works for me. Is it the scariest ghost story you'll ever see on screen? No, not by a long shot.*** Is it John Carpenter's best film? No, not that either. But is it full of self-aware pleasures, superb cinematography, (mostly) lived-in performances, and a few fun scares? Absolutely. Is it worth your time? I'd say so.

Father Malone sez: "We're all murderers!"

Bonus afterthought: I have never seen the 2005 remake of The Fog and never plan to -- you're joking, right? 

UPDATE 8/30/2015: This io9 list names The Fog as a "devastatingly beautiful" horror film.

UPDATE 5/25/2016: Enjoy Guillermo Del Toro's appreciative series of tweets about John Carpenter.

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* By Hollywood's standards, "low-budget" means around $6 million or less. Carpenter's Halloween was made for $325,000 and The Fog was reportedly made for approximately $1 million. For more information about the Hollywood Renaissance, see my review of Bonnie and Clyde.

** Halloween is a big movie for me, because it is the film my younger brother used to lure me into horror film fandom in the first place, and it is surely the John Carpenter film I have seen the greatest number of times by far. It will always maintain a special place in my viewing history and my heart, even if there are other horror films (such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Videodrome) and John Carpenter films (especially Assault on Precinct 13, my very favorite) that I enjoy more than I do Halloween. It may also be that once I saw Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) and realized that Carpenter stole most of Halloween's innovative visual ideas from that earlier slasher, my appreciation for Halloween was somewhat diminished.

*** That distinction surely belongs to Kairo (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) or maybe The Innocents (1961, dir. Jack Clayton).