Carpenter Wanted To Kill What He Created

Everything in Halloween III screams, “Stop it! Stop it now!” Which the film actually physically ends on through the character of  Dr. Challis. The annoying commercials that are all the same obviously imply that if you’ve seen one then you’ve seen them all. Candidly implying the same for the slasher genre as a whole. In Harris’ article he has Carol Clover stating this same point for the slasher genre, especially the overflow of sequels. Yet, what  is interesting is that for a genre that has such “absence of threshold” (Harris, 101) they provide such stability through the reoccurrence of familiar narrative patterns. It complicates  that elements like style of the narrative by never showing instability to the monsters in the orders of life. “They transcend the various orders of morality, physical ability, society, etc.

But what made the catalyst, Halloween, separate from the slasher montage to follow it was the ambiguity of Myers. Zinoman in his chapter The Thing In-Between speaks on how Myers was the first character who felt no remorse or even emotion to killing (Zinoman, 181). Like Carpenter is famous for doing, he engineered a killer that had no intentions other than to kill. Only once in a person’s life can the viewer be first shocked and awed in this way by the killer. Carpenter made the original slasher killer, all the rest are knock offs.

 

 

Juliet Almost Died

Black Christmas was the first film that brought tension to me. I bet Clover loved that they used Olivia Hussey as the lead victim girl. She’s arguably one of the prettiest girls of her time, especially after you see her in Romeo and Juliet. Thus, she was the perfect candidate to help define the key themes of the slasher genre. Mulvey makes a great reference to the reoccurring themes of the plots of films like Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even Black Christmas with the role of the lead victim in which the story is developed from. Everything rotates around her character Jess, just like everything is centered on Laurie in Halloween.

As the narrative goes on and narrows it become more and more clear it will be up to that one quinn-essential girl to get away or die. She is helpless and supposedly in need of a man to save her. Yet what diverted from the usual slasher script was the presence of no sexual ties to the killer. Even after the killer had the first victim in the attic he did nothing to take advantage of her and acted towards none of the girls with sexual motives. This highly steers away from images like Leatherface’s chainsaw being on Stretch’s crotch symbolizing his own crotch and sexual act.

I Had Sympathy For A Serial Killer

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a breed of its own. Director Tobe Hooper split from the norm of legends like John Carpenter and Roman Polanski to bring a new level of sympathy and support to the murderer. Zenoman talks about how Hooper wanted to bring the whole family into play when it came to the culprit. Zenoman goes on to talk about how Hooper actually used excerpts of dialogue from a Texas family Thanksgiving he attended into the infamous dinner scene where Burns is getting beat in the corner. Carpenter was known for not wanting to give any sympathy to his monster in Halloween, he wanted them Myers to be detached from the real world. Clover ties both these characters into children within adult’s bodies longing for the affection of their mother.

Yet, Hooper physically shoves the real world on leatherface’s doorstep. All he is left to do is react. Zinoman states, “Leatherface has one simple goal: make dinner”(Zinoman, 139). I am working on a paper this week on the role of horror films in violent crimes and this film caught my attention with the idea of victims. Leatherface is seen as the bigger victim over his murdered victims. They have no story, no redeeming quality, they are just like the livestock the family used to butcher. But real people have stories and redeeming quality. their death is real and has much larger consequences than a annoying hippie who gets killed 30 minutes into a film.

New Meaning To Gothic Homes

Hitchcock made a living on screen adaptions of successful Gothic works of literature in Rebecca, Notorious, Psycho and of course Birds. I’ve realized more and more through this class the crucial presence of Gothic Literature into the emergence of  horror. Films we’ve seen such as Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby were works of literary fiction. Even writers such as Stephen King have made a killing through film adaptions of some of his works.

In terms of Hitchcocks’s film adaptions of Gothic Literature, Bishop makes some interesting points of how all four are connected in the general idea of gothic literature. He states, all four of these films by Hitchcock unabashedly address the psychological underside manifesting contemporary control, family tradition, underside of the otherwise normal family, reflecting and manifesting contemporary concerns regarding female independence, patriarchal control, family traditions and the tension between social classes (Bishop, 136).

What really makes this film a horror is the power of the birds with no clear motivation. They have no purpose to harm, yet it is as if mother nature is rebelling against humans. Much of the film is a romantic drama between Mitch and Melanie. The birds don’t even kill until an hour into the film. This helped emphasize the cantering of the human order by the birds. It also allowed the birds to represent issues within the human narrative such as femininity,repression, and patriarchical dominance.