Editorials
The One Nagging Problem the ‘Halloween’ Franchise Needs to Permanently Retcon
John Carpenter and Blumhouse Productions are bringing Michael Myers back to the big screen in 2017. Let’s hope they toss one of the Halloween franchise’s biggest problems out the window.
When John Carpenter’s Halloween was released in 1978, audiences were terrified – and we’ve got the vintage audio to prove it. The independent film, which played no small part in launching the slasher boom of the early-mid 1980s, introduced the world to a nightmarish boogeyman in the form of “The Shape,” who would of course come to be known by the human name Michael Myers.
But in the original film, The Shape wasn’t quite human so much as he was a supernatural force, hell-bent on brutally butchering anyone who happened to cross his path. Fifteen years after snapping and slaughtering his sister for unknown reasons, Myers escapes from a sanitarium and goes on a murder spree through his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, a blank white mask covering his face and effectively wiping away any semblance of humanity he once had.
What happened to Michael that caused him to snap? And why does he set his sights on young Laurie Strode and her friends? Carpenter never answers these questions, and it’s because he doesn’t that Halloween remains one of the most genuinely terrifying films in the history of the horror genre.
When Rob Zombie came along and remade Halloween in 2007, he gave Michael Myers the full “origin story” treatment, explaining away his source of evil as the product of a disturbingly troubled childhood. In doing so, Zombie turned The Shape from a potent symbol of terror into your ordinary white trash serial killer, and many fans may never forgive him for that. But let’s be real here: Myers was humanized, in a damaging way, long before Zombie gave him a beard and a backstory.
In the original Halloween 2, reluctantly co-written by John Carpenter, we learned that Laurie Strode was Michael’s sister, thereby explaining why he targeted her in the 1978 film. With that one major addition to the mythology, Myers was more or less given a motive, and if you’re asking me, that motive did a whole lot more harm to the character than good. The Shape’s familial connection to his victims went on to become a nagging issue that plagued the entire franchise, as it suggested that he was only really interested in killing family members. And that’s just not that scary.
Certainly not as scary as a masked maniac choosing his victims at random.
“Michael Myers was an absence of character,” Carpenter noted in a 2014 interview with Deadline, hitting the nail squarely on its head. “And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness – it just misses the whole point of the first movie. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake.”
At this time, it’s unclear what direction Carpenter and Blumhouse are taking the franchise in – and they assure that they don’t plan on giving it the remake or reboot treatment – but if they hope to recapture the terrifying simplicity of the original classic, one thing they simply must avoid is connecting Myers to any of the victims he decides to stick his trademark knife into. Hell, they’d be wise to ditch his human name entirely, as The Shape becomes more and more terrifying when there’s less and less humanity present in him.
In order to make Halloween great again, they need to make The Shape scary again. And the easiest way to accomplish that goal is to retcon all motivation out of the franchise.
Because Carpenter’s right. All that family stuff was a huge mistake.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
We’ve finally arrived at the first of ten 2023 Amityville titles! First up is writer/director Jack Hunter II’s Amityville Ride-Share, a ~60 minute found footage film featuring loosely interconnected (or not) clips.
In some ways, Ride-Share feels reminiscent of the ill-advised pandemic title Amityville Hex, which exclusively featured YouTube creators doing their take on a viral video challenge (ironically several clips in Ride-Share feature this exact same idea, albeit under the challenge is under a different name and premise).
The difference between this and Hex, however, is that there appears to be a knowing wink of self-awareness to the material. And while that may be giving Hunter II and dialogue writer Dann Eudy too much credit, even if it is unintentional, the bizarre meta commentary about gimmicky, cash grab sequels makes Ride-Share more interesting in the long run.
The film begins with a disclaimer that the footage we’re about to see was found abandoned in an Amityville home and that “the video clips you are about to see may not make sense…” This is something of a challenge: it’s either Hunter II’s premature defence against criticism or it’s a hilarious acknowledgement of the “franchise”s notorious refusal to employ things like logic or continuity.
