Halloween – The 25th
Anniversary Edition (Divimax Series)
Picture: B-
Sound: B Extras: B Film: B+
In the late 1970s, there was once a fine film magazine
called Cinemonkey. Yes, Cinemonkey. Their spring 1979 issue was focusing on the
films of 1978, including remarkable films like Michael Cimino’s The Deer
Hunter, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, Terrence Malick’s Days of
Heaven, Walter Hill’s The Warriors, and even David Lynch’s Eraserhead. This was still a time that Hollywood could
get great films made, and the atmosphere encouraged bold independent filmmaking
when the word still really meant something.
That issue (Volume 5, Number 2 aka #17) also had an essay on John
Carpenter’s Halloween in which its author, Sean Mercer, names the film
best of the year.
It also reminds us what it was like to have a great year
of films, something that we do not see much anymore. Though it is not necessarily as challenging as most of those
films, it also reminds us that at one time, Halloween was a picture people
took more seriously. Of course, any
degradation of the original is due to its numerous sequels that have been
virtually unnecessary. Even though the
first sequel tries to continue the Horror by upping the murders and their
gruesomeness, it still cannot compete with this original. Despite this and the inane (insane does not
seem like the choice word in this particular case) number of lame films at the
time that tried to duplicate its success, the original endures because of
Carpenter. But there is one other
reason the imitators and sequels have hurt the original: bad video copies.
Ever the popular rental and purchase title, the film
drifted through lame VHS & Beta releases until Criterion did a double disc
set in the 12” LaserDisc format. That
was a loaded special edition set. When
the DVD format arrived, upstart Anchor Bay got the rights and promptly issued a
disastrous basic disc that everyone hated, awful sound and picture included. They then did a special edition that offered
better picture and 5.1 remix of the monophonic soundtrack, with cinematographer
Dean Cundey supervising the anamorphically enhanced image. Since then, High Definition technology has
progressed, so with that version having sold out in three editions, here is the
new version form their Divimax series.
So far, the series has produced two winners, a restored
director’s cut of Michael Mann’s Manhunter and upgraded special edition
of George Romero’s Day of the Dead.
Besides a new video transfer, this newest 25th Anniversary Halloween
offers the audio commentary from that long-gone Criterion set, which is enough
alone for fans to get this new set.
That should also put a dent into the secondary market value of the laser
set.
However, though this is relatively the clearest and cleanest
the film has ever looked on home video in certain ways, the colors are often
inaccurate throughout. Oranges, browns
(the season’s natural colors, though faked somewhat for the film, which was
shot in spring), shades of grays and large patches of blue are missing, or have
been botched. Since the Cundey
guidelines are in the possession of Anchor Bay, why did this happen? Why were they not used? How could this get by them?
Though this technical fiasco has been reported elsewhere,
no one has addressed the possibilities of what led to this. It is easy to claim ignorance, but there may
be a more profound problem. When Fox
first issued Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) in a LaserDisc boxed set of its
own, it was not bad for its time. Then
a basic LaserDisc was issued with THX certification and a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix
that took the 70mm Dolby magnetic stereo multi-channel and made it rock. Along with the once-planned DTS LaserDisc
being cancelled, Fox’s DVD (the first and only one out at presstime, lacking
DTS) was also a disaster. As compared
to the 5.1 Dolby THX LaserDisc, the DVD picture was missing information on the
sides, was pale by comparison, and butchered the 5.1 sound into something
muddled and indescribable. Like this
new Halloween, note how the picture suddenly was lighter, less
foreboding, and color-incorrect.
Part of this comes from technocrats who have limited
knowledge of filmmaking and want to make images “clearer”, which really means
brightening them up unnecessarily. Part
of this comes from a television mentality, the video age that spoon-feeds its
audience to make sure they can see everything.
It treats films as a total commodity, not as an art. This feeling of infantilized “happiness”
also comes form the feel-good films of the 1980s, but even Steven Spielberg has
not been this bright and chipper in his visuals since before Schindler’s
List (1992), so this mentality is as wrong as it is out of date.
