I've got that old time religion in my hoard

Marjoe (1972) may have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Cinema 5 did their damnedest to release the film as stealthily as possible, and all but buried it afterwards. There was a 1983 VHS release, but the film itself was thought lost until the negative was rediscovered in a vault, restored, screened and released on DVD in the 2000s. Which is obviously to the good: you won't watch a documentary like Marjoe this side of glory, so it'd be a shame if it was lost forever.

It's hardly surprising, though, that the distributor feared a backlash and virtually declined to release the film in the Bible Belt. Featuring an entirely faithless evangelist raking in the cash from Pentecostal congregations and casually sharing the tricks of the trade, Marjoe was sure to infuriate both the duped and the protagonist's, er, colleagues. But Marjoe wouldn't be very interesting if it was only an exposé. Its power comes from the real questions it asks about faith, showmanship, suffering and ethics.

Marjoe Gortner began preaching in tent revival meetings at the age of four, after his ambitious evangelist parents discovered his flair for the dramatic and confidence in front of crowds. Billed as 'the youngest ordained minister in history' and ruthlessly drilled in money-making tricks by his parents, Marjoe travelled the revival circuit and appeared on television until his mid-teens. When his father absconded with the family's money, a disillusioned Gortner drifted to the West Coast and immersed himself in hippie culture for several years. Lacking the education or formal training for a 'normal' job, in the mid-sixties Gortner went back to what he did best: he began working as a preacher again.

This time, though, he kept the money himself, and was able to work just six months a year thanks to donations and the sale of prayer cloths and other paraphernalia. It was a living, but Gortner was tired of it, and hoped to change careers to acting. So when he travelled the American South preaching, prophesying, and healing the sick one last time in 1971 he allowed a team of documentary filmmakers to follow him around, constantly sharing the tricks of the trade behind the scenes - unbeknownst to congregations, other preachers and even Gortner's own father, all of whom were given the impression of a straight documentary.

Certainly, Marjoe's greatest asset is its morally ambiguous protagonist. Gortner's transformation from his 'real self' to screaming revival preacher - complete with a totally different cadence and inflection - is astonishing. By showing off his acting chops and everyday persona, Marjoe doubles as an audition tape for Gortner's anticipated career in showbiz (his record, for which he exploited his renewed post-Marjoe fame, flopped but he was able to carve out a moderately successful career in genre films and television). So there's real doubt, I think, as to whether such an expert self-publicist ever lets us see the 'real' Gortner. But he's so darn likeable it hardly matters.

Gortner cheerfully admits that even as a child he never believed in God, but enjoyed the attention and did as he was told. (He still uses the story of his prophetic calling made up by his parents in later meetings.) Like many people who aren't required to subscribe to doctrinal statements, Gortner holds pretty vague beliefs in reality: he'd like people to love and forgive each other. He'd even be content to preach Jesus, he says, if he didn't have to go on about hell. He doesn't think he's a particularly moral person, but not actively malevolent either: 'I'm bad, but not evil'.

There's no denying, though, that Gortner is essentially a fraud, using mass psychology and carefully engineered religious ecstasy to persuade people to open their wallets. Asked point-blank if he is a conman late in the film, Gortner's girlfriend gets a little embarrassed. It's not just Marjoe who is living a double life, though. His preacher colleagues may genuinely believe in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but they also know the importance of a well-executed meeting to their bottom line. I prefer Gortner's open lack of faith, in fact: after all, it's not the cold that Jesus warns, it's the lukewarm.

Fred Clark distinguishes between two types of Christian conservatives: true believers, who sincerely believe in the amalgamation of Christianity and conservatism peddled by the Religious Right, and hucksters, who are in it for the money and the power. Marjoe suggests a third type: the semi-true believer, who has faith in the work of the Holy Spirit but also in the power of emotional manipulation to fill the pews and his coffers. This type, surely, is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism and is the raison d'être of the church growth movement.

In Marjoe, itinerant preachers emerge as a community resembling magicians, sharing tricks of the trade. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. For example, Gortner mentions creating the illusion of a glowing cross on his forehead by smearing his skin with transparent dye that would react with his perspiration during the sermon. Then there are the movements he's adapted from Mick Jagger and his strategic use of repetition, shouting and surprise to induce religious trance and falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') when he lays hands on people coming up during the altar call. Similar tricks are in use today.

I've only been to a couple of charismatic worship services and they freaked me out, so, being unadventurous, I returned to what I liked best: silently judging people in a traditional church setting. There's no denying, though, that Gortner's servies fulfil real needs: joy, peace and healing, even if it is only for a few hours, for people who are otherwise downtrodden and sick. (Another preacher gives a nauseous sermon in which he thanks God for his brand-new Cadillac - go prosperity gospel!)

In that sense, perhaps Gortner can't be considered a fraud at all: don't attendees get the exact same experience with him as they would with a more sincere preacher? (And, theologically speaking, is not God's spirit quite independent of human machinations, and hardly frustrated in his work by a fraud?) Preying on people in the vulnerable state induced by religious ecstasy - however legitimate, even beneficial that experience may be in itself - is not improved morally by the sincerity of practitioners. Give me an honest fraud like Marjoe Gortner over a semi-true believer any day.

One by one, our old friends are gone

Despite a three-star Roger Ebert review that has angered fanboys for four decades, The Godfather Part II is, if anything, even more critically acclaimed than its predecessor. But among audiences, Coppola's sequel has never been able to catch up with the then highest grossing film of all time. Virtually all the franchise's famous lines and characters are from the first installment. A large segment of the moviegoing public, convinced it's all about Vito Corleone, is unable to strike up a connection to the Marlon Brando-less sequels.

But that's hardly the result of the first-year university student's favourite bugbear, the stupidity of the common man. It's all in the material. The Godfather Part II is brilliant, but it's much harder to like than its predecessor. Detached and critical where the first film is engrossing, Part II functions as a deconstruction of The Godfather's oft-criticised glamorisation of the Cosa Nostra. In Al Pacino's cold, calculating Michael Corleone it has a protagonist only in the technical sense: it's virtually impossible to root for him.

