“introducing JAMIE LEE CURTIS as Laurie”

It’s Wednesday night, it’s Halloween and what better way to spend it is revisiting John Carpenter’s 1978 classic at the Astor. Getting prepared comes in general horror banter, ‘which is scarier’, Freddy, Jason, or Mike Myers and who, even won out of Freddy vs. Jason (2003)?

Then the iconic credit sequence “introducing JAMIE LEE CURTIS as Laurie” establishes it is show time.

Beginning through the eyes of Michael Myers or as we simply refer to him as ‘Mike’ we get a sneak peek into the evil he breeds. Firstly as a child, through a voyeuristic attack on his sister before he is bound to an asylum, then what becomes his escape fifteen years later and the Halloween night on which he craftily takes down Laurie’s circle of friends. 

It was a boisterous experience seeing Halloween. Hearing the audience interact and embody near death situations. During which, the words, I’ll be right back’ had cropped up. A phrase familiar to the likes of the Friday the 13^th and the Scream narratives was indeed chuckle worthy. But indifferent to the teen slasher sub genre, Carpenter presents a monster that is not afraid to be seen day or night. A predator to the neighbourhood, framed in such a way as to disrupt and spoil what could be a safe picture. Carpenters use of wide angle shots creates disorientation and uneasiness to these streets.

Ending on a montage that looks like a crime scene, it shows us everywhere evil has been. It becomes unsettling after it is revealed Myers’s dead body has disappeared. Like a case for an unsolved massacre, discomfort still lingers on.

It was my third viewing of Halloween, but never I noticed playing on the TV whilst Laurie is babysitting, Howard Hawk’s The Thing from Another World (1951).  A film re-made in 1982 as the Thing, a celebrated and important film yet again from Carpenter.

The Innocents

The Innocents (1961) is indeed haunting, something that I was glad to have watched during the day. Based on Henry James novella ‘the turn of the screw’, it was co-written by Truman Capote and suggested to have inspired Alejandro Amenabar’s film, The Others (2001).

 

Its narrative focuses on Miss Gaddens (Deborah Kerr), a governess hired to take care of two children in a recluse old mansion. Unfortunately for her the mansion is haunted. That is the house is filled with memories of an affair between a valet and a previous governess, who are now both dead. Even though Gaddens believes to have witnessed their ghosts she is told else-wise it’s her imagination. 

The Innocents does not hide its ghostly narrative, or that the film is frightening, but instead enhances it through cinematography and dark compositions. Shot in Kerr’s first person perspective, we get a one on one perspective with the occult as it starts to infuse her persona. Kerr pushes the narrative along with her matron-esque, almost Davis meets Crawford, making it feel natural to sympathize with children, Miles and Flora. However this pair displays innocent and evil binaries, familiar to the Exorcist (1973) and the Omen (1976) archetypes, from which Gaddens domineering actions become justifiable. 

The Innocents is an accessible horror, in its location setting of a gothic mansion in Sussex which breeds paranormal tensions. But once these horror trademarks are removed, it allows us to observe the tragic descent of a women’s journey into madness.