A Nice Place to Slash!

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 13^th—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

Valentine.  I love this movie.  The killer is absolutely awesome.  The best in any of the golden age (post-Halloween) slashers.  The producers veered away from the other slashers in the very important aspect of economics—the characters in My Bloody Valentine are blue collar, a little bit older, and therefore, I believe, more sympathetic.  The director did a fantastic job of creating the fictitious town the story takes place in.  The night scenes are drenched in eerie, blue light and smoke.  It’s actually not a very scary film—not a lot of suspense is used and the ending is a little goofy.  But none of that matters.  I go back and watch My Bloody Valentine once a year because, like all films that do a good job with atmosphere, it’s like visiting somewhere familiar, seeing familiar people (who, unfortunately, get chopped into little bits and pieces), it’s like a small, hour and a half vacation. 

            Exactly what a movie is supposed to be.