Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  But what Halloween was is the first movie to make serial killers murdering young people into mainstream entertainment. No one tried to ban it because there was relatively little gore. Although it is actually an extraordinary work of art, Halloween didn’t play like an art movie. It bowled along, tight and simple enough for a child to understand, while containing enough believable peril to keep a cynical adult appropriately spooked. And, while Hooper and Craven were obviously an influence on Carpenter and Halloween’s co-writer Debra Hill, this movie took its horror cues from Hitchcock’s Psycho rather than its more gore-splattered peers or the supernatural monster movies of the past, paying explicit tribute to The Master by casting Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Psycho’s doomed heroine Janet Leigh, in the lead role. Like Hitchcock, Carpenter believed that insane people were scarier than scary monsters, and his killer Michael Myers is burdened with the same truckloads of psychological baggage as Norman Bates. Even the usual square-jawed hero is replaced by a short bald psychiatrist who seems almost as nuts as the murderer.

  The input of Debra Hill perhaps explains what is arguably Halloween’s most important influence on popular culture. A year before Alien gave us Sigourney Weaver’s extraordinary Ripley, Halloween introduced the feminist action heroine. That is, the girl in peril who doesn’t just freeze and die or scream and wet herself until a man comes to save her. Whoever made the decision that the only teen to survive Myers’ irresistible rampage would be what critics now refer to as The Final Girl was some kind of prophetic genius, because, unlikely as it seemed in the feminist backlash ’70s, the teen boys who made up the majority of the potential audience for horror movies loved the idea of tough birds. I mean, we had had punk, which gave us Pattis, Debbies, Siouxsies and Chrissies who obviously, if unlucky enough to be faced with a nutter in a rubber William Shatner mask with a giant phallic knife, would have pulled a machete out of their knickers while the boys in the band huddled behind them. In short, we’d been prepared and had realised that helpless girlie girls were dull and annoying. Curtis’s Laurie Strode was useful in a fight and hot as hell. A perfect combination which, after 20 years of Tank Girls and Lara Crofts and more and more Final Girls, finally gave us Buffy Summers. For that alone, Carpenter and Hill are Gods.

  Curtis’s performance is key. Her role in Halloween and lesser teen slasher movies like Prom Night saw her dubbed The Scream Queen, and, Boy, can she scream. But what made Halloween stick was how convincing Curtis was as someone who was entirely terrified yet brave enough to still think clearly and fight back. There is an inner strength in Curtis’s looks and demeanour, and just enough boyish androgyny to make her someone men could empathise with, rather than pity. You wanted to rescue her but knew she didn’t need you. Not an easy trick to pull off while screaming hysterically and stabbing masked men with coat-hangers.

  And then there is the masked man. Taking a cue from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the maddest murderer wore a flayed victim’s visage as a mask and never showed his face, Carpenter gave Myers a cheap William Shatner mask from a toy shop and stumbled upon something crucial. We are, in the end, more scared of a person than a supernatural monster. But we’re even more scared of a human who has no facial expressions, and therefore gives us no clues as to what he’s going to do to us, or why. This great idea spawned an entire genre of Jasons and Freddys (see A Nightmare On Elm Street, here) who looked like monsters while being driven by entirely human neuroses.

  But being human, in a modern teen slasher, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are mortal . . . another phenomenon we have to thank Halloween for, for better or, mainly, worse. When Carpenter allowed his psycho to rise from the apparently dead twice during Halloween, he didn’t just give clever permission for numerous, profitable and largely awful Halloween sequels, but permission for any successful slasher idea to become a never-ending franchise. It works because, even though slashers are human, they are still, metaphorically, monsters of the Id; the bogeymen of our shared childhood nightmares whose unquenchable desire to ‘get’ you isn’t bound by anything as rational as mortality.

  This leads to Halloween’s two smartest breaks from horror tradition. In trad horror, the victim has to be drawn into a haunted house, or spooky castle, abandoned motel, or mad scientist’s lab, or, even post-Halloween and repeatedly, a remote cabin in the woods. In the end, even the most gullible enthusiast for celluloid terrors has to conclude that the best way to avoid being sliced into pieces fit for the meat counter at Tescos is . . . don’t go to the scary place. All movies set in a scary-looking setting come with a side order of irony.

