Essays
After The People Lights Have Gone Off is one of the best single-author short fiction collections I've ever read, in any genre. It's a marvelous distillation of the imaginative leaps and creative risks Stephen Graham Jones is willing to take in his fiction, and each story
Tracing The Shape
Halloween, like Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, doesn't really end, not in the neat way we tend to think about. There's no real solution to anything, just two people who managed to survive and a whole town terrorized all over again. If you
Tracing The Shape
Sam Loomis has wanted this for a long time. It's the end of a long search, and he's cornered Michael Myers on the top floor of a house in Haddonfield. His gun is loaded, he's ready to make his move. If he does it
Tracing The Shape
Michael Myers is a composite character played by more than one actor. Nick Castle famously portrayed Michael as "The Shape," the masked and coverall-clad Boogeyman who picks his way through Haddonfield with quiet grace and fluid steps. But for one unforgettable moment, another actor went under that mask,
Tracing The Shape
Laurie Strode has placed herself in an impossible position with the biggest gamble of her life. She'd hoped to lure Michael outside by opening the balcony doors in the bedroom, make him think he needed to go chase her through the streets, away from the kids, toward some
Tracing The Shape
If I've gotten across anything in my writing about Laurie Strode over the past month, I hope I've gotten across just how much I think is going on in this character's head. Everything about her, from the way Carpenter and Hill scripted her to
Tracing The Shape
One of the more fascinating things about Halloween is how little, for all the backstory and insight it tries to pepper in throughout its runtime, it seems to care about who Michael Myers was before that night in 1963 when he murdered his sister. Those six years, the ones that
Tracing The Shape
Once Laurie has seemingly dealt with Michael, Carpenter briefly pivots the action back to Loomis. I say "action," but really he's not doing much of anything, and yet the way Donald Pleasence plays this brief scene says everything about where the character is right now. We
Tracing The Shape
When you're in the habit of watching Halloween a lot, as I've been for more than two decades now, you tend to end up in situations where people want to watch it with you. And if you're in those situations, you're gonna
Tracing The Shape
The single most frightening moment in Halloween doesn't feature Michael Myers. Here's there, of course. He's always there somewhere, passing like a shadow over Haddonfield, infecting it with his darkness, his menace, his pulsing drive to destroy. But the scariest scene in the movie
Tracing The Shape
It's finally time for our Final Girl and our Slasher to get to know one another intimately. All the pieces are in place, and all that's left is this, a clash between good and evil, light and dark, hope and horror. And Michael Myers completely whiffs
Tracing The Shape
Michael Myers came back to Haddonfield with a plan. It may not have been a complete plan, and it may have depended in no small part on the obliviousness of those around him, but he knew what he wanted to do when he got home. And we know this because