In 1901, Antonio Andolini is murdered by the Mafia don of Corleone, Sicily. His funeral procession is disturbed by shotgun blasts that signal the murder of Andolini's oldest son, Paolo, who had gone to seek revenge. Heartbroken, Paolo's mother (Maria Carta) goes to see Don Ciccio (Giuseppe Sillato) to plead for the life of her only remaining son, nine-year-old Vito (Oreste Baldini), but the don refuses. Vito's mother is killed, but Vito manages to flee Sicily and make it to the United States. There, an immigration official mistakenly writes down his name as Vito Corleone.

At Lake Tahoe in 1958, the Corleone family and their many friends celebrate the first communion of Don Michael's son Anthony Corleone. There's trouble in the family, though. Michael's sister Connie (Talia Shire), still wounded by the murder of her husband in Part I, is neglecting her children and cavorting with a man the family disapproves of. Fredo (John Cazale) is unhappy in his marriage, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) is increasingly shut out by Michael, Nevadan senator Geary (G.D. Spradlin) is causing trouble for the casino business, and New York caporegime Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) is dissatisfied with Michael's refusal to let him strike at his rivals. When Michael and his family barely survive a hit that same night, it's hardly a surprise.

The rest of the film is about Michael's attempt to uncover and defeat the conspiracy against him. Somehow involved is the reptilian Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). An elderly Jewish gangster living in Miami, Roth has organised a coalition of American business interests to carve up the Cuban economy with the full cooperation of Fulgencio Batista's government. While publicly declaring his intention to turn over his business to Michael after his death, Roth is angered by Michael's reticence in providing an agreed cash investment. After the little matter of the Cuban Revolution foils Roth's plans, the relationship of the two men turns openly hostile.

Vito's mother mourns her oldest son while Vito watches from background right.

Meanwhile, the film flashes back to a younger Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) struggling to make a living in Manhattan's Little Italy in the 1910s and 1920s. After acquiring a rug that really ties the room together as a thanks from petty criminal Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), Vito begins to supplement his income with theft and burglary. Inevitably this puts him on a collision course with Fanucci (Gastone Moschin), the local Black Hand don who extorts protection money from businesses. After dispatching Fanucci, Vito expands his operations and sets up an olive oil import business as a legitimate front.

The period segments cover perhaps a quarter of the film's running time (at three hours and twenty-two minutes, the film is almost half an hour longer than its already hefty predecessor). I was at first annoyed by the soft focus and sepia tone returning cinematographer Gordon Willis chooses to mark these scenes: they seemed entirely too pleasant-looking, underplaying the squalor of New York's immigrant areas in the first quarter of the century. Then it clicked. Like the declarative title ins that explain who and what we're seeing in the beginning of the film, the look of the period scenes stresses the artificiality of what is shown and highlights the process of myth-making, particularly as they are constantly contrasted with the grubby present-day scenes.

The Godfather Part II doesn't mimic its predecessor's expert use of the three-act structure, opting for a more level narrative and the back-and-forth between present and period scenes instead. But many of the beats fall into the same place and fulfil equivalent functions, and they're all much nastier. The opening celebration is hollow and conflict-laden. Where Woltz was turned into a vassal of the Corleones after finding a horse head in his bed, Geary wakes up in a brothel next to a dead woman. ('This girl has no family. Nobody knows that she worked here. It'll be as though she never existed,' Tom Hagen assures him.) At the end of the film, those paying for their defiance of Michael Corleone with their lives are not real threats like Don Barzini and his allies, but defeated and isolated people on the run. ('I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out,' Michael explains. 'Just my enemies, that's all.')

'Don't worry about anything, Frankie Five-Angels.'

In its structure, then, the film undermines the sympathies Part I encouraged in the audience. The Godfather Part II thus becomes a critique of its own predecessor, indeed a self-critique by Francis Ford Coppola, who was bothered by accusations of glorifying organised crime with his sympathetic portrayal of the Corleone family. In a series of committee hearings, Michael is questioned by senators (portrayed by the likes of Roger Corman and Richard Matheson). It is, I believe, the first time in the series terms like 'Mafia' and 'Cosa Nostra' are spoken without the halo of 'honour', 'respect' and the rest of the claptrap that these films' criminals invoke to convince themselves they're more than gun thugs who got rich.

If it's a far more searing indictment of organised crime, though, The Godfather Part II also blurs the line between the strong-arm tactics of legal and illegal enterprise more thoroughly than its predecessor. 'This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it,' Roth says in praise of the Batista dictatorship.'We have now what we have always needed: real partnership with a government.' The film's most overt satire comes in a boardroom meeting that brings together the Cuban president, gangsters, representatives from American corporations, and a solid gold telephone. Crime and law enforcement are more thoroughly entwined, too: where Sonny Corleone spat at the FBI, in the sequel policemen are brought drinks by Michael Corleone's waiters.

The film's greater maturity is seen in markedly more subdued acting, with the exception of Gazzo's histrionic Pentangeli. De Niro, hardly recognisable to those used his last two decades of self-parody, is a revelation. Pacino's Michael continues becoming colder, ever less capable of ordinary human affection. 'All our people are businessmen', he knows: 'Their loyalty is based on that.' Yet he continues turning away people who care about him - Tom, Kay, Connie - in favour of those businessmen. In The Godfather Part II, his evolution from idealistic war hero to unscrupulous gangster is completed in a sequence that exceeds the heights reached by the already terrific ending of The Godfather. It's a sad and lonely place, and it's where the character's arc finds its logical conclusion. Accountants thought otherwise, though...

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)

I heard that you were a serious man, to be treated with respect

So much ink has been spilt on The Godfather (1972) that a standard plot-direction-acting-technical review would be both superfluous and painfully beside the point. But since that describes much of this blog- er, I mean: having recently enjoyed seeing Coppola's epic at the cinema after years of watching it on the small screen, I thought I'd throw a couple of observations out there. I'm a superstitious man, though, so I'll deal with some standard review points lest this blog become too avant-garde.

The Godfather is often held up as a prime example of auteur-driven seventies cinema, but it didn't spring forth fully armed from Francis Ford Coppola's head. In fact, after snatching up the rights to Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller Paramount first approached Sergio Leone and Peter Bogdanovich before tapping Coppola, then inexperienced at helming epics and $400,000 in debt to Warner Brothers. The 31-year-old had to fight an uphill battle against the producers' distrust of everything from tone to casting choices, but was bull-headed enough to push most of his vision through.