  But Halloween is about home invasion. The worst thing imaginable is that the source of all your primal fears is in the one place where you lock your door and feel safe. People are, in the end, more scared of burglars than vampires. Carpenter’s insistence that no place is safe from the bogeyman is taken to logical extremes by A Nightmare On Elm Street where the bogeyman actually lives in our brains, which is, of course, exactly where he lives, and is exactly what horror writers are attempting to exploit. Halloween even mocks the haunted house tradition when Laurie walks right up to the door of the creepy old Myers home, and walks cheerily away, unaware that her soon-to-be nemesis is lurking behind the door.

  The other great break from tradition is all about what our friend Vern (see introductory chapter, p. 4) calls ‘filmatism’. Carpenter does things with cameras and music which only visionaries can pull off. The lo-fi keyboard drones and loops that Carpenter self-composes for his films reach a pinnacle here that match Ennio Morricone’s legendary spaghetti western themes. Like the shrieking violins in Psycho and the rumbling, accelerating two-note cellos that soundtrack Jaws, Carpenter’s music makes otherwise entirely innocent images into agonizing suspense or sudden shock, so much so that whenever the gently twitching piano-and-synth motif kicks in, audiences found themselves emitting spontaneous groans of ‘please-God-not-again’ dread in a kind of Pavlov’s Dog reflex acknowledgement of the inevitable horrors to come.

  But even greater, perhaps, was Carpenter’s revolutionary use of exteriors. In conjuring his imaginary killing field of Haddonfield, Illinois (actually filmed in South Pasadena, California), Carpenter noticed something that others had missed. In suburbs that are almost entirely residential, lack community centres like pubs or shops, and where everyone is wealthy enough to drive . . . neighbourhoods become ghost towns. No one walks anywhere. The white middle classes come out of their fortress, get into another moving fortress to go about their business, return just before nightfall, lock their doors, close their curtains and seek to repel all potential invaders to their one private space. By using beautifully composed shots of this pretty, leafy and almost always deserted suburb, with its huge driveways that set the big houses way back from the street, Carpenter finds a perfect visual metaphor for suburban isolation, and illuminates a secret fear we all share: that, in this increasingly privatised modern world, we could be suffering unimaginable horrors in our own homes and no one would even hear us scream. Many of Halloween’s creepiest scenes take place in familiar, everyday, comforting places in broad daylight. The film is haunted by the absolute lack of community in Haddonfield, established so persuasively that we entirely believe that help would only come from crazy Dr Loomis, an outsider and the only character who appears to care for the welfare of suburban children. Parents and cops are almost entirely absent. Halloween’s nightmare is entirely human, and more socio-political big-picture than private fears of psychos in masks.

  Which leads neatly to the most enduring criticism of Halloween. Famously, all its teen characters have sex and then get brutally slain. The only teen who survives is the virgin. Add the fact that Myers only seems interested in killing adolescents (he has been in the nuthatch from ages 6 to 21, which perhaps explains why kids free to explore their sexuality piss him off so much), and Carpenter and Hill are obviously and blatantly punishing sexualised teens and warning their impressionable audience to remain abstinent without even k
nowing what AIDS would do to the sexual mores of Western society over the next decade. This became such a repeated motif in formula teen horror that it became the biggest black joke in that ultimate meta-movie, Scream (see here).

