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Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.58 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:08:22 (recovery run)

 

I know, I know—how cliché to watch Halloween on Halloween. But here’s the thing: I was short on time because I needed to get my Pandemic Trick-or-Treat Station of (non-)Doom set up outside, and since that included dealing with freezing temperatures and the four inches of snow we’d gotten the day before, I really wanted to get my run out of the way early and couldn’t spend my usual indecisive hour cruising the streaming services looking for just the right movie. Besides, it had been a while since I’d seen the original, and it deserves to be revisited. So, Halloween on Halloween it is.

 

Since there’s almost no chance that anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet (heck, there’s almost no chance that anyone’s reading this at all!), we’ll speed-run the summary: a six-year-old kid named Michael Myers stabs his post-coital teenage sister to death for no apparent reason, spends 15 years catatonic in a psychiatric facility, and then breaks out to steal a William Shatner mask and kill a bunch of babysitters in his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. His pistol-packin’ psychiatrist Dr. Loomis tries to warn the local police, oblivious to the fact that Cassandra-like portentous ramblings about Myers being the Ultimate Evil Ever Unleashed might be a bit of a buzzkill and therefore of limited success. Meanwhile, when all her babysitter friends wind up getting the pointy end of a butcher knife in their various soft bits, it’s up to booksmart-and-dateless Laurie Strode to protect the little kids from the unstoppable bogeyman.

 

I’m not sure there’s anything good left to say about Halloween that hasn’t been said before. It’s got everything you’d want in a horror movie, with the possible and notable exception of excessive gore (which it absolutely doesn’t need). The script is solid—okay, I admit that the characterization is a little thin and some of the dialogue is iffy, but on balance, the characters are believable and their motivations are sound. And that’s why where the script really shines is the plot. So often in horror, people do things for no reason other than the story demands it, or make choices that seem totally counter to their personalities or interests. In Halloween, the story moves forward because everybody does things that make sense for them in the moment—Annie makes popcorn, she spills butter on her clothes, she goes to the laundry room to wash them, she gets locked inside, etc. etc.—and it’s weird how rare that seems to be in the genre.

 

Anyway, in no particular order and off the top of my pointy little head, here’s a further list of stuff I adore about Halloween: Jamie Lee Curtis AND P.J. Soles (I mean COME ON); one of the most effective musical scores ever; Michael’s head tilt while he appreciates a corpse; the establishment of the trope that the nerd girl survives; Donald Pleasence as a psychiatrist who’s somehow diagnosed Michael as being pure evil even though the patient has never said a word in 15 years; jump scares that actually work; that shot when Michael suddenly sits up in the background after having been “stabbed to death”; the way Michael is just walking around Haddonfield out in the open because no one knows enough to be scared of him yet; the way that the little kids are always right about the bogeyman.

 

My big gripe is that Halloween was so good, the makers had to shelve their original vision of the franchise, which was to be different unrelated Halloween-themed horror stories in each installment. The first story was too successful, though, and so Halloween II was instead a direct sequel with the same characters. That’s why Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a totally standalone installment with no Haddonfield, Michael Myers, etc.—they’d gone back to their original plan, only to find that, true to form, Michael Myers refused to die; fans revolted, and every Halloween film since then has been Michael, Michael, Michael. (As for me personally, while I acknowledge it’s not the best in the series, Halloween III is the one I most enjoy watching. I hereby await the mob of angry villagers with torches and Frankenstein rakes.)

 

If it’s been some time since you made that first stop in Haddonfield, do yourself a favor and take another look, because I don’t know how much was sheer genius and how much was pure dumb luck, but the makers really captured lightning in a bottle on this one. It’s not the first slasher out there, but it’s one of the best, and in it you’ll see the seeds of plenty that have come along since.