'I believe in America', spoken while the screen is still black: perhaps the most famous first words in cinema. (Coppola seems to have a talent for it: see also 'Saigon. Shit.') Then we see the face of a middle-aged man, Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), as he tells the story of his daughter, whose boyfriend attempted to rape her and beat her half to death only to receive a suspended sentence. The camera slowly zooms out, letting us see more of the darkened study and eventually the back of the man behind the desk, who listens patiently before asking what Bonasera wants him to do. After he's told, we get the first cut after a three-minute opening shot, and a face: Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

Well, I know you know all that. But observe the precision in every little moment. Bonasera's monologue gives us a full character, a self-righteous man who wants to be thought respectable, loves his daughter in a paternalistic fashion, and is afraid of and disgusted by the man he is no longer too proud to ask for help. Corsitto, an Italian stage actor who put in his one and only film appearance here, delivers it note-perfect, which would be a problem if Brando were not equally brilliant. Thankfully, he is that and more: so what if he's reading his lines from cue cards?

From the start, the all-round extraordinary physical acting gives The Godfather the feel of well-choreographed theatre with stage directions whose detail would put Tennessee Williams to shame. Brando (slouched posture, shrugs and little hand movements) and James Caan's Santino Corleone (expansive gestures, struggling to contain animal fury) are showiest, but to my mind Al Pacino takes that particular crown - by not doing very much. In the beginning he is relaxed, but as the film progresses and he is hardened by loss and brutality he becomes clenched and tightly controlled, exuding power through impassivity: the scene in which he mollifies and wins over his Sicilian future father-in-law (speaking English because his Italian is limited and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous) is not so different from a much later encounter in which he sits still while an enraged Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) hurls insults.

That's the point: The Godfather is all about power. While Puzo's novel was defanged slightly for the big screen, the parallels between the Corleone family and 'legitimate' power are still spelt out. (Michael: 'My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.') Not just any power, but patriarchy, whether it asserts itself in Carlo Rizzi's wife-beating, Sonny's open adultery or Michael's refusal to tell his wife about his business. The film's men genuinely view their authority as a burden rather than a privilege ('women and children can be careless, but not men'), having so insulated themselves against alternative voices that they are blind to the reality and self-serving benefits of their rule.

Power, and power asserted through violence: what better illustration of that point than the men with lupare at Michael's Sicilian wedding? The Corleone family, like all empires, ultimately comes down to men with guns - although, like all empires, Vito knows to dress it up more nicely than that. (Michael lacks his natural charm, but is as ready to spend money on his public image.) The Sicilian scenes in the film's second act may be on the nose and potentially offensive (gee, all the men are dead from vendettas, are they?), but their barebones displays of criminal power form the film's real heart: Vitelli's choice to associate with a Mafia family when Michael treats him con tutto rispetto,  Apollonia's naiveté rendered deadly by the omnipresent infantilisation of women, Fabrizio's opportunism. And they're gorgeous: how could anything filmed on Sicily fail to be?

The heart of The Godfather, I said, and that's true even in the most mundane sense: the Sicily scenes form one half of the film's second act, the most placid of the three even though it covers the phase in which the gang war is fought openly. Rarely, in fact, does a film have three acts that are so distinct, even though all end with defining moments for Michael (the film's protagonist, recall, despite the fact that the elder Don Corleone is remembered better). The film's third act, in which Michael takes over the family business from his ailing father and prepares to strike at the enemies gathering against him, feels much more like it belongs to the world of the film's own sequel - it's set in the fifties, after all - and closes with one of the great endings in cinema, as a horrified Kay (Diane Keaton) watches Michael's caporegimes swear fealty to him before Al Neri (Richard Bright) shuts the door in her face.

It's the first act, in which a single rash sentence by Sonny leads to an assassination attempt on the don and Michael's irrevocable decision to involve himself in the family business, that I've always liked best, though. The reptilian Barzini (Richard Conte) is still in the background, while the visible antagonist is Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), a Sicilian narcotics importer who calls himself a 'man of honour' even after he attempts to kill the don over the latter's refusal to support the drugs business. On the page Sollozzo is an unremarkable baddie, but in the hands of Lettieri (who sadly died in 1975) he's extraordinary: a savvy businessman who would prefer to live in peace with the Corleones, but he is ruthless enough to kill, and constantly alert to any danger (there's a twitch in his left eye that Lettieri works to perfection). I still get upset every time he bites the dust.

Coppola and Puzo's screenplay excises remarkably little of the source material's plot (Fabrizio's fate, Neri's story, Vito's youth which would be adapted in The Godfather Part II). The real change is structural. Puzo's novel is a terrific page-turner, but it mostly just goes on until it ends. With the perfection of the three-act structure, complete with self-contained arcs and moments that rhyme both visually and narratively, the film knocks its source material into a cocked hat. Its excellence as an adapted screenplay is not the least of them, but The Godfather sets a number of records: greatest cast of all time with career-best performances all round, greatest crime drama of all time, greatest anti-Sinatra screed. It made some people angry and made some other people a lot of money, but to us it's a film that keeps on giving four decades down the line.

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)

Satan of suburbia

In the month of winterfylleþ, 'the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead'. To honour the run-up to Halloween I'll spend this month focusing on horror films, from esteemed classics to tawdry schlock. Above all that'll mean resuming that Mario Bava series, but I'll find time for other films too.

Today's entry falls firmly on the 'classic' side of the spectrum: so much so, perhaps, that we're inclined to forget it's above all a superb piece of genre filmmaking. Roman Polanski is perhaps the greatest purveyor of genre fare since Hitchcock, whether it's noir (Chinatown), thriller (The Ghost) or Oscar bait (The Pianist). Rosemary's Baby (1968), then, is a perfect paranoia thriller with higher aspirations.

A young couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), move into an apartment building in New York. Rosemary doesn't like their nosy and eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), but Guy soon becomes fast friends with them.