  Carpenter has constantly refuted any reactionary intent in Halloween. And I have no idea what was going on in his and Hill’s clever heads. But I do know that no young horror fan, of my generation or later, ever gave up shagging because of the metaphorical punishments of slasher movies. I also know that Carpenter is such a fan of and expert on Golden Age Hollywood film-making that all of his films are peppered with referential in-jokes for movie buffs, and that he’s forged a pretty nifty alternative career as a leading authority on film history. And that Halloween belongs firmly within a thriller tradition whereby the loud, arrogant blowhard characters are always cruising for a bruising, while the sensitive, vulnerable and humble character goes on to discover their inner hero and save the day. Halloween, again, taps into a shared experience of its target audience: there were always these kids at school who bragged constantly about how much sex, booze and adult action they got, and, whether they were bullshitting or not, we always secretly wanted them to get their comeuppance for making us feel childish and inadequate. We relate to Laurie and not to her friends, not because she’s chaste, but because we like to think that we are/were as rounded, admirable and strong as she is. Drunken sex is a useful metaphor for being a bit rubbish, because, even when we were having lots of adolescent sex, none of us wanted to think of ourselves as shallow sluts. And Laurie survives not because she’s celibate, but because she takes life more seriously than her friends, and therefore fights harder to keep hold of it. So I suspect Carpenter and Hill stumbled upon their right-wing formula by accident, because, innovative though they were, they believed in the emotional pull of traditional Hollywood storytelling.

  Blimey. That really is a lot of baggage for a cheap horror flick to have carried for so many years, isn’t it just? But then, that’s why it has lasted, been copied relentlessly and parodied mercilessly, and why its director is a cult in himself, through his work here and on Dark Star, Escape From New York, The Thing, They Live and, especially, the peerless B-movie masterpiece that is Assault On Precinct 13. The best compliment I can pay Halloween is that the hundreds of bad versions of its accidental formula have had no impact whatsoever on its power. The terror etched upon Jamie Lee Curtis’s face while she’s trapped in a wardrobe still hurts. The bit where an out-of-focus, dead Michael suddenly sits up straight and turns towards us still freaks me out. And that glowering, droning, tinkling music always has a welcome place in my most enjoyable nightmares.

  THE WARRIORS

  1979

  Starring: Michael Beck, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Lynne Thigpen, Roger Hill

  Dir.: Walter Hill

  Plot: New York gangs as teen opera. But nobody’s singing ‘I Feel Pretty’.

  Key line: ‘WARRIORS! COME OUT TO PLAAYY-YAAYYY!!!’

  I struggled a while over whether this unique, controversial cult film qualified as a teen movie. The Warriors operates in such an irrational parallel universe that it’s impossible to tell whether its gangstas are teenagers or not. I plumped for a Yes because even though, like most teen films of this era, its lead actors are well into their twenties, the surreal spirit of the movie is teen to its core; a fantasy of inner-city violence where, even when people die or attempt rape, the images are just too cartoonish to hurt.

  Action director Walter Hill’s best and most enduring movie is based upon Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel; a relatively serious, socially concerned tale of poor kids forced into gangs by poverty and their environment. What Hill saw was a chase movie with added comic book possibilities and a connection to the history of ancient Greece. The Warriors is a retelling of the war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Specifically, in this case, the tale from Xenophon’s Anabasis of a mercenary Greek army, isolated after battle and miles away from home, struggling to return to the sea. This weighty source was initially intended to be a big part of the movie as a narrative voiceover read by none other than Orson Welles, but the studio wouldn’t cough up the bucks.

  For the recent director’s cut DVD version, Hill couldn’t go back to the now-deceased Welles to right that perceived wrong. But he could and did restore another idea initially rejected for budgetary reasons. When Hill and co-writer David Shaber first developed the script, they put the point that the only realistic way to do New York teen gangs was to make them black and Latino. Paramount baulked. So Hill figured that the only way around this was to create an alternative reality, based in a comic book vision of what gangs might look like. Hill produced a list of colourful imaginary gang names, and costume designer Bobbie Mannix, who had no experience of gangs, was allowed to let her imagination run wild, coming up with a set of gang uniforms that remain the most memorable element of The Warriors. Especially great are The Baseball Furies, who dress in baseball uniforms (with baseball bats as weapons, naturally) and wear Kiss-style make-up, giving them a look not unlike an American spin on the droogs from A Clockwork Orange (see here).

  To make this comic vision clear to viewers, Hill wanted actual comic book art to form transitions between scenes. Again, the studio weren’t keen on an idea which is now commonplace but had no precedent in 1979. Presumably, Hill was stung by some of the bad reviews at the time, which sneered at the film’s lack of realism and stilted dialogue, and has now taken the opportunity to insert the panels and illuminate the cartoon aesthetic.