If you think about it, these are being done to many films
on video and even in bad restorations, but it is especially a problem here
because these are pictures form the Horror genre. How does this NOT dawn on the people doing the telecine
film-to-tape transfers? Are they afraid
they might kill the viewer if the film is too visually suspenseful? There is also the Svengali mentality, as if
the transfer person(s) were somehow the true artists of the piece, even though
they had NOTHING to do with producing it.
The image is presented anamorphically enhanced from a High
Definition transfer, but tampering with the colors have also softened details,
such as simple print writing on signs.
The 2.35 X 1 frame seems to have been retained well for the most part,
but that does not help the telecine color problem. This is not unlike a colorized film where there is something odd
about the way the colors sit. Think one
generation later of the painted-on look the awful basic DVD of Mike Nichols’ Wolf
(1994) and you also get the idea. The
final picture problem is the elimination (if we can call it that in some cases)
of grain, as if all grain was the enemy and a bad thing. Again, it is that TV mentality seeping in
where it does not belong. That would
explain some of the detail trouble here.
The soundtrack is available in 5.1 Dolby Digital AC-3 and
2.0 Mono mixes, the latter attesting to the film’s optical mono originals. This is the same 5.1 mix as the previous
Anchor Bay re-issues, but seems to have a touch more bass. There are brief moments of “wow” and warping
on the score, but that is minor. However,
for all the films they are redoing in DTS ES, why not this one? Especially when the soundtrack is more
dynamic than this Dolby mix offers, that would have been awesome. With the picture trouble here, that will now
be a wise thing to do in the next edition.
The extras are decent, including a poster/stills section,
DVD-ROM screenplay like Anchor Bay has done on many of their recent DVDs,
DVD-ROM screensaver, three filmography/biographies (co-writer/director
Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, and producer/co-writer Debra Hill), the
87-minutes-long documentary shown on the AMC cable network, a 10-minutes-long
featurette revisiting the location of the film’s shoot, teasers/trailers for
TV, theaters and radio, and a great commentary first recorded in the mid-1990s. Other editions had more footage that had
originally been shown on TV, but letterboxed, and besides the Cundey-supervised
transfer, a dated 2000 featurette is not here.
For the record, Criterion’s set included an isolated music
and sound effects track, a guide to the slasher cycle, and the special episode
of PBS’ Sneak Previews where Roger Ebert and the late great Gene Siskel
discuss that cycle. I do not see how
and why Anchor Bay did not try to add these, or modifications thereof, to any
of their DVD editions.
That leaves us with the content of the film. Why does Carpenter’s original endure so
much? The story is simple, and
Carpenter consciously and explicitly acknowledges the film’s debt to Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in many ways (in dialogue, character names,
and that Curtis’ mom is Janet Leigh), including on a visual level. It is not the hardest film to remember.
We have the psychopath who escapes the mental asylum
(which is the least politically correct aspect of the film is its Horror
treatment of mental health), which the wise Doctor Loomis (Pleasence) knows
embodies pure evil and must slay. He
targets the new youth, who happen to populate the “scene of the crime”, i.e.,
the neighborhood where he committed murder.
It can also be read as a place where the populous commit crime just by
living freely there in a way “The Shape” could not or cannot. He stalks and kills them for living, because
he is death. That is compelling.
Carpenter at his best (The Thing, They Live) keeps
his films moving in a way where it feels like a lived-in world that everyone is
familiar with. That especially gels
with this story, where the killer moves even faster than that world, for which
he cannot integrate. When the sequels
turned into a silly family tree, including having “The Shape” becoming more
known as Michael Myers and related to Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode, it
forever ruined that integrity.
Explaining it away almost makes it something like Science Fiction, but
Carpenter was smart enough to have a Doctor who knew Science had failed in this
case. Pleasence never gives the kind of
explanation that Simon Oakland’s psychiatrist gives at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho,
which pumps up the Horror aspect. It
walks the line between the real world and the potential supernatural/superhuman
one.
That is why the original will always be the classic of the
genre it is. Carpenter and Hill aced
what was going on it the genre at the time, and until Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining came out two years later, were ahead of everyone else. It is the only one of the films that deals
with the killer as “The Shape” and it is that figure in his original form that
powers Halloween. A quarter
century later (already), this is the best way to approach the film next time
you revisit it. This DVD set (despite
flaws) is as good a way as there is to do that, outside of a good film print.
- Nicholas Sheffo