When Rosemary becomes pregnant, it's at first an occasion of joy for the couple. But the mother-to-be soon becomes suspicious. At the advice of the Castevets she has switched to a new obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who refuses to take seriously her concerns over an increasingly draining and troubled pregnancy. What's more, the Castevets seem to have Guy on their side as they move to isolate Rosemary from her friends, give her suspicious drinks in lieu of prenatal vitamins and have her wear a malodorous pennant containing tannis root, a plant associated with witchcraft according to Rosemary's elderly friend Hutch (Maurice Evans). When the previously healthy Hutch falls into a coma and dies after investigating the Castevets, Rosemary begins to suspect that her neighbours are involved in witchcraft and have made a pact with her husband to take her baby from her.

Feminist readings of Rosemary's Baby have pointed out that the film is about a woman constrained by patriarchy. Guy is a patronising jackass from the start, regularly infantilising and objectifying his wife. When she finds scratches on her body, he nonchalantly explains that he raped her in her sleep. Any bodily autonomy is taken away by the Castevets' witches' brews and Dr. Sapirstein's belittling of her fears. In Rosemary's Baby Polanski empathises with his protagonist's anxiety about a living creature growing in her body, and attacks a system that negates women's personhood by reducing them to the role of carrier.

But the film is also a broadside against the bourgeois culture of the sixties, caught between the stuffy respectability of the Castevets and the hip appeal of a younger generation. Early on Rosemary goes for a Vidal Sassoon haircut, in what would be product placement - if every other character did not immediately (and unfairly) opine that it looks terrible. Beyond a veneer of befuddled harmlessness, of course, the honourable personages of the older generation turn out to be members of a satanic conspiracy. Not that that dampens their enthusiasm for housekeeping: in one of the film's finest scenes, Minnie disarms a knife-wielding Rosemary, then checks to make sure the blade hasn't damaged her parquet floor.

It is only in the film's final minutes that the script clarifies whether the all-encompassing witches' coven preying on Rosemary is real or a figment of a disempowered housewife's imagination. Before that Polanski refuses to tip his hand, emphasising the extent to which male domination mirrors the demonic possession of folklore. 'Patriarchal' is decidedly the right word: the film is about the rule of old men more than men per se, be they naturally aged like Roman or only seemingly old, in the way Guy artificially constructs an age difference to his wife by infantilising her.


All of that, and I haven't yet praised Rosemary's Baby as a near perfect example of the paranoia thriller. Polanski makes the most of images of satanism and witchcraft. It's no coincidence that the film provided much of the imagery peddled both by respectable society and rebellious youth culture during the infamous satanic panic of the following decades. Then there is the terrific, terrifying score of longtime Polanski collaborator Krysztof Komeda.

A supremely accomplished horror film, then, and at 96 minutes leaner than most prestige pictures know to be in our decadent age. It set the stage for the explosion of lurid diabolical cheapies at the turn of the seventies (The Brotherhood of Satan, Mark of the Devil), and the slightly more respectable religious horror that followed (The Exorcist, The Omen). But Rosemary's Baby is smarter and more aware than its imitators, and it's as fresh now as it was in 1968.

Carving up America

It's a truth commonly acknowledged that the modern American horror film begins with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Fourteen years after Hitchcock had thrown the rules out of the window with Psycho, Tobe Hooper completed the transition from the stately Gothic pictures of the past to the gruesome body count horror of the 1970s and 1980s.

It would be foolish to consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only in the context of the horror genre, however. Hooper was undeniably part of the New Hollywood wave of auteurs, and the film is ultimately an extreme expression of the deconstruction of the American way of life pioneered by Bonnie and Clyde and later exemplified by Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, etc. Leatherface is a hillbilly Travis Bickle, but without the delusions of heroism.

The film opens with a text crawl, narrated by John Larraquette, informing us that what we're about to watch is a true story. That, of course, is a lie. (But it's an entertaining lie, and in the end, isn't that the real truth?) Hooper claims that this intentional misinformation was a reaction to the American government's recent public lies about Watergate, the oil crisis, and the Vietnam War: and while that is an attractive idea, it's also possible that, like the makers of The Blair Witch Project a quarter-century later, Hooper simply realised that claiming your fiction was based on a true story would sell a lot of tickets.

Then there is darkness, unpleasant noises, and brief flashes of something horrible: and before long we realise that we're watching half-decomposed bodies displayed in garish poses. It seems, according to radio news we hear over the extraordinarily raw and hideous opening credits, that recently there has been a spate of grave robbings in Texas: but significantly that's only one of a number of disasters and violent crimes the dispassionate news anchor tells us about, signifying a society - indeed a world - dissolving into murder and chaos.

Now at last it's time to meet our van-driving cast. Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her brother, wheelchair-bound Franklin (Paul A. Partain) are travelling to a Texas graveyard to make sure their grandfather's grave is not among those disturbed; they're accompanied by their friends, Jerry (Allen Danziger) and Kirk (William Vail), both of whom are men without qualities, as well as Kirk's girlfriend Pam (Teri McMinn), whose sole identifying characteristic is an obsession with astrology. Along the way they pick up a seriously disturbed hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who rambles about slaughterhouses ('My family's always been in meat') before cutting himself and attacking Franklin with a straight razor, and being thrown out of the van.

Stopping at a petrol station our heroes are told that fuel has run out, with new supplies not arriving until later that day. To pass the time they decide to explore the Hardesty family homestead, where Sally and Franklin lived as children. Kirk and Pam go off to a swimming hole, but are attracted to a nearby house that has a generator (and hence presumably petrol), where both are murdered by a big man wearing a mask made of human skin (Gunnar Hansen). Jerry goes to look for them and meets with the same fate; and eventually, after dark, Franklin and Sally set out to find their missing comrades.

From there, it's a straight line to Franklin ending up on the wrong end of Leatherface's chainsaw and Sally being invited to a family dinner with Grandpa. The sheer quantity of plot recap points to the least but still pleasant achievements of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: it's never boring. A bad body-count horror film is at heart a tedious and inert thing, treading water between gruesome murders; but that's never the case in TCM, and the screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper gets points for that - even if the paper-thin categorisation of most characters does not sit well with that sort of quality.

Upon release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gained a reputation for gore and brutal violence it has to this day. Indeed the victims do not die cleanly and quickly, the way they might have in an earlier horror film, but all in all TCM is not particularly bloody. The only chainsaw death - one of four murders in the film - happens in darkness, while other killings are handled reasonably discreetly.

