It's Halloween night, about a month before JFK went to Dallas, and a small child named Michael brutally butchers his older sister. He's sent to the asylum, and he's supposed to stay locked up forever. However, 15 years later he escapes, and guess where he goes? Yup, back to the scene of the crime. This time, Michael has his eye on a trio of teenage girls. Why is he paying such close special attention to a very young Jamie Lee Curtis? Who taught him to drive? Why does his mask look like James T Kirk met a can of spray paint? John Carpenter's Halloween is pure horror. It proves you don't need tons of blood, kills, or a big budget,…

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The holiday of Halloween is more than just a night of candy and harmless pranks. As consumerist tendencies grow and expand financially, Halloween has become not only a celebratory day of the internal desire to change and shift, but a gigantic season in and of itself. Costume stores open as early as late July and decorations are everywhere, appearing in Grocery stores and gas stations just as much as the local retail shop. As a result, the mood of autumn and the spooky turn into the Halloween season comes as early as late-August. I’m not complaining. Halloween allows for a specific and almost indescribable aura to enter the air, floating and observing as it alters neighborhoods and triggers something…

John Carpenter is a history buff.

No seriously, hear me out. I don't mean that I have knowledge of his scholarly habits, and that he is a voracious reader of history texts, but that above many directors, he has a respect for the context and history of a place while others too often ignore it.

This is most clearly true in The Fog where the history of the town quite literally rises from the dead to enact vengeance on those who have ignored it, but it's a thread throughout a number of his films. In The Thing, the spaceship is buried for thousands of years, in Big Trouble in Little China there's a mythology in place that sets up the…

Ms. Activia before she went legit as the girl who is related to the wrong mother fucker. That iconic-as-fuck-pure-fuckin'-genius-holy-fuckin'-fuck-does-it-get-any-fuckin'-better-than-this score. Trick-or-treat mother fucker. First-person hack-a-sis clown-ownage. The compassionate Dr. fuckin' Loomis. Extreme-carjacking. The Evil is loose. Tommy loves popcorn and monster movies. Heavy-as-fuck breathing. Who the fuck gives the boogeyman driving lessons? A pay-phone warning. Speed kills mother fucker. The creepiest-of-creeps playing peek-a-boo behind a bush. The good sheriff. Tales from the graveyard. Yes you should fear the fuckin' reaper, especially when his fuckin' ass is driving right behind you. Acting not-high-as-fuck to fool your dad. All the girls love Ben fuckin' Tramer. A spooky haunted house. Lester the dog knows what the fuck is up. Who's that peeping in…

What am I doing celebrating Halloween this earlier? Happy World Goth Day, everybody! Yeah. It's like Halloween way before 31 October. It's like celebrating Christmas twice..., or Valentine's Day twice? Regardless, today is World Goth Day, mind you, and I had to read a horror novel or watch something, really. The more or less closeted goth in me demanded I did something, anything --beside my thesis about gothic literature in the cinema of Buñuel, currently in progress--, ...and fate led me to John Carpenter's eponymous very own celebration of Halloween on film.

And, among other preoccupations, Halloween the movie has fate as one of its themes. Deranged little Mike Myers (the original one, not Austin Powers) goes upstairs and stabs…

Vuelvo a verla después de no sé ni cuántos años y me quedo con esto:

1. Esa sensación de amenaza constante que consigue el acojonante uso del scope y del Panaglide. Myers puede acechar detrás de cualquier arbusto. Su presencia se siente hasta cuando no está ahí.

2. La dinámica asustar/ser asustado. Es Halloween, al fin y al cabo. El abusón de patio de colegio que es asustado a su vez por Michael. Ni siquiera el Doctor Loomis puede resistirse a olvidar la caza por un momento y darle un susto a los críos que juegan en la casa de los Myers.

3. Loomis es, en esencia, el mismo personaje que el Coronel Trautman en Acorralado. Sus personajes, al menos,…