Horror Movies Require An Artistic Touch

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2007)

I buy one bag each of miniature Hershey's, Reese's, Kit Kat, Milky Way and Three Musketeers. On sale. To delight my neighbors' kids who will be knocking on my door on Wednesday night -- Halloween. This morning I open the cupboard where the candy was stashed.
A tragic tableau.
Scattered candy wrappers and empty bags mock me. I think of Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, "The Old Man and the Sea." You remember -- impoverished fisherman rides out to sea in a tiny skiff and bags a colossal marlin with a hook on the end of a rope. The fish is too big for the boat, so he lashes it to the side. Fifteen hundred pounds of bleeding fish in the water? Great. Shark dinner bell. The fisherman fights valiantly to protect his catch, but loses the battle one bite at a time. He returns home with a skeleton tied to his boat.
Suffice to say I fought hard to repel my kids' repeated predation on my Halloween stash, but I lost the battle. One bite at a time.
Ah, Halloween! Monsters, ghosts and things that go bump in the night! I was in the first grade when my grandmother gave me the Aurora model kit of Frankenstein, based on the 1931 classic film starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Never really grew out of my love for great horror stories and films. And I don't mean guys hacking up skinny-dipping teenagers. That's just stupid. I mean great ghost stories, haunted houses, vampires, werewolves and other well-crafted monsters.
John Carpenter's 1978 film "Halloween" is brilliant. Terrifying. Plays your imagination like a fiddle. Astonishingly little blood. I saw the film at the Student Union at Southern Methodist University and will never forget my friend Harry with his head between his knees, screaming. Great fun! Saw the remake. Really hated it. Wasn't scared once. Mostly just sickened. I left feeling like I'd done something wrong. And I have been asking myself why.
I know I'm not a prude. And it can't be the violence, per se. I think "The Godfather" is the greatest American film ever made, and it's replete with violence. It can't be that I felt manipulated, because I pay film studios to manipulate me.
John Carpenter's film was like a well-told story around a campfire. Rob Zombie's film was like someone breaking into my house and assaulting me. The violence in Carpenter's film was like an iceberg -- most of it occurred beneath the surface in my imagination. Zombie's film is too cool for anyone's imagination -- brutal, savage, bordering on the obscene.
Carpenter manipulates your mind and senses with cats yowling, branches scraping the side of a house, lighting, shadows and curtains wafting before an open window. Zombie manipulates me by turning up the soundtrack to a preposterous volume.
When Michael Myers, age 11, kills a schoolmate by beating him to death with a tree branch, Zombie interprets the sound with a noise like a snare drum hit pushed through an effects unit. The victim suffers and begs for minutes on end, surviving blows that would have killed a Cape buffalo.
Carpenter's film has one brief-if-obligatory flash of nubile breasts. Zombie's version shows me a man sitting on a truck-stop commode perusing a graphic porn magazine. But that's not enough. Zombie points the camera over the shoulder of Man Sitting on Commode so that I can see the graphic porn photo, too! OK. I get it, Rob. The man is looking at porn.
Art, by definition, is interpretation. Just 'cause you're angry, randy, a hedonist, sadist or anarchist -- well, none of these things makes you an artist. Alone, they pretty much make you an exhibitionist. A boy sticking pins in an insect just to see what happens.
I rowed out into the open ocean of my willing imagination and tied Rob Zombie's remake to my boat. But in this case, the sharks didn't come nearly soon enough.
Written by Steven Kalas, Las Vegas Nevada