To end there, though, is to miss what was so shocking about TCM: its extraordinary nasty-mindedness. We often jokingly call the cast of slasher films 'meat', but here it's true. From the defiling of corpses to the theme of cannibalism, Hooper's magnum opus reduces the human body to flesh to be lacerated and devoured by the murderous Sawyer clan, and this is underscored by the slaughterhouse images and the animal noises made by Leatherface.

What really gives The Texas Chain Saw Massacre its punch, though, is Hooper's direction, which marks a revolution in the genre. I can't put it any better than to say that TCM finally abandons the pretence to objectivity that previous horror films had challenged but ultimately upheld. Hooper's very unsteady, jerky, obsessive camerawork (he doesn't use handheld, praise Jesus) gives the impression of psychosis: the camera is not a neutral observer but a deeply disturbed participant and sufferer. His frequent use of uncomfortable high and low angles, his habit of crowding the foreground, and his invasive, nervous zooms on human agony all violate what is classically thought of as good direction, but this is precisely what prevents the audience from ever settling into the film and being able to steer its terror into a predictable, familiar experience.

Despite the claim of factuality, the direction marks TCM as a nightmare. The scene in which Pam discovers the Sawyer clan's living room, covered in feathers and human bones, is edited as a surreal and disturbing montage by Larry Carroll and assistant director Sallye Richardson. (Incredibly, neither of them has ever edited a film again.) The sound design, too, is outstanding: beside the creepy prevalence of silence early in the film's run, the harsh, dissonant chords used in the family dinner scene mark TCM as a film that goes out to hurt its audience; lastly, cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl's deliberately harsh and hideous creation of a bleached landscape is crucial to the film's sense of isolation and despair.

It's often assumed that there must be something deeply wrong with those who enjoy bloody horror, but it's the attitude that makes the difference. A film like Wanted gawks at its hero slaughtering dozens of people in cool blood and gasps, 'Isn't that awesome?' The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, on the other hand, presents deeply unsettling killings and seems to say, 'Isn't this terrible?'. As a result, Wanted left me disgusted with the film and its makers, while TCM leaves me horrified but on Hooper's side. Besides, those same critics who extol The Wild Bunch - as they should - hardly get to recoil at TCM.

It's not the first slasher, but the importance of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to the development of the genre can hardly be overstated. Its vicious, relentless creation of a world in which man is man's wolf was shocking at the time and remains so today. As a literal, physical dissection of the evaporating optimism of the sixties it could hardly be bettered.

Meet the ur-slasher

Lest this blog be accused of lacking Christmas cheer, I decided to do what I do best: watch a low-budget slasher film. But not, gentle reader, any old dead teenager flick. No, nothing but a Christmas-themed horror picture would do, because if the stylish slaughter of innocents is not the reason for the season, I don't know what is. (Jesus is. It's not Herodmass, after all.)*

Black Christmas isn't just yuletide-friendly, though.  It's also an important film, after a fashion: released on 11 October 1974, Black Christmas is the first North American slasher film, predating Halloween by four and Friday the 13th by five and a half years. That's how long it took for the template the film pioneered to catch on - which may have something to do with the fact that the first, glorious flowering of this most American of horror subgenres was produced in Canada.

It's shortly before Christmas at the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house, somewhere in the northern US (portrayed by Toronto). The girls' Christmas party is interrupted by an obscene phone call from a man the sisters have dubbed the moaner for his fondness for gurgling, screaming, and animal noises. Foul-mouthed Barb (Margot Kidder, of Superman fame) shouts at the caller, causing 'professional virgin' Clare (Lynne Griffin) to worry about provoking someone obviously unhinged. She's right to fret since, while packing in her room, Clare is asphyxiated in plastic foil by an unseen assailant.

The next day Clare's father, Mr Harrison (James Edmond) arrives in town to pick up his daughter but finds that the house mother, Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman) hasn't seen her of late. (Mrs Mac, by the way, is an alcoholic spinster, and I'm never quite sure whether to be grateful or appalled that screaming stereotypes tend to die early on, as this character does.) Meanwhile, Jess (Olivia Hussey, who shot to fame with Romeo and Juliet) meets her boyfriend, highly strung music student Peter (Keir Dullea, of 2001: A Space Odyssey), to tell him she is pregnant but will have an abortion. Peter takes this badly, and the two part without agreeing.

Mr Harrison and the concerned sisters report the threatening calls to the police. There, Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon, who later played a similar authority figure in A Nightmare on Elm Street) decides to put a tap on the house phone. (The specifics of telephony - rather different in those primitive days - are rather important to the plot, and are thankfully well explained.) Before long, the police discover the shocking truth: the calls are coming from inside the house.

As a horror film Black Christmas is extraordinarily satisfying: suspenseful and, well, scary - a less common trait in the genre than one might suppose - it towers over its lesser brethren. That's in no small degree thanks to having an unusually threatening baddie in the Moaner (voiced by Nick Mancuso and director Bob Clark himself). Most slasher villains are not actually insane: sure, Michael Myers spent most of his life in an asylum and his madness is frequently asserted, but for all practical purposes he's a functioning guy who just really enjoys stabbing teenagers to death. The Moaner, on the other hand, is frakking psychotic, and the psychosexual menace in his calls ('Let me lick your pretty piggy cunt!') makes your skin crawl in ways simpler murderfests cannot muster.

It can't be denied, unfortunately, that Black Christmas is filled to the brim with padding - although at the time many superfluous subplots seem like they'll lead to something, and I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. For example, the search for a missing teenage girl keeps Jess, Phyl (Andrea Martin) and Mr Harrison occupied during the film's second act, but ultimately peters out. At least they're always diverting, thanks to the well-written script by Roy Moore. (My favourite moment occurs when Phyl's boyfriend Patrick (Michael Rapport), dressed as Santa Claus, glumly mutters 'Ho ho ho shit... ho ho ho fuck' into his fake beard.)

It's well-acted, too: Margot Kidder as the hard-drinking Barb, who enjoys shocking people with tales of her promiscuity to hide her lack of meaningful relationships, is perhaps the best, but Olivia Hussey comes close despite being hampered by an unsteady accent. Then there's the undeniable fact of the film's feminist subtext - surprising in a subgenre generally known for its vicious misogyny. Like many slashers, Black Christmas is in no small part about a man violently reasserting control over women; unlike some of its brethren the film problematises the patriarchal murder spree rather than celebrate it.

