Halloween

I never saw John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) at a young, impressionable age so it never imprinted on my psyche like The Birds (1963), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Jaws (1975), which continue to this day to creep me out because they make me regress instantly to the little kid who saw them through fingers barely covering my eyes. That being said, Halloween is still an unsettling experience because Carpenter created such a well-crafted scare machine.

And he gets us right from the start as we see the world literally from the point-of-view of a young Michael Myers (Will Sandin) as he spies on older teenage sister Judith (Sandy Johnson). Dean Cundey’s flawless steadicam work creates a sense of unease as it glides smoothly through the Myers house. In a nice bit we even see Michael put on a mask before he brutally kills his sister. The real punch to the gut comes when Carpenter cuts from Michael’s P.O.V. to an omniscient angle as we see his parents arrive outside the house just as the boy emerges with a bloody knife. The mask is pulled off to see the slightly blank, slightly surprised expression on the child’s face. I don’t know how Carpenter got that expression from the boy, but it is a fantastically complex mix of emotions (or lack thereof) that plays across his face.

The film jumps from 1963 to 1978 and it’s a dark and stormy night as Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) drives to a psychiatric hospital in Smith’s Grove, Illinois to take Michael to another facility. There’s this great shot of several patients wandering the grounds in the middle of the night. What are they doing there? We’re barely able to ponder this when Michael suddenly appears, commandeers the car and like that he is on his way back home to Haddonfield.

I love how Carpenter is confident enough of a filmmaker, even this early on in his career, to show Michael (Nick Castle) in broad daylight, like the initial, over-the-shoulder shot of him observing Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she walks down the street. Every time he pops up, it is unsettling in the way he almost casually appears, like when Laurie spots him across the street from the school standing behind the station wagon he stole, almost defiantly as if daring her to call attention to his presence. And then, after a few looks, he disappears. Michael prowls the neighborhood in that car, driving by Laurie and her friends who seem blissfully unaware except for her who senses that something isn’t right. The creepiest shot of these daytime sequences is when Laurie and Annie (Nancy Kyes) see Michael down the street, standing by a hedge. There is something disconcerting about a killer like Michael being so brazenly visible during the day despite Loomis and the police looking for him.

The contributions of producer and co-writer Debra Hill can’t be underestimated enough as evident in the scene where Laurie and her friends, Annie and Lynda (P.J. Soles), walk and talk about boys and babysitting – mundane things that pretty much anyone can relate to and this humanizes these characters. We start to get to know them as their distinct personalities surface. They’re not just cardboard stereotypes to be senselessly killed off later on in the film. When it does happen their deaths have more of an impact because we’ve come to identify with these characters, even care about them. This is certainly the case with Laurie whom we spend the most time with and who comes across as the most sympathetic.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie just right. She’s not naïve or entirely innocent (we see her smoking a joint with Annie), but there is definitely something good about her. She lacks experience because of her youth and this fateful night is a coming-of-age of sorts for her, which Curtis conveys so well. There’s a nice exchange between Laurie and Annie as they drive around town. They talk about the upcoming school dance and Laurie admits that she doesn’t have the courage to ask someone even though she admits to liking a specific boy. This is a telling scene that sheds light on her character. Laurie may be something of a bookish wallflower (in these early scenes she always seems to be carrying around her school books), but she has aspirations to be more assertive. It is this wish fulfillment that gets us to empathize with her.

Donald Pleasence hits all the right notes as the obsessed Dr. Loomis. He is Ahab and Michael is his great white whale that he is compelled to pursue come hell or high water. Having spent years with Michael he knows just how evil the man is as he lays it out for Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers): “No reason, no conscience, no understanding. Even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.” And this is from Michael at six years of age! Loomis tried to help the boy for eight years and then realizing it was no use, spent another seven making sure Michael never left the institution because, as he puts it so well, “I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.” Pleasence delivers this beautifully written monologue brilliantly; transforming what could have so easily been perfunctory exposition dialogue into a chilling account of just what is stalking the tree-lined neighborhoods of Haddonfield. The veteran actor doesn’t oversell it, resisting the urge to go over the top with the role. When Loomis loses his cool it’s with good reason. This speech conveys all we need to know about Michael in the intervening years from ‘63 to ‘78, which was needlessly fleshed out in Rob Zombie’s remake. I also like how Pleasence shows that Loomis is scared of Michael because he knows how evil the man is and what he’s capable of. This helps humanize the good doctor. He’s not some stereotypical infallible hero, but someone trying to do the best he can under trying circumstances.

