Now David Gordon Green, whose career has swerved from Terrence Malick-esque indie-hit George Washington to the stoner comedy of Pineapple Express and Your Highness, retreads familiar ground with added PTSD. Friday the 13th may have lifted its gory riffs from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (just as Carpenter looked back to Bob Clark’s Black Christmas), but it was Halloween that paved the way for its blockbuster success.Ī string of inferior sequels and reboots followed Carpenter’s low-budget hit, from Rick Rosenthal’s 1981 Halloween II (written by original screenwriters Carpenter and Debra Hill) to Rob Zombie’s dreary 2007 “reimagining” and its dispiriting follow-up. (“I didn’t mean to put an end to the sexual revolution,” Carpenter laughingly told Simon, “and for that I deeply apologise.”) Yet it also had a punky power that inspired a slew of titillating teen-terror slashers. Starting with George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Simon unpicked the rebellious socio-political threads of films such as Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Shivers before arriving at the more conservative inflections of Carpenter’s ruthlessly efficient modern morality tale.Ī stylishly suspenseful thriller in which teenagers indulging in illicit sex and intoxication are stalked and slashed by a relentless killer, Halloween was a funhouse ride with a puritanical narrative edge. ![]() In his brilliant turn-of-the-century documentary The American Nightmare, Adam Simon located John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween as the end point of a decade of countercultural horror movies.
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