Editorials
Copycat Killers: 10 Slashers Inspired By the Original ‘Halloween’!
No movie fundamentally changed the horror genre as much as the original Halloween. The Shape’s iconic debut inspired — and continues to inspire — countless other slashers. And while most of these movies are only vaguely similar to Halloween, such as Friday the 13th, others were more blatant in their design and execution.
The flicks in question aren’t always set on Halloween, the victim doesn’t have to be a babysitter, and the antagonist may or may not even be masked. However, despite the superficial differences, these ten examples are unmistakably influenced by Michael Myers’ first killing spree.
Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981)
Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (or simply Nightmare) has a well-earned reputation for being sleazy and gruesome. Romano Scavolini‘s previous work in pornography comes out often in this erotic slasher, but if there’s anything to take away from this exercise in lust and grisliness, the gore scenes are meticulously set up and executed. As in most of the movies here, the killer has escaped a hospital and is out for blood. In this case, Baird Stafford‘s character has schizophrenia, and he’s been subjected to heavy drugs and experimental psychotherapy.
Trick or Treats (1982)
Gary Graver (also known as Robert McCallum) delivered perhaps the zaniest Halloween cash-in with 1982’s Trick or Treats. The movie begins with Carrie Snodgress‘ character having her husband (Peter Jason) committed to a psychiatric hospital against his will, and after a couple of years, he returns to get revenge on his ex. Meanwhile, Jackelyn Giroux‘s character is more afraid of the kid (Chris Graver) she’s babysitting on Halloween than his father, who’s now thrown on a nurse’s uniform and is bumbling his way toward their house! Trick or Treats isn’t an effective slasher, yet its weirder moments will make you laugh.
Alone in the Dark (1982)
Dr. Loomis fans will want to watch this post-Halloween slasher co-starring Donald Pleasence. A year after resuming his iconic role opposite Michael Myers in Halloween II, Pleasence played another psychiatrist in 1982’s Alone in the Dark. This time around, there are four killers (Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Erland Van Lidth, Phillip Clark) on the loose after a blackout frees them from a psychiatric hospital. The escapees then proceed to terrorize the family of another doctor from the same hospital. Jack Sholder‘s directorial debut not only adds more villains to the mix, it’s also a pioneer in the home invasion subgenre.
The Initiation (1984)
There was a small burst of dream-themed slashers starting in the early ’80s. A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most known example, though it technically came after (and eclipsed) The Initiation. When Daphne Zuniga‘s character is plagued by unsettling dreams, she and a grad student (James Read) conduct a sleep study to get to the bottom of these recurring nightmares. The terror escalates once the protagonist and her fellow pledges stay overnight inside a department store as part of their sorority’s initiation rituals. It might not seem clear how this slasher is particularly influenced by Halloween, but in time the inspiration becomes more evident.
Sorority House Massacre (1986)
Sorority House Massacre borrows from Halloween II as well as the original 1978 movie. In this slasher, which also uses the aforesaid dream theme, Beth (Angela O’Neill) is stalked by her homicidal brother, who’s freshly sprung from a — you guessed it — psych hospital. The setting is now a sorority house, and Beth shares a sort of telepathic connection with her murderous sibling. As unoriginal as it is, Sorority manages to scrounge up some decent suspense. There are two sequels, both of which are ridiculous in their own special ways.
Blood Rage (1987)
No holiday was left unturned as slasher filmmakers looked for new settings and gimmicks in the ’80s. With Halloween already taken, the folks behind Blood Rage settled on Thanksgiving Day. Ten years after a brutal incident at a drive-in theater, a man’s brother escapes from a psychiatric hospital to get revenge. He crashes his family’s Turkey Day festivities and carves them up. Blood Rage is regarded for its especially gory set pieces.
Offerings (1989)
By 1989, slashers weren’t as popular as they were earlier in the decade. This of course didn’t stop the stragglers from cropping up. One of these slasher slowpokes was Christopher Reynolds‘ underwhelming and poorly received movie Offerings. Here a man (Richard A. Buswell), once abused by family and picked on by his peers, returns to not only take revenge but also find the one girl who was nice to him back then. Offerings isn’t remembered by the masses possibly because it lacks the features that made earlier slashers so successful.
Happy Hell Night (1992)
In place of a sinister sibling or a random madman, the Canadian movie Happy Hell Night has a priest doing the killing. There’s also a supernatural angle to this panned slasher; the antagonist Malius (Charles Cragin) is practically demonic at the time of his first massacre on Halloween, and years later when he escapes his cell and picks off some unlucky college kids during hell night. Brian Owens‘ movie has been picked to shreds over its sloppy editing, paper-thin characters and barely there plot, but Happy Hell Night boasts some solid camerawork and creepy atmosphere.