Carpenter and Hill tell us just enough to let our imagination run with it, allowing us to fill in the gaps ourselves and in doing so be active participants in the narrative – something that countless imitators, wannabes, and even subsequent sequels often failed to do, instead of spelling things out and upping the gory body count. In comparison, Carpenter’s Halloween is downright subtle, like when Michael kills a neighborhood dog. All we hear is the poor animal whine and then a shot of Michael gently dropping its limp body to the ground. There’s no need to rub our noses in it as Carpenter conveys all we need to know through an economy of style. Another haunting shot (one of many) is when a little boy named Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews), whom Laurie is babysitting, spots Michael across the street carrying Annie’s dead body around the front of a house at night. Perhaps it is the voyeuristic aspect that makes it so spooky or it’s the matter-of-fact way Michael goes about his business.

There are many reasons why Halloween still holds up after all these years. It’s more than being an expertly crafted, efficient scare machine. I think it also taps into some pretty primal fears that most of us can relate to – it took a ruthless serial killer and set him loose in an average, all-American suburb – symbols of safe haven in the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly, with this film they weren’t so safe anymore. As a result, Halloween helped spawn a whole slew of suburban slasher movies, but few, if any, have stood the test of time like Carpenter’s film.

John Carpenter Week: The Fog

“It was very shocking to go from a movie that was as easy to make as Halloween to a movie that seemed to be simple on the surface when you read it and that was in the end a much more difficult film to pull off. It was quite a humbling experience.” – John Carpenter

After the phenomenal success of Halloween (1978), there was a lot of speculation as to what John Carpenter would do next. A sequel? Another slasher film? He confounded all expectations by working in television on a movie-of-the-week entitled, Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), and a mini-series biopic (1979) about Elvis Presley, starring a then-up-and-coming Kurt Russell. His next proper feature film would be an atmospheric ghost story entitled, The Fog (1980). At the time, it was considered an odd choice for Carpenter as that particular sub-genre was not all that popular or commercially successful. After all the good will he enjoyed with the underdog status of Halloween, the knives were out when it came to The Fog as he faced criticism for conducting reshoots to add more gore. This was done reportedly because the studio was not happy with his first cut of the film. Critics savaged the end product as betraying its own logic and for not being all that scary. It underperformed at the box office, especially in comparison to Halloween. However, for me, The Fog has only improved over time, despite its flaws, and deserves to be rediscovered and reconsidered as one of Carpenter’s better films.


The film opens with a tell-me-a-scary-story prologue that Carpenter would use again in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) as an old man (John Houseman) tells a group of children about a small clipper ship known as the Elizabeth Dane that was beset by a thick fog many years ago. The ship’s crew saw a light and mistook it for a lighthouse and crashed into the rocks. All the men aboard perished. It has been said that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the ship’s crew will rise from the depths and will exact their revenge on the ones that led them to their deaths.


And with that appropriate mood setter, Carpenter proceeds to introduce the more significant inhabitants of the town. There’s the alcoholic pastor Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) of the local church that harbors a horrible secret. He finds the diary of his deceased grandfather with a rather ominous entry that reads, “midnight ‘til one belongs to the dead. Good Lord deliver us.” Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) is a sexy late night disc jockey whose show runs for an hour starting at midnight, which just so happens to be the time when the fog appears and the attacks happen. There’s Dan O’Bannon (Charles Cyphers) who uses the weather reports to flirt with Stevie. They’re two disembodied voices that will probably never meet. Meanwhile, Mayor Williams (Janet Leigh) is busy organizing a celebration for the town’s centennial with the help of her assistant Sandy (Nancy Loomis). Finally, Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) picks up a female hitchhiker named Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) on the way into town.