 

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

 

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.04 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:13:58 (recovery run)

 

Gather ’round, kiddies, and let me tell you about a bygone era called… THE LATE ’80S! It was a time when you had to call local businesses on the phone instead of tweeting @ them and you didn’t even have to dial an area code, a time when the most heated religious debate was VHS vs. Betamax, a time when… Actually, no, you know what? Why should I go to the effort to be a first-person historical source (yes, I’m that old) when I can just point you toward tonight’s totally tubular recovery run selection, WNUF Halloween Special? I chose it as a spooky window into antiquity, because as everyone knows all too well, next to the present and the future, the past is the third-scariest thing out there!

 

WNUF’s found-footage conceit is about as straightforward as it gets: you’re watching a videocassette recording of an investigative Halloween special that broadcast live from the local murder house, which has stood empty since its last resident got obsessed with an old Ouija board he found in his attic and then, y’know, sorta decapitated his parents and stuff. The tape kicks off a little early during the WNUF Evening News, complete with local anchors in crappy witch and vampire costumes, and immediately sets the tone for the night by making two things very clear: 1) you’re going to be watching a LOT of fake ’80s commercials; and 2) everything about the ’80s aesthetic is cursed.

 

After some typical local news fare about dentist Halloween candy buy-backs and crackpot religious opposition to trick-or-treating, we finally begin Frank Stewart’s Halloween special, live and on-location at the Weber Murder House. Frank is a typical smarmyish news reporter and he works the crowd, asking a bunch of costumed knuckleheads if they believe in ghosts, which leads to a few good chuckles. Frank also gives the background on the murder, and introduces us to a husband-and-wife(-and-cat) team of paranormal investigators, as well as a priest he’s brought in just in case they need to do an exorcism. Things eventually start getting weird, but it takes a while: glimpses of motion when the house is supposed to be empty, creepy voices appearing on recordings, equipment smashed by invisible entities, etc. Once the violence escalates, will even an exorcism save them?

 

Story-wise, that’s about all there is to it, and it’s not a lot, but story is clearly not what WNUF was supposed to be about. The look and feel of the recording is darn close to perfect: the low definition, the terrible color bleeding, the scan lines and tracking artifacts during the fast-forwarding scenes. The art direction for what appears IN the recordings is spot-on as well—possibly the scariest thing about WNUF is that these fonts, fashions, and colors really did once roam free and plentiful. 

 

The thing is, unless you’re a pretty specific age, you probably won’t appreciate just how spot-on a lot of this is. I watched Geraldo Rivera open Al Capone’s vault live on Chicago television, so believe me when I say that the notion of a local channel doing a live call-in seance in a murder house on Halloween as a ratings grab is VERY realistic. (In fact, I strongly suspect that Frank Stewart and his moustache are directly inspired by late-’80s Geraldo.) Likewise, cheesy “Just Say No” anti-drug commercials, local political attack ads, pay-by-the-minute 900 numbers, pizza-parlor video arcades, “computer learning centers,” the pervasive hysteric hand-wringing over the alleged increase in Satanic worship and animal sacrifice due to heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons, and SO, SO MANY carpet commercials—all of that is dead-on accurate, yo.

 

That said, I should point out that while WNUF is one heck of a nostalgia trip, it’s not especially effective as a scary movie. There’s nothing in this found-footage entry that comes close to cultivating the sort of dread and fear that, say, The Blair Witch Project can brew up, so if you’re looking for real scares instead of some lighter scare-adjacent Halloween entertainment, you should probably look elsewhere. (On the other hand, Blair Witch doesn’t have a shot of a psychic cat wearing headphones, so hey.) Even if the acting were top-notch (spoiler: it isn’t), it’s pretty tough to build up the sort of tension required for real creepiness when the narrative is being interrupted by commercials every four minutes, which is precisely why you should never watch a horror movie for the first time on basic cable, Tubi, or Pluto TV—but I digress.

 

What WNUF does offer is a little heart, a few decent laughs, and a truckload of authentic 1987-style video. If you’re old enough to remember what UHF programming was like in 1987—and aren’t so traumatized by it that you’d rather forget it ever existed—this movie might be for you. If not, I would guess that you’re probably going to hate it. But as a movie you can throw on in the background on Halloween night, there are worse choices you could make.