  And the result? An annoying waste of time. The reason why the film has sustained enough of a fanatical cult following to inspire a range of Warrior dolls and a Warriors video game as late as 2005 is because everybody who sees the movie understands that it wasn’t meant to be a documentary. Hill’s magical realism worked just fine without a need to clump us over the head with it.

  But, thankfully, the comic cuts don’t have enough impact to spoil a classic. The action revolves around a mixed-race Coney Island gang called The Warriors, who favour hippy-biker leather waistcoats as their ‘colours’. When Cyrus (Hill), the leader of Manhattan’s most powerful gang The Gramercy Riffs, suggests a summit meeting between all of the gangs, The Warriors send the requested nine unarmed members. But, as Cyrus is making a rousing speech in Riverside Park about united gangs taking over the city, he is shot by Luther (the show-stealing David Patrick Kelly), leader of The Rogues. In the ensuing melee, Luther fingers The Warriors as the shooters and Warriors leader Cleon is caught and beaten to death by The Riffs.

  The rest of The Warriors escape and, after a power struggle with mouthy loose cannon Ajax (Remar), chiselled hunk Swan (Beck) is charged with leading his troops back to the safety of Coney Island. Trouble is, The Riffs have a female radio DJ (Thigpen: gorgeous even though you only hear her voice and see her extraordinary mouth) relaying coded orders to every gang in Manhattan to kill The Warriors on sight. On their odyssey through the New York night, the weaponless Warriors fight off gangs and cops, encounter subway fires and Molotov cocktails, pick up a girl (Van Valkenburgh as Mercy), get fake-seduced by girl gang The Lizzies, get separated, are entrapped into sexual assault, reunite and lose members to death and arrest before their inevitable western-style showdown with The Riffs and The Rogues on the beach at Coney Island.

  The Warriors was entirely filmed in its New York location at night in authentically rough areas: The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Coney Island. This entailed liaising with the NYPD over which areas were the least likely to be terrorised by real gangs, which makes the gang rally all the more extraordinary. Shot in Riverside Park, it involved corralling 1,000 extras, most of whom were drawn from around 200 real New York gangs. These were unruly guys with no acting experience, yet they had to be controlled and choreographed in a very specific way to make the riot scene work.

  Cyrus, the stunningly handsome mixed-race man who has the charisma to attempt to organise a criminal revolution, is actually played by a real
gang member called Roger Hill. The brilliant, boxing-announcer-meets-carnival-barker way he hollers the phrase ‘Can you dig it?’ was entirely his idea and is one of the most enduring motifs in the movie (it was sampled on a minor 1988 hit single by British indie band Pop Will Eat Itself), even though Hill was a last-minute replacement for another actor who was cast, but disappeared.

  Similarly inspired ideas from various crew members established the crucial visual aesthetic. Director of Photography Andrew Laszlo saw one problem before shooting started. The chances of shooting an entire movie on the streets of New York over a number of weeks without encountering rain were pretty slim. So Laszlo suggested that the voyage back to Coney Island be set in a downpour, which then meant that the streets could be washed down for key scenes. Light and colour bouncing off the black, puddled concrete gives The Warriors a further element of magical hyper-realism and yet another level of nocturnal atmosphere.

  In these times of CGI overload and the sleight-of-hand cheats of over-fast cutting, it’s also still great to watch low-budget action sequences where you can actually see what’s happening. The fight scenes are rightly legendary: a mix of comic overstatement, Peckinpah-style slow-motion ballet, and Samurai flick-influenced choreography, in tribute to Akira Kurosawa. The score is also crucial. Barry DeVorzon’s atmospheric little jazzy soul instrumentals contrasted brilliantly with the main theme, which sounded like Giorgio Moroder jamming with Led Zeppelin. This gem was matched by the film’s closing theme, a classic arena rock song by sometime Eagles member Joe Walsh called ‘In The City’, which has nothing to do with The Jam and everything to do with relocating the blue-collar angst of early Springsteen as cheesy survivalist heavy metal. Pure genius and a score right up there with any by John Carpenter (see Halloween, here).