As Antonio Bay celebrates its 100th anniversary, not so coincidentally, the fog has decided to return and with it the crew of the Elizabeth Dane. Their first victims are three fishermen on a trawler. Carpenter does his best Val Lewton imitation as he uses shadows and the darkness to create an oppressive mood of dread as the three men are quickly murdered. Nick is friends with one of the men and once he discovers their bodies, decides to look into their murders with Elizabeth in tow. The Fog actually starts off as a mystery as the protagonists try to figure out why the crew of the Elizabeth Dane have come back and what it is they want. We learn that the town was founded on greed and now the past sins of their forefathers are coming back to haunt them.

The Fog is a master class on how to create an ominous atmosphere through cinematography and musical score. Carpenter teamed up again with director of photography Dean Cundey, whom he worked with previously on Halloween. They make great use of the widescreen frame, like the shot of the camera looking down the many steps that lead to the lighthouse where Stevie broadcasts her radio show. You really get a sense of how remote the location is. There’s also a creepy shot of an overcast sky with the fog slowly encroaching on a dock in almost monochromatic colors. The fog takes on an otherworldly look thanks to a glowing effect that Carpenter employs in order to reinforce its supernatural attributes. Cundey’s lighting is particularly effective in making the fog sequences so creepy. It can’t be overstated just how important his contributions were to the films he made with Carpenter.


There are all kinds of small, but memorably unnerving moments, like the mysterious piece of driftwood that Stevie’s little boy finds and that spontaneously leaks sea water only to then burst into flames and yet shows no signs of damage. There’s a scene where an apprehensive Elizabeth is alone in a room with the corpse of one of the fishermen and we see the body stirring slightly under a white sheet in the background while she stands in the foreground unaware of what is happening. Then, Carpenter cuts to a close-up shot of a hand reaching out from under the sheet and grabbing a scalpel, all to the filmmaker’s own unsettling minimalist musical score. Another spooky moment is a shot of the fog rolling in at the beginning of night. It glows white in contrast to the red of the sky as the sun disappears for the day. Only Carpenter could make a fog bank look scary as evident from the unnecessary and bland remake that failed miserably on every level.


The cast acquits themselves admirably with Adrienne Barbeau being a real stand-out as the D.J. with a sexy voice. Much like Laurie in Halloween, Stevie Wayne is a resourceful woman and not some damsel in distress. In The Fog, it is the male characters that are ineffectual and get killed off fairly easily with the notable exception of Nick who saves Stevie’s son at one point. The town even has a female mayor! For a short while, Tom Atkins, who plays Nick, was a favorite of Carpenter’s, and he cast him as the unlikely male lead in both this film and Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). He comes across as frumpier, less gruff version of Nick Nolte but an effective leading man nonetheless.


After the surprise success of Halloween, Carpenter and his producer and co-screenwriter Debra Hill wanted to follow it up with another horror film and were interested in doing something different – not another slasher film. In 1977, they were in England visiting Stonehenge and noticed a fog bank that “was pulsating as if something was in it,” remembered Hill. Carpenter felt like that would be an ideal situation for a ghost story. They soon began writing the screenplay and decided to explore the notion of revenge because it was usually a strong motivating factor for ghosts.

 Carpenter was inspired by E.C. Comics like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror that he enjoyed in his youth and that sometimes involved rotting corpses coming back to life for revenge. The story itself was inspired by an actual incident that took place in Santa Barbara, California during the 1700 or 1800s that caused a ship to crash and only to be hijacked for its gold with the help of a fog. Both Carpenter and Hill also drew inspiration from literary sources. She was influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe and his knack for exploring fear of the unknown, while Carpenter was inspired by the notion of amorphous evil and “something from beyond” from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