That feminist edge is present in our Final Girl, too. Jess, you'll recall, is pregnant out of wedlock and determined to have an abortion, and yet she's a fully drawn, rounded human being. Her let's-get-married-and-have-the-baby boyfriend, with his obsessive need for control, is clearly the less mature of the two. I'd argue, in fact, that the old 'sex equals death' cliché conceals the fact that survival in a slasher film is not primarily about virginal purity but about level-headedness and maturity - qualities exhibited by the nonvirginal Jess and the virginal-by-lack-of-opportunity Laurie of Halloween, but not by their promiscuous friends. Seen in that light, Black Christmas is a far less heterodox slasher than it seems at first.

Bob Clark's direction is far too eager to waste time with gratuitous shots from the killer's point of view but is otherwise good: the best scenes, for my money, are a slow close-up pan over the girls' faces during the moaner's first call and an eeriely beautiful murder committed with a crystal unicorn statue, in the film's most Italian moment. Black Christmas never hides the debt it owes to the giallo: the telephone subplot is cribbed from Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), as is what Tim Brayton has termed the uncovering of the tableau, the scene - present in most slashers and gialli - in which the Final Girl discovers the bodies of her slain comrades.

These characteristics lead me to identify Black Christmas as the first slasher film, despite the fact that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released ten days earlier. Tobe Hooper's violent fantasy grew out of the very American countryside-revenge film typified by Deliverance (1972) rather than the giallo, and the series has retained that genre's tropes - incestuous, unhygienic hillbillies, a rural, Southern setting, a group or family of killers rather than a lone murderer - to the present day even as it's been intertwined closely with the true slasher.

If Black Christmas still feels like a giallo in places, it has already transcended that genre and created something new - new in 1974, that is: after the Friday the 13th series set to churning out braindead paint-by-numbers slashers, its originality is easily missed almost four decades on. Many of the tropes it introduced - the lone, unseen killer, the meat whittled down one by one, the Final Girl, the crucial role of the telephone - form the bedrock of the genre to this day. Black Christmas is not, however, only the archetypical slasher. It's also one of the very best, and has lost little of its raw creepiness.

*And now I find myself wishing someone would do a slasher adaptation of the Christmas story, with Jesus as the Final Girl.

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.

The Graduate is a fine example of an almost extinct subgenre: the funny comedy. Once, you see, funny comedies were fairly common, but in recent years they've been crowded out by scatological and infantile varieties, as well as alleged comedies that contain no jokes (Definitely, Maybe). But first things first.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, aged thirty in a comical case of Dawson Casting), has recently graduated from university and returned home to his affluent parents and their dreary friends, who are inexplicably enamoured with him (and want to recruit him for tedious careers). Plagued by ennui he begins an affair with Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's business partner. Things take a dramatic turn, however, when Benjamin is forced by his parents to date the Robinsons' daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), and ends up falling for her, much to Mrs Robinson's chagrin.

Let's get this out of the way first: no, The Graduate is not a universal tale of young people's disaffection. Benjamin, unlike most twentysomethings, is filthy rich and, even near the end of the post-war era of prosperity, spoilt for choice among high-flying careers. (As Roger Ebert remarked, 'I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics'.) It's a story of the horror of a life of luxury mapped out for you from birth: a dystopia, I suspect, that many would gladly trade for their less glamorous lives.

So yes, it's a self-indulgent story of privilege. What's more, it is curiously free of any of the struggles of the 1960s: no race conflict, no Vietnam War, no drugs, no real rebellion, in fact, at all: just a curious sense of being adrift. Perhaps the sanitised world the Braddocks inhabit was shielded from these tremors; perhaps that's not what Mike Nichols was interested in.

Ah yes, director Mike Nichols! For I referred to the fact that The Graduate is a funny comedy, and the inspired direction has a lot to do with that. The most famous image from the film is, of course, that of Mrs Robinson putting on her stockings while seducing Benjamin, embodying their lazy objectification of each other; another well-known sequence, Benjamin driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, was later to be lovingly ripped off by Cruel Intentions. The editing absolutely needs to be mentioned: my favourite moment is a cut from the protagonist lunging forwards in the swimming pool to a scene I dare not spoil.

All this with a whip-smart comedy script, full of hilarious lines ('Are you here for an affair?' can hardly be bettered, and the subsequent scene of Benjamin being accidentally introduced to various strangers is  priceless), although the later turn into drama is not handled as well as it might have been. While The Graduate is clearly a product of its age, it remains mercifully free of the mustiness that can afflict some pre-1970 films.

That leaves us with the performances. To be frank, neither Hoffman nor Ross are exactly brilliant; both struggle with underwritten characters, and Hoffman shows few signs of the actor we know & love. But Bancroft shines as Mrs Robinson, dominating every scene she's in, although the script serves her ill during the third act. Not a timeless masterpiece, perhaps, but an excellent comedy well worth treasuring in our depraved age.

Headin' nowhere

(Note: much of the historical context, and some of the analysis, is drawn from two sources: Bonnie and Clyde by Lester D. Friedman and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Friedman, who seems quite the expert on the film. I won’t reference rigorously, this not being an academic essay – just note that I’ve stolen much of the material.)

The ‘New American Cinema’ (c. 1967-1981) was without doubt the richest period of Hollywood. Easy Rider, The Godfather and its sequel, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Badlands, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall… That’s just a few of the most important films of that magical decade-and-a-half when new filmmakers revolutionised cinema. They were auteurs, fiercely protective of their individual visions, but by common consent they had one thing in common: they were unleashed by Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was created first and foremost by the passion of four men: first-time screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, producer and leading man Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn. Beatty wanted to gain more independence within the studio system, while Penn was eager to realise his vision of a film inspired by the New Wave that was then in full bloom in France. Indeed both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were in talks to direct the film: while Truffaut made some very specific suggestions that survived in the final product (such as the high angles during car chases), Godard wanted to make the film resolutely his own and set it in the modern day. But Penn won the day, and being no Godard can be a good thing: while still an auteur, he did not insist on being so idiosyncratic and, frankly, difficult. So, like it or not, Bonnie and Clyde is far more accessible (‘easy’, I guess) than your average French film. It was a box-office flop on its limited release in October 1967, but the immediate critical controversy it spawned and the ten Oscar nominations received persuaded executives to re-release the film in early 1968, and the rest is history.

