But it was, as I said, temporary. At first I couldn't decide whether to open it up to all Asian horror movies, or specifically to focus on J-Horror. And then ultimately I decided I wasn't feeling either of them.
So instead I am going to watch every Halloween movie.
You probably know, if you are a regular reader of this blog, how I like completism. I've scheduled several series to complete the filmographies of certain directors, or in one case, to finish watching all the best picture winners.
Well, I'm not very close to completism on the Halloween series, having seen only three of the 13 films available. But I can get there with a month of concentrated viewing.
I started last night with the original Halloween, the only of the three I've already seen that I'll rewatch for this series. It had been a long time since I'd seen this classic and it was worth a fresh viewing. I saw (and really liked) Halloween III: Season of the Witch only earlier this year, and I saw (and didn't care for) Rob Zombie's 2007 remake only two years ago. No need to rewatch either of those again so soon, or in the case of Zombie's film, ever.
But that still leaves me with Halloween II (original), Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween II (remake), Halloween (second remake), Halloween Kills and finally (deep breath) Halloween Ends.
At first I thought I also had to consider some Freddy vs. Jason movies, until I remembered that Freddy and Jason are from different franchises. (If I don't totally regret doing this, I could at some point watch the remaining Friday the 13th movies and Nightmare on Elm Street movies.)
Am I setting myself up for developing a considerable aversion to these movies, very quickly?
Possibly.
But to at least give myself a break on the blog side of things, I won't write about each individually, grouping them together by two or three films -- or possibly more, depending on how it all fits into my schedule.
The last three movies, from director David Gordon Green, have defied my recent tendency to try to see as much from the new release landscape as possible. But when I missed the first of his films, I intentionally skipped the second and third, which was maybe one of my indications that it was time for a project like this one, just to get fully caught up in case/when there is another.
I likely wouldn't have gone out of sequence at all except that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was assigned to me as part of a Flickchart viewing series back in January, and as it so happens, it doesn't involve Michael Myers and is really only adjacent to the Halloween narrative, existing in its universe more than involving its characters and storylines. And then of course the sequence is broken a couple times by remakes, which was why I was clear to see Zombie's first remake without seeing all the proper sequels to the original Halloween.
From here on out, though, we'll go in order, and I'll start with some thoughts on the original Halloween, watched last night for my third time overall.
The first time I saw Halloween, probably sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, I thought "Yes, well, a pretty typical slasher flick, albeit one of the first of its kind." The second time I saw it -- almost exactly 15 years ago, on August 28, 2009 -- I was overwhelmed by its perfectly 70s stylings. I fell in love with John Carpenter's camera traveling the streets of a suburban Illinois neighborhood, with all its olive greens and other woodsy colors, and the fact that the camera itself moved like someone watching Laurie Strode and her friends was the perfect combination of the era in which the film was made and a certain intentionality born of authorial voice.
Armed with that viewing recently in mind, I gave Halloween 4.5 stars on Letterboxd a few years later when I added all my films to Letterboxd and assigned them retroactive star ratings.
I still think the extra half star might be warranted just to acknowledge this film's place in the history of the horror genre and of cinema in general, but on this viewing I was struck by how basic it is. I know that sounds like a negative descriptor in almost every context, but I think more than anything, what I mean is, there are simply no frills on this thing. It barely squeaks over 90 minutes and at this stage in the history of the serial killer, there is nothing clever or particularly sadistic about Michael Myers as a killer. It's like he's the standard model of a serial killer, and every one who would come after him would contain bells and whistles and upgrades that cost extra.
This is not a bad thing. In 1978, the serial killer genre was brand new, though I suppose a real genre expert would probably tell me all the ways Halloween is indebted to other movies that came before. But at this point you didn't need killers to be adept with a clever turn of phrase to accompany a kill, something that talkative Freddy Krueger always did, but the silent Jason Voorhees never did -- to touch on the two other iconic franchise-carrying killers I've already mentioned in this piece. I suppose Freddy was his own variation that took things down a different path while Jason was more of a Michael Myers clone, only with a more supernatural ability to be anywhere and everyone and to recover from seemingly fatal blows. (Though I don't doubt we'll get there with Michael Myers later in this series. In fact, he survives plenty of fatal blows in just this first film.)
I do think Carpenter's filmmaking is good, but maybe never more so than those opening scenes where his camera approximates the POV of a killer. The filmmaking in the extended climax set between two homes in Laurie Strode's neighborhood is more straightforward and efficient than it is a real case of experimentation with perspective of other tricks, like the opening is. (The very opening of the film, set 15 years earlier when Michael kills his sister, shows what he sees through his eye holes as he walks around wearing a mask.)
For a second I thought I might have seen Seth Green in this film, and rushed to IMDB to see if it was the case. I thought it was possible Seth Green was around 12 in 1978. As it turns out, he was only four -- younger than I am -- so that this kid was definitely not him:
In fact it's an actor named Brian Andrews, who had about 20 credits prior to 1987 and then a few in the twenty teens. He's not great here, so it doesn't surprise me that his career never really went anywhere.
Because of my impression of Halloween as a clean, efficient serial killer movie and not a lot more to delve into, I'll leave off with any further thoughts for now. But I'm sure the original Halloween will come back plenty as I delve into the ten (!!) other Halloween films I plan to watch this month.
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