Tag: Halloween franchise
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If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the damp, flickering basement of the 80s, it’s that you can’t keep a good corporate mascot down. In the world of horror, death isn’t a finale; it’s a temporary inconvenience, a smoke break before the next shift starts. By 1988, the slasher genre was having a full-blown identity…
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Forget the guy in the spray-painted William Shatner mask. Forget the heavy breathing in the bushes and the repetitive piano tinkling that sounds like a cat walking across a keyboard. In 1982, Tommy Lee Wallace, Debra Hill, and John Carpenter looked at the most successful slasher franchise in history and said, “You know what people…
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Forget the modern reboots for a second. Strip away the tangled timelines and the increasingly elaborate explanations for why Michael Myers just won’t stay dead .If you want to understand the moment early-80s horror changed gear, when the slow tension of the 70s gave way to the bloodier energy of the slasher boom, you have…
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In 1978, a young, cigarette-smoking film geek named John Carpenter sat down to make a babysitter murders movie. What he actually unleashed was a lean, stalking nightmare, less a movie and more a cold breath on the back of your neck. He took the tropes of the drive-in, blood, boobs, and boogeymen, and filtered them…
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John Carpenter and Debra Hill had no idea back in 1978 that they were changing the horror genre. They set out to make a scary movie about babysitters being stalked on Halloween night. They weren’t thinking about sequels – let alone 12 of them. They weren’t thinking about Corey Cunningham’s awful night of babysitting, heavy…