The first few video clips are cam footage from a ride share featuring a male driver and a middle aged female customer. The pair make uncomfortable small talk (she mentions she just got out of jail, and he asks how it was without a hint of irony). Suddenly the words “initiate sleep mode” appear on screen and the woman falls asleep. The driver’s face begins to morph back and forth with Henry (Hunter II himself), then the woman is driven to a crowded warehouse and asphyxiated with a garbage bag.
It’s a solid start for a film, but it quickly devolves into complete disarray. A man named Frank is called, who proceeds to alert a reporter named Kelly (Mary LeBlanc Zaunbrecher), but then Frank is bonked on the head by a clown and both he and the ride-share woman’s bodies disappear before Kelly arrives.
These opening scenes are emblematic of the film’s pros and (many) cons. The sound is rotten (the ride-share woman is barely audible), the “score” – five seconds of distortion on a loop – is abrasive, and the acting is often quite amateurish.
And yet there’s also a sense of unpredictability to Amityville Ride-Share. It’s rarely clear what, if anything, is important, and the constant whiplash between scenes, characters, and temporal setting often makes the low-budget found footage a perplexing mystery, a bizarre oddity, and/or (occasionally) legitimately unsettling.
Case in point: at one point Amityville Detective Whyte (Milton Cortez) appears in a black and white PSA on public access television to comment on the recent spate of murders of local teens, as well as the recent abduction of 15 year old Taylor Marks. Immediately following this, there is a prolonged sequence of handheld footage of the two kidnappers in long-haired wigs threatening the girl with a sickle; the effect has the same grainy quality of a real life hostage video or even a snuff film. (Think amateur The Poughkeepsie Tapes, albeit with garish CGI blood that don’t even come from Taylor’s amputated hand, but rather flows over the screen like a waterfall.)
Several clips reference urban legends, including the aforementioned YouTube viral challenge about the Red Knight, which is an obvious rip-off of Bloody Mary or Candyman.
Then there’s the final sequences, which feature a mother warning a group of girls at a slumber party about Buttons the Clown, who was killed Freddy Krueger-style by angry townspeople for pedophilic activities. This last bit is genuinely harrowing as Buttons and several other clowns are seen on black and white Amityville CCTV, stalking and abducting the girls from deserted streets.
While many of the clips go nowhere or are unconnected to each other, the Henry character pops up sporadically to yell and mug for the camera. Henry is a recurring character in Hunter II’s other films, and his appearances here feel (lightly) evocative of BOB from Twin Peaks. Between him and the diversity of the clips, Amityville Ride-Share sometimes feels like a series of bizarre creepy pastas about a town under siege by dark forces that take the appearance of clowns.
Which brings us to utterly baffling end credits, which begin…then pause so that Hunter II can include ten minutes (!) of trailers for his found footage “series” Paranoia Tapes. Initially these play like real trailers for fake movies (a la opening sequence of Scream 4), but IMDb genuinely lists these ~12 films as part of the “longest running found footage franchise in cinema history.”
What makes this so bizarre? The titles of the Paranoia Tapes bear a striking resemblance to the nonsensical pathway that films using the Amityville IP have taken. Consider some of the ridiculous titles, which include ‘Kennel House’ (entry 4), ‘Siren’ (entry 3), ‘DVD+’ and ‘DVD-’ (entries 8 & 9) and – the most Amityville-like of them all – ’06.06.06’ (Amityville 1992: It’s About Time anyone?)
The fact that these films seemingly dip into other horror subgenres, bear virtually no connection to each other outside of their titles (and the Henry character), and, for all intents and purposes, are basically just low-budget cash-grabs, is all very telling.
Is this Hunter II commenting on the Amityville series? Or he is simply a savvy filmmaker who hitched his own low budget found footage franchise to a larger IP, knowing that an Amityville film was more likely to break out than Paranoia Tapes? I bet it’s the latter, but considering the playful opening of the film, it seems clear that the writer/director has a sense of humor.
At the end of the day, Amityville Ride-Share is undeniably a crap shoot: technically the film is a total mess (sound, dialogue, performance) while the clips alternate between frustrating, barely watchable, and genuinely harrowing. It’s not a great film by any measure, but as a found footage exercise, it is…unique.
Next time: we jump ahead to March of 2023 with writer/director Evan Jacobs’ comedy Amityville Death Toilet.
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