Lovers Lane (1999)
As much as Lovers Lane is inspired by the new wave of teen-slashers, namely Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, its basic plot better resembles that of Halloween. Here a Valentine’s Day massacre from years ago comes back to haunt a small town. The killer dubbed “The Hook” (Ed Bailey) was sentenced to life at a psych hospital for his crimes. In the present timeline, a new strand of murders suggest The Hook is back. ’90s slashers liked to keep the audience guessing, and Lovers Lane is certainly no different.
Frayed (2007)
No entry here copies and pastes the concept of Halloween more flagrantly than the indie slasher Frayed. This movie initially comes across as totally derivative, and the pacing can be a challenge. However, as the ending comes into view, Norbert Caoili and Rob Portmann‘s story takes on a whole new shape. What happens there in those last couple of minutes redeems the entire movie, not to mention becomes one of the more shocking twists of 2000s horror.
Editorials
Before ‘The Odyssey’ There Was ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ and Ray Harryhausen’s Legendary Monsters
Greek mythology is the talk of the town, or at least of the internet at the moment, and with good reason. Christopher Nolan’s retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey opened this weekend in theaters and, as of this writing, is on track to rake in $120 million in the U.S. and $250 million worldwide.
That’s quite a feat for an R-rated sword and sandal epic based on a story that was first put to papyrus over 3,000 years ago. Of course, mythology has been a film standard practically since the beginning of the medium and has proven to be fertile ground for storytellers. One of the great tellers of these tales is not a writer or director but an innovative special effects master and producer, Ray Harryhausen, and among his greatest achievements is Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
The story of Jason and the quest for the golden fleece predates the Homeric period by a generation or two, and there are certainly similarities to the later works, specifically The Odyssey. Both are seafaring adventures captained by men of both strength and wit. Their crews are filled with colorful characters as well, including Hercules and Argos in the Jason tales and Eurylochus and Polites among Odysseus’s men. Both encounter the beautiful and bizarre on their journeys. The major differences are in tone and theme. The Odyssey is a more contemplative piece about men of war finding it is practically impossible to truly return home.
Jason and the Argonauts, especially in the hands of Harryhausen, producer Charles H. Schneer, director Don Chaffey, and writers Beverly Cross and Jan Read, is a tale of adventure, romance, betrayal, gods, and perhaps above all—monsters.
Strictly speaking, nearly all the Harryhausen films are fantasy films, but all are filled with some of the most incredible monster creations in all of cinema. Telling mythological stories was a way of making monster movies that parents would not object to their children seeing. That whiff of the movie-going experience being educational gave him license to bring to life dozens of indelible creations, starting with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 all the way to Clash of the Titans in 1981. So, rather than spoil the story of Jason and the Argonauts, I will be focusing on its main attraction, its unforgettable monstrosities.
Talos: The Bronze Giant That Changed Movie Monsters
After Jason (Todd Armstrong) and his crew set off on their quest aboard the Argo, they quickly find themselves running out of food and water. Calling upon the help of his protector Hera, Queen of the Gods (Honor Blackman), Jason is guided to the Island of Bronze but warned not to take anything from the island but food and water. While chasing a herd of goats, unlikely pals Hercules (Nigel Green) and Hylas (John Cairney) discover the gargantuan bronze statues of the gods and Titans created by the long-departed Hephaestus.
In the base of the statue of Talos, they discover the treasure trove of the gods, and Hercules decides to take a giant golden needle that he intends to use as a javelin. Of course, this awakens Talos, who pursues them back to the Argo.
Talos was one of Harryhausen’s favorite creations, and he reveled in giving life to the stiff movements of the man of bronze. In one sequence, Talos blocks the narrow waterway that is the only means of escape and plucks the Argo out of the sea as though it were a toy, shaking the crew overboard and breaking the mast in two. Jason once again asks Hera for help, and she advises him to “look to the ankles” of the statue. He spots a kind of hatch on the heel of the giant and, after much struggle, removes it, releasing a flow of steaming liquid that is apparently the driving force of Talos, who weakens, cracks, and falls to the beach, breaking into pieces.
Echoes of this scene can be found in all kinds of stories from Achilles’ heel to the small vulnerable spot on Smaug’s belly in The Hobbit, to tangling the legs of the Imperial AT-AT’s in The Empire Strikes Back. Even the Death Star has a touch of Talos to it.
