Yes, I know, it’s a little cheeky of me to convert a note into an article. However, I think I made a pretty decent case here, and as such I decided I both didn’t wish to lose it to the swiftly shifting sea of Notes and wanted those who read chiefly by email to get a chance to give this a read, too.
A marvelously morose Macabre Monday to you all, my magnificent misery mongers. Since it seems lessons from film is something of the topic of du jour, I wanted to touch on one such lesson that can be pulled from one of my all time favorite horror movies. It also just so happens that this is one of the very few slasher movies out there to build a genuine sense of suspense and fear, though that wasn’t always the case for the original Halloween.
I’m sure we all at least know of this movie, and most of us have probably seen it. The original Halloween holds a hallowed (heh) place in film history as being the film that arguably defined the slasher formula as we know it today. However, when put up against its contemporaries, Halloween quickly shows itself to be a very different kind of animal, dripping with suspense and unease thanks to a number of simple but effective filmmaking techniques used by John Carpenter to ratchet up the tension.
Shots from the perspective of Michael Myers where we can hear his breath behind his mask. Shots of him standing in view one moment and disappearing the next. Shots of the car he stole creeping in and out of view as he stalks Laurie around Haddonfield, with all of this supported by the unease that his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, (played wonderfully by the late Donald Pleasance) shows us when he shares tidbits of the sheer lack of humanity he saw in the boy.
Today, Halloween is seen as a classic of the slasher horror genre and one of the very few entries that successfully built genuine suspense by not relying on cheap jump scares and instead focusing on creating the feeling that Myers could always be right around the next corner, waiting for you. But did you know this wasn’t the case at the start? In fact, when John Carpenter showed a test screening to the studio, they were deeply concerned that they might’ve just wasted their money on him because none of them found it scary. In fact, the test screening did such a poor job at building the tension Carpenter wanted that some of those viewing it found it to be comical.
Concerns were laid before Carpenter’s feet - he needed to find a way to fix this, because the studio didn’t want a flop on their hands. He assured them he had a plan, though, because one element of the film wasn’t ready yet: the movie’s famous musical score.
The lesson we can learn from this early version of Halloween is the importance of setting up the right kind of mood in our horror stories. Horror is a challenging genre to write effectively. It’s very easy to either push too far with what you’re writing and make it comically over the top, or to not go far enough and have those elements fall flat. Horror is at its strongest when it sticks in your mind, makes you think after you’ve finished reading or watching whatever it is that’s caught your attention. As writers, our challenge with creating effective horror is to find a way to strike this delicate balance, and to do that we need to set up the correct moods for our stories. John Carpenter understood this, and with just the inclusion of a simple score he wrote on his electric keyboard, he managed to create one of the most suspenseful slasher films in history. We can do the same, proverbially speaking.
I think the key word here is suspense - Carpenter definitely took his lessons from Hitchcock and Psycho. He uses, frequently, a shot that is almost the opposite of a jumpscare; a long lingering take (sometimes on nothing, sometimes on Meyers) or a slow pan. Combined with framing which almost always leaves open spaces or deep shadows at the edge of the screen, and you get a sense through the whole film that the 'horror' could be just around the corner.
I don't think Halloween is Carpenter's best movie (The Thing is his magnum opus), but its certainly the best slasher, period.