Tracing The Shape
There's a moment just before Annie Brackett is murdered inside her car at the Wallace house that speaks to a certain thematic undercurrent running throughout Halloween. Annie, clad only in a men's dress shirt, socks, shoes, and underwear, blanket wrapped around her shoulders, takes Lindsey Wallace
Tracing The Shape
What does Michael Myers want? I told you it was a question we'd ask again and again, because I remain deeply fascinated by the choices this man makes. To call him a killing machine stripped of all of his humanity is to rob him of the mind that
Tracing The Shape
The incorporation of children in the Halloween narrative, not just as props but as characters with their own fears and joys, is a crucial element of the movie's success. The film's original title was, famously, The Babysitter Murders, but it was never just about the babysitters.
Tracing The Shape
Our babysitters are in place. The children are in for the night. The TV is on, the phone is ringing, there is candy and popcorn and pumpkins. Outside, a Shape waits. There are many details worth unpacking in the sequence marrying Laurie's babysitting gig in one house with
podcasts
C. Robert Cargill and I have run in some of the same Austin film spaces for some time now, but we didn't actually meet until Fantastic Fest earlier this year. He was gracious enough to agree to come on the podcast, and as luck would have it, his
Tracing The Shape
Sam Loomis is a man haloed by ghosts. We talked earlier about the madness of this scientist driven toward the supernatural by the soulless gaze of a small boy, and that's still there, but even if he wasn't a witness to Michael's first murder,
Tracing The Shape
If you know anything about the production of Halloween, then you probably know that the film was shot not in Illinois in the fall, but in California in the spring. The streets of Haddonfield are quite verdant, the trees full of leaves, so to create some semblance of fall in
Tracing The Shape
Halloween gives me something new every time I watch it. That's not an exaggeration. I have seen this movie at least once a year for at least the last 23 years, and there are still details worth mining, worth expanding. This time around, for instance, I noticed something
Tracing The Shape
Michael Myers doesn't become The Boogeyman until he encounters a child. John Carpenter has done his part over the decades to reinforce the idea that his monster is more force of nature than man, something echoed by Dr. Loomis throughout Halloween. There was a time when it felt
Tracing The Shape
Great Final Girls come in all varieties. Despite what Randy Meeks would have you believe, there is no single formula for nailing the character in any given film. If there was a formula, though, it would be Laurie Strode. Virtuous, apparently pure of heart and body, and determined to fight
Halloween
Sam Loomis is a mad scientist. We don't know if he's always been that way, and we get no clues as to what other factors in his life have driven him to this point, but by the time we meet this man, framed as the hero
podcasts
I've been a fan of Talking Scared, Neil McRobert's author interview podcast, for years. To my mind it's the best show of its kind, and Neil is the best interviewer in the game at the moment. So I was thrilled, as both a listener