After an astonishingly effective opening montage of Depression-era photographs that begins in silence, the film proper starts with a close-up image of a woman’s mouth. She’s Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), and she spends this opening scene naked. Hollywood naked, you understand: it’s quite clear she is, but you don’t see anything. Still, that’s Penn telling you straight away that what you’re about to see will be taboo-breaking and exciting in all sorts of ways. From her bedroom window, Bonnie observes Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) trying to steal her mother’s car. This leads to him inviting her out for a drink, and when he tells her that he has just been released from jail after serving time for armed robbery, she not only suggestively strokes the gun he produces to show off (really, it’s very suggestive, and no-one in 1967 was in any way likely to mistake it), but also dares him to rob a shop for her. Which he does, and she is so excited by this that it takes little persuasion from Clyde to convince her to abandon her tedious existence as a waitress and follow him on a life of driving cool cars, taking what they need without asking, and being wildly in love. Not that the last part works as Bonnie hoped: in a major point of the film, Clyde turns out to be impotent, and the external violence leashed out mirrors the characters’ inner frustration.

Bonnie and Clyde is very clearly divided into three acts, each ending in violence: in the first part, the titular characters meet and set out on their life of crime. Their play-acting at being gangsters definitively ends when, during a bungled bank robbery, Clyde shoots a bank employee to make possible their escape. The second act chronicles the crime spree of the Barrow Gang, consisting beside Bonnie and Clyde of the latter’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck’s wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), who is drawn into the gang by accident and loyalty to her husband, and the simple-minded mechanic C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). The Barrow Gang’s aimless life of robbing banks and stealing cars comes to an end when they are cornered by police in the film’s hardest-hitting gunfight. In the third act, Bonnie and Clyde are in hiding, hoping for a fresh start, but we know it is not to be.

If that sounds like I’ve just given away large parts of the plot, fear not: the fact that it will not all end happily is quite clear from early on. Clyde’s shooting of the bank employee is the point of no return: from there on, the lovers have blood on their hands and must atone for it in the end. Nor is their journey really represented as a romantic road trip, although it is clear that the characters would very much like to think they’re living wild and free outside societal restrictions. In her poem about their lives together, Bonnie frames their ‘adventure’ as a modern Robin Hood story. She recounts Clyde’s experience of being kept down by the Man: ‘Then he said to me, “I’ll never be free, so I’ll meet a few of them in hell”.’ But in an early attempted stick-up, Clyde is assaulted by the desperate shop owner, evidently unaware that he is robbing not the rich, but hard-working average Americans.

The obsession with image is one of the most pervasive themes of the film. It is no coincidence that Bonnie and Clyde begins with photographs and a reflection in a mirror while the very final frame of the movie is seen through a window. Bonnie in particular grasps the possibility the media afford. She constructs the image of the gang as dashing outlaws posing with guns and cigars by taking pictures with a captured policeman (Denver Pyle) and sending them to the newspapers. If Bonnie projects an image outwards, Clyde creates illusions within their relationship, cultivating hopes of a romantic life that will plainly not materialise. He tells Bonnie’s mother that when he and Bonnie settle down, they will live no more than three miles from her. ‘You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long, honey’, Mother Parker tells her daughter in one of the best scenes of the film. ‘You best keep running, Clyde Barrow. And you know it.’

This rejection at his lover’s hands reveals Clyde’s weakness. From the first, he is not in the dominant position in the relationship a Hollywood lead might be expected to be in. He commits the first robbery of the film in his desperation to impress Bonnie and is visibly the more nervous of the two in their early crimes. Bonnie, the clear protagonist in the film’s first act before fading somewhat in the second, takes easily and naturally to a life that liberates her from the cage she knew before. Where Clyde is inarticulate, insecure (constantly driven by the need to impress his girlfriend and keep up with his older brother) and fails in the bedroom, she is vocal, confident and sexually voracious. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the early impression that she is something of a hellcat, a temptress leading weak-willed Clyde down the path of iniquity. That this is not so becomes clear when the rigours of their run from law enforcement reveal Bonnie’s frailty.

If I’ve now made the film doom-laden and laborious, I’ve given you a very wrong impression. For starters, the entire thing is hilarious. Penn switches between action, comedy and tragedy very quickly. One of Clyde’s early attempts at bank robbery fails when the bank he has chosen is revealed to be abandoned, whereupon he drags the sole remaining cashier outside to explain the situation to Bonnie for fear of embarrassing himself: this is a good example of using humour to further the plot (in this case, showing Clyde’s insecurity). And if not for the humour, let’s face it: Bonnie and Clyde is also great at showing attractive young people posing with guns (which, wrong and reactionary though it may be, are decidedly awesome) and wearing fantastic fashion. Here’s what I mean:

Yeah. Faye Dunaway is decidedly central to the film not only in being absurdly well-dressed, but also in exuding sex appeal (no-one can drink a bottle of Coke like Bonnie Parker). Even if little is explicit, Dunaway is so sensual that it would be astonishing if every moral conservative in America hadn’t been appalled. This brings us to the major criticism the film received then: namely, the accusation that it romanticised violent crime. As I pointed out above, the reality is rather more complex than that, but there’s no denying that young people being in love and robbing banks are cool (unless it’s Malick’s Badlands). And of course the policemen gunned down along the way are more or less faceless goons. So the film has it both ways: it foregrounds the characters’ self-delusion while also letting the viewer feel their appeal.

I am as usual ill-equipped to discuss technical aspects, so let’s do it. Penn’s direction is self-consciously flashy: it works to draw attention to itself, but since it’s excellent, that’s all to the good. A character’s death is filmed with an unsteady zoom from a high angle, an unflinching eye on human suffering. In what is probably the film’s most famous scene, Penn uses rapid cutting to devastating effect. His filming of violence is almost nauseatingly visceral, far more real than what moviegoers in 1967 were used to. No accusation is more wrong-headed than that Penn made violence look glamorous. Instead, he made you feel it. At the height of the Vietnam War, that was a political statement, and one just as relevant today.

