For better and for worse, Halloween is the front from which all modern slashers spring. It’s not that it was the first, but it was the most overwhelmingly popular of its era (earning $70 million dollars on a $300,000 budget), and managed to bring a bit of cultural cache to the burgeoning, but much-maligned, slasher genre.
Following its release, it was so widely imitated that some of its innovations became rote, but few (even its own sequels) seem to grasp why it works. The key, often-forgotten fact about Halloween is that it was a collaboration between John Carpenter and writer/producer Debra Hill. Hill who wrote most of the dialogue, creating reasonably believable teenage characters who happened to have sex—without their inevitable deaths being the conservative moral statement of later movies. Carpenter’s understated camerawork and the blank-slate, force-of-nature, William Shatner-lookin’ killer meld into a perfect adversary for Jamie Lee Curtis’ level-headed Laurie Strode, representing the dangers of teenage angst or, really, whatever you care to project onto that white mask.
Where to stream: Shudder, The Roku Channel, Hoopla, Redbox, IndieFlix
Comentarios recientes