Carpenter and Hill struck a two-picture deal with a small but promising company called AVCO-Embassy who gave them a $1 million budget, significantly more than what they had to work with on Halloween. Carpenter shot the film in the Point Reyes Station area of Marin County in California, which he found while driving up the coast with Hill stopping at every place that had a lighthouse. When they got to Port Reyes, saw the building and found out that it was the second foggiest point in the United States, they knew they had found their location. Carpenter found the fog very difficult to control as it was never the same from scene to scene. During many of the outdoor scenes they were unable to shoot because it was too windy. To do the indoor fog, they would tent in the entire set and make sure no air got in so it would not blow away. The production had different machines for a specific effect, like using a small, hand-held fog machine to squirt it under a door and keep it close to the floor, and large machine to cover a big area. In addition, long shots of the fog in the distance were done by combining background plates with the fog optically. Carpenter found it very time consuming getting the right color, the right density and making sure the fog wasn’t too slow or too fast.

The Elizabeth Dane ghost ship was an actual one anchored in Long Beach, California. The film’s art directors put their own sails on it and surrounded it with fog machines on boats, on the ship itself and on the dock. They also used miniatures, like the scene where Nick saves Stevie’s son at the beach house and the fog overtakes the place. The production built a miniature of the house in black on a soundstage and then had the fog come up on it in scale. The actors were then combined optically.


During the editing phase, editor Tommy Lee Wallace “didn’t have a great feeling” about the footage Carpenter had shot,” and thought that “we did okay.” Carpenter realized that the film wasn’t working and when they screened it for the studio, the executives didn’t think it was scary enough. His original concept for the film relied almost entirely on mood and atmosphere for effect but he went back and added “visceral shock” when his commercial instincts told him that something was missing. He was originally interested in doing an understated horror film with a “brooding atmospheric feel to it,” but didn’t feel like it could compete with films like Alien (1979) and Phantasm (1979). With only three months to go before it would be released, the studio gave Carpenter money to shoot additional scenes, including the title sequence, the climactic top-of-the-lighthouse sequence and reshooting the trawler deaths making them more explicit. The initial version also had a slower pace to it and so he added more energy. In addition, he re-did the sound as the original sound-effects track wasn’t very good and his score, by his own admission, “didn’t work and was very heavy-handed.”


Predictably, the knives came out when film critics came to review The Fog. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “But as The Fog rolls on, it dissipates its mystery, shock and credibility.” In his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold wrote, “an acceptable scene-setter, Carpenter reveals glaring inadequacies as a storyteller.” Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars but felt that the film was “made with style and energy, but it needs a better villain.” Finally, Cinefantastique magazine’s David Bartholomew wrote, “I feel a lingering disappointment in The Fog because the movie isn’t more than it is, or hasn’t broken any new ground … But as it is, The Fog is a frisky, efficient and scary movie in a genre overloaded with ineptly lifeless pictures.”

Carpenter does a good job of spacing out the attacks and spends time letting us get to know the key inhabitants of Antonio Bay so that we care about what happens to them later on. For example, there’s the recurring interludes between Dan and Stevie where they coyly flirt with each other like something out of a classic Hollywood film. The Fog is a slow burn film as it gradually builds up the tension and the scares to an exciting finale. Carpenter often likes to explore how a group deals with a threat in his films and so this one features yet another fascinating ensemble cast of characters. With this film, he has crafted quite an effective ghost story that is a triumph of mood and atmosphere. He employs every trick in the book to make the fog something to fear. This is done largely because of what exists within it – the unstoppable, vengeful ghosts of the Elizabeth Dane. They aren’t really evil per se – they exist solely to punish the town for what they did 100 years ago. They only want to right an injustice. Carpenter examines the hypocrisy of a town celebrating an anniversary based on a foundation of lies. This a theme that he would go on to explore several times, most notably in Escape from New York (1981), They Live (1988), and Vampires (1998).

SOURCES

Boulenger, Gilles. John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness. Silman-Jones Press. 2003.

Fox, Jordan R. “Carpenter: Riding High on Horror.” Cinefantastique. Summer 1980.

Scanlon, Paul. “The Fog: A Spook Ride on Film.” Rolling Stone. June 28, 1979.

“Tales from the Mist – Inside The Fog.” Director Jeffrey Schwarz. The Fog DVD. MGM 2002.