Collected & Directed #3:John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN & Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM

 HALLOWEEN

Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, PJ Soles, Nancy Loomis. Dir. John Carpenter, Compass Point International, 1978

I decided to watch both HALLOWEEN & PHANTASM the same day, as they had some basic similarities, being microbudgeted indie horror films which saw almost absurd box office returns vs their budgets. Carpenter's film reportedly cost $325k, Coscarelli's $300k. HALLOWEEN earned $70M, PHANTASM $22M. PHANTASM, though shot about the same time as HALLOWEEN, found more mainstream distribution BECAUSE of HALLOWEEN's runaway box office, released in the blood tide of slasher & slasheresque films cashing in on Carpenter's formula. PHANTASM contains slasher-y elements, but it's a bonkers subdivision of scifi horror, one pretty much entirely of Coscarelli's making. HALLOWEEN might not quite invent the slasher film, but it refines and codifies what will be slasher's de rigeur storypoints moving forward. It is its own thing, but it exists within a recognizable reality. Coscarelli's films appear to exist within a recognizable reality but actually exist in Coscarelli's outlandish imagination, which MAY follow its own rules but it doesn't - well, were you not entertained?

Both Carpenter and Coscarelli embrace not simply improbable but preposterous story ideas. HALