Watching a film consumes anywhere from seventy-five minutes
to three hours of your life. Knowing you
have a finite number of hours to live, why in the world would you ever watch
the same film twice? But certain movies
beg us to come back. Reasons vary, but
for the filmmaker trying to make a movie that will be watched over the
generations, one way to guarantee return trips from the same audience is
atmosphere.
Why did Blade Runner attract such a huge
audience when it came out on video? Critics
(most of whom did not understand what they were watching and, by the way, most
of whom have since recanted their initial assessments) bashed the movie when it
showed up in summer, 1982. There were
severe problems—the voice-over and the sappy ending. But when people had the opportunity to view
it multiple times on VHS, the movie became a hit in spite of the damage done by
paranoid studio executives and brain-dead movie critics (Leonard Maltin, by the
way, sticks to his shitty review to this day.
Way to be stubborn and stupid, Leo!).
Why? Atmosphere. Blade Runner is a bleak, depressing
story. But Ridley Scott did such a
fantastic job creating the environment the film takes place in that watching
the movie again feels like actually going someplace familiar. That’s the key to atmosphere.
What the
hell does that have to do with slashers?
Good
question.
Blade Runner was released on the same
day as John Carpenter’s The Thing. Carpenter’s The Thing is widely considered the best horror film of the
1980s. With good reason. It’s a movie that stands up today, just as Blade Runner does (although some young
people complain about the special effects—they have no appreciation for the
artistry of in-camera effects; I’m not going to go into the whole ‘CGI sucks’
routine—anyone born before the year 1980 knows it and those born after have to
live with the fact that their legacy in cinema is a batch of remakes and
reboots made by computers with no soul at all.
Sucks to be them, but, by and large, it’s not the fault of the
individual Gen Yers, it’s their collective inability to put a stop to the
Hollywood machine that doesn’t give a shit about craftsmanship anymore). Both Blade
Runner and The Thing suffered
because of Spielberg’s E.T. and the
beginning, gradual shift from dark, introspective realism, to sunny,
materialist, blind 1980s-optimism (which, admittedly, was fun while it
lasted). What’s important to note is
that both Ridley Scott and John Carpenter understood atmosphere.
We can move, then, to the subject of slashers. Carpenter was heavily influence by Howard Hawkes. Ever noticed how the movie Rio Bravo never gets old? Hawkes was a master of creating atmosphere (Big Sleep, anyone?). Carpenter managed to make Pasadena and a
street just off of Sunset Boulevard look like a small, midwestern town in Halloween. During his reign as king of the big(ger)
budget b-movies, he directed and/or produced a string of movies that hold up
today simply because of his mastery of atmosphere (of which, oh by the way,
music plays a big role—an aspect Carpenter saw to himself). Any time Escape
from New York is on AMC, I stop and watch the whole damn movie. I’ve seen it a dozen times. I love the end, I think it’s a great piece of
nihilism that modern, ninnified America would never tolerate today, but what
glues me to the movie is the attention paid to the environment depicted in the
film and the music. The main ingredients
for atmosphere. Even when Carpenter was
only a producer (Halloween II and III), his imprint is still obvious and,
as mediocre as those films are, they are still re-watchable.
So, on to
the subject of slashers.
When the
slasher boom took off in late 1980 and 1981, the filmmakers responsible were
desperate to figure out what ingredient they needed to steal from Carpenter’s Halloween in effort to make a similar
film. Some of them got the suspense
right (The Prowler), some of them
understood the necessary makeup of the characters (teeny boppers or college
students), but the best took all those elements and added atmosphere.
Think about the original Friday the 13th—what
do you hear? The goofy k-k-k-ma-ma-ma motif and the whooping
cranes (or whatever bird it is) heard throughout all the daylight scenes. The film made excellent use of its forest
location. When I watch that movie again,
I am taken back to summertime in the late 70s and early 80s. Whether intended or not, the movie does a
great job creating atmosphere appropriate for the eventual slaughter that takes
place.
The king of
the Halloween rip-offs, in terms of
atmosphere, however, is the original My
Bloody
Exactly
what a movie is supposed to be.