Harryhausen’s Harpies and Hydra Bring Ancient Myth to Life
Next, the Argonauts encounter the old man Phineas, played by Patrick Troughton of Dr. Who (he played the Second Doctor) and The Omen (1976) fame. As punishment for sins that go unnamed in the film, Zeus torments Phineas day and night with harpies who steal his food and leave him only scraps.
The harpies are flying, blue, rather demonic-looking creatures complete with bat wings and horns. They look something like living gargoyles and are masterworks by Harryhausen. The crew lures them into the ruins of a temple and covers the entire structure with a net before releasing the top and snaring the harpies. The stop-motion work in this sequence is some of the best Harryhausen ever created and is seamlessly placed into frame with the live-action elements, as was among Harryhausen’s greatest strengths.
The special effects of the film use every tool available at the time, as demonstrated by the next major effects sequence, “the clashing rocks.” The sequence utilizes stop motion, miniatures, rear projection, location and stage work with the actors all blended together, sometimes into a single shot. The clashing rocks are more-or-less a rock slide, but combined with the destruction of a different ship that tries to make passage between the rocks and the knowledge that Hera is now forbidden to interfere with Jason’s fate, real stakes are afforded to the scene. Hera pulls a fast one on Zeus (Niall MacGinnis), however, which allows Triton, king of the Mer-people, to rise from the sea and stabilize the rocks, giving the Argo safe passage.
The crew then rescues Medea (Nancy Kovack) and heads to their final destination, Colchis at the end of the world, where Jason and the Argonauts are welcomed by King Aeetes (Jack Gwillim). Eventually, after a betrayal and turn of events, Jason finds the golden fleece, which is guarded by another great Harryhausen monster, the Hydra, a multi-headed serpent. The most famous aspect of the Hydra, growing back two heads for every one cut off, is not depicted here, but the sequence is still harrowing.
Jason fights the dragon with his sword and at one point is wrapped in its tail, depicting Harryhausen’s love of intercutting and interrelating his stop-motion creations with actors and other live-action elements. The sequence also demonstrates that the artistry of Harryhausen and the craftspeople in his workshop was not limited to fantasy creatures; they were also masters of recreating believable human figures.
Why Harryhausen’s Monsters Still Feel Alive
Perhaps the most famous Harryhausen creation, the one that has had the greatest lasting influence, is what is called in the film the “children of the hydra’s teeth” and the “children of the night” by Aeetes, who calls on the goddess of darkness Hecate to bring them to him. Fire rains down from the sky and reduces the hydra to a skeleton. Aeetes orders his men to gather its teeth, which he collects in a helmet and, cornering Jason and his men, sows on the ground like seeds. Reanimated skeletons of dead soldiers rise up out of the ground and attack the Argonauts in what is certainly one of the most iconic sequences in all of fantasy cinema.
It is an expansion of a similar scene in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in which the fearless sailor fights a single skeleton, but this time there are more than half a dozen reanimated warriors complete with the famous “Harryhausen brow,” in which the empty eye sockets are given a sinister frown. Even today, the sequence is thrilling. Though our technology has given us tools that look more realistic, there is a magic in stop-motion that remains unmatched despite all our advances in CGI.
This sequence has directly influenced many movies over the years, but for the horror crowd, the clearest examples are Freddy’s skeleton fighting Donald Thompson (John Saxon) in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and the deadite army in Army of Darkness (1992). The animators even included the slouch of the “children of the hydra’s teeth” in the Nightmare 3 scene, and Sam Raimi insisted the Army of Darkness skeletons all have the Harryhausen brow.
Beyond these films, Harryhausen’s work has had a massive influence on horror, fantasy, and science fiction films for decades, while also making an indelible mark on popular culture at large. Among his acolytes are stop motion genius Phil Tippett, and filmmakers including Joe Dante, Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, Don Coscarelli, and many others. The fingerprints of Harryhausen can in many ways be seen even in Nolan’s The Odyssey, which relies on tricks from throughout film history rather than only more recent innovations like CGI.
Above all, Harryhausen was a storyteller who sought to make audiences fall in love with the great adventure stories that have been with us for thousands of years. These stories speak to the heart of our humanity in ways that will always feel fresh when told in innovative ways. Harryhausen also always had in him the true joy of creation. Bringing his monsters to life was a long, sometimes tedious, process, but Harryhausen clearly understood that all that time and attention to detail would imbue every creation with humanity that cannot be replicated by taking the easy way around.
Despite the limitations of budget, star power, and other resources that his films often lacked, that love of storytelling always shone through. Perhaps that is why his creations endure along with the kinds of ancient stories he so loved to tell.
At their heart, they are one thing above all—deeply and undeniably human.
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