To decide on the best film from the slasher genre is a difficult task for a film buff, especially one who doubles as a horror movie aficionado. Let's face it, Alfred Hitchcock opened the door for movies like this. When it was released in 1960, Hitchcock revolutionized the way people became members of the audience permanently. Before Marion Crane stole $40,000 and stopped for the night at the Bates Motel, people would just walk into movies whenever. In order to build buzz around his latest film, he refused to admit anyone to the theatre after the film began. People wondered why, people began to talk, and people walked in to the opening credits, believing they were watching Hitchcock build suspense around superstar Janet Leigh stealing an exorbitant amount of money from her boss and fleeing town... they had no idea what was in store for the movie's heroine when she made that fateful stop for a sandwich and a shower. Film history was made.
The other film that goes without question for this particular genre, of course, is John Carpenter's Halloween. There is no element of Halloween that I do not believe to be completely and totally perfect. The actors, the clothes, the story, and the music that is almost as scary as the film itself; however, Bob Clark had done the same thing several years before Michael Myers escaped the Smith's Grove Sanitarium and went on an All Hallows Eve rampage. In fact, in many ways, I feel that Clark created a boogeyman one hundred times more terrifying than any other character in film history.
The setting is a sorority house, the days leading up to Christmas. Jessica Bradford is one of the girls forced to stay at the house for the holidays while she deals with a personal crisis of conscience. Phyllis is the smart-looking friend who has remained for reasons of her own, and Margot Kidder plays "Barb", a perpetually sloshed alcoholic whose mother has decided to spend Christmas with her new boyfriend rather than having her daughter home from school. As the girls have one last party before most of them depart, we take on the point of view of someone crawling up the house's exterior and into the attic. Then we get our first taste of what the girls have apparently been experiencing for some time: extremely graphic and unbelievably upsetting phone calls from a myriad voices (man? woman? both?) making all sorts of sexually aberrant and violent threats. Then one of the girls is attacked as she packs a bag to leave, but nobody hears her struggles with the party ensuing on the floor below.
When Claire doesn't meet her father as planned, the tension really begins to mount. The phone calls continue, people are missing from town, the police are investigating the events, but can find no definite correlation. The boyfriends all fall under suspicion and it become apparent that Jess's secret has sent her boyfriend over the edge. Then a little girl is found murdered in the park, and the police decide to put a trace on the phone.
Slightly predictable by today's standards, this film is actually able to stand on its own as an experience in tension and terror.
Also recommended: John Carpenter's Halloween, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th, George Mihalka's My Bloody Valentine, J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Armand Mastroianni's He Knows You're Alone, Roger Spottiswoode's Terror Train, and Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls
No comments:
Post a Comment