Bonnie and Clyde is a rich film. It bears endless scholarly dissection. But for the casual or not so casual viewer, it’s a visceral, innovative and, dare I say it, thoroughly entertaining experience centred on a couple of outstanding performances. Like Godard’s Weekend, Bonnie and Clyde has a sort of inbuilt negative dialectic: it constantly negates the meanings it seems to construct. It’s a cautionary tale about the follies of youth. Ah, but it’s so romantic! As for me, I’ll remember the tragedy and the violence. And Faye Dunaway sporting a beret.

Horror comes home

The development of horror from its origins in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction and dark romanticism* to the present day has always closely mirrored the historical development of society. Early horror was a reaction to the industrial revolution, the enormous development of the productive forces creating a contradiction between an increasingly urbanised population and the countryside, now thought wild and uncivilised. The ‘dark places of the earth’ (Joseph Conrad) became an Other, a canvas on which both fears and desires were projected. Thus in Dracula Jonathan Harker travels to a world in which the achievements of civilisation are noticeably absent (no trains in Transylvania). In some senses, it’s an alluring world: most obviously the Count’s polygamy and sexual voraciousness offer an enticing alternative to the public rectitude of Victorian England. But the inviting Other also seeks to devour Harker.

If horror is found outside the bounds of civilised society, it’s not always so easy to keep it out. In Dracula, the titular vampire soon comes to England and terrorises Lucy Westenra. It is this invasion of the domestic sphere by the Other that is the most defining trait of post-war horror. The blank spots on the map had disappeared. To be sure, the city-countryside contradiction still existed and was in many ways at its starkest. A string of horror films and thrillers of the 1970s – Deliverance (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and others – dealt in no uncertain terms with the horrors that befall people from the city as the countryside avenges its victimisation (Carol J. Clover). Of these, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) comes closest to being a slasher film, but it’s not quite there: the distinguishing feature of the slasher, as typified by Halloween (1978) and Black Christmas (1974) before it, is that evil is no longer on the outside. It has invaded the home itself.

Halloween establishes this paradigm in its famous first scene. After opening credits featuring John Carpenter’s incredibly creepy theme, we are outside a small-town house on Halloween night, 1963. A stalker lurks in the bushes, observing a young woman and her boyfriend inside. His perspective is our perspective: the entire scene is presented as a single scene from the first-person perspective (although Carpenter hides a cut at one point). The stalker sneaks around the house, then enters through a back door. He picks up a kitchen knife and a Halloween mask. The couple go upstairs, oblivious to the world; the boyfriend leaves shortly afterwards, rather smug about the world’s shortest teenage sex. Our stalker goes up the stairs. He brutally stabs the girl to death before running outside, where he is confronted by two adults. As the man takes off his Halloween mask, we leave the killer’s perspective for the very first time and realise, to our horror, that he is a six-year-old boy with a disturbingly blank expression.

The killer, Michael Myers, is placed in a psychiatric institution for life, but manages to escape almost fifteen years later, on October 30, 1978. His therapist, Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), suspects that Michael will return to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, to wreak more murder, and tries to enlist the help of local police in chasing down Michael. Meanwhile, local teenagers Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film début) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) are babysitting local children, while their friend Lynda (P.J. Soles), obviously unaware she’s in a slasher film, thinks the absence of adults presents a great opportunity for sex with her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham). Needless to say, ‘the night he came home!’ will be bloody.

Halloween’s greatest strength is its simplicity. You’d think the old ‘escaped lunatic’ trope would make the film tired, but instead it imbues the proceedings with an archetypal character. Michael Myers kills because he is evil, pure and simple; he is only technically human, knowing neither love nor hatred. He cannot be bargained or negotiated with; he does not want revenge. He doesn’t want anything. He is a machine, pitiless and unfeeling. You cannot propitiate him by changing your behaviour. If he comes across you, he will kill you, and therein lies true terror.

On the receiving end of that terror are our actors. Most of the characters, frankly, are paper-thin. Lynda and Annie are both defined chiefly by their great interest in sex, and can only be distinguished by hair colour and the former’s tendency to say ‘totally!’ a lot. Donald Pleasence makes the most of heavy-handed dialogue. The standout is Jamie Lee Curtis. She is at once convincingly caring and tough, afraid and determined. Her hard, almost androgynous features are a perfect fit for the role. She doesn’t exactly confirm to the Final Girl mould, either: while she is indeed a virgin, dialogue establishes that this is for lack of opportunity rather than moral uprightness. I am unsure about the usual pseudo-Freudian psychosexual interpretation of the slasher film. It seems to me that Laurie’s superiority over her friends is not to do with sex, but with emotional maturity. Michael in his mechanical nature represents primordial unreason, but Laurie is mature enough to take responsibility for others as well as herself. While Annie dumps the girl she’s babysitting on Laurie, the latter protects the kids in her care. Laurie has learned to master her baser desires, while her friends’ enslavement to these causes their deaths.

Speaking of deaths, there aren’t that many. Five people and a dog are murdered in Halloween, but two of these killings (including the dog) occur off-screen. If, as the great Tim Brayton has said, the number of murders in a given slasher film is inversely proportional to the movie’s quality (which explains the scores slaughtered in any given Friday the 13th sequel), Halloween must be pretty good. Which it is. Nor are the deaths very bloody: although Halloween is brutal, scary and nasty-minded, there is virtually no gore.

About the direction and cinematography no words need be spoken, for they are fantastic. Some of the most famous compositions (Michael in his white mask rising behind Laurie, for instance) are at once beautiful and horrifying. Carpenter’s pacing, too, deserves praise. In a world in which many horror directors feel the need to pile up the deaths to stop audiences from dozing off, Carpenter devotes the middle section of the movie solely to building an all-encompassing atmosphere of dread. And how well he does it: when night falls, each death is as harrowing as about twelve of the same in the Friday the 13th series. I joke, of course: deaths in Friday the 13th are never harrowing, only mildly diverting, if you’re lucky.

Halloween is a short, taut film. It’s also art. And it’s very scary. It is, then, all the things the slasher genre that exploded into mainstream popularity a few years later with Friday the 13th (1980) and its sequels was not to be. But the sad decline of the slasher film from bad movies into unspeakably horrible movies cannot taint the terrifying power of Carpenter’s greatest work.

*I desperately tried to fit my beloved E.T.A. Hoffmann into that sentence, but just couldn’t. Read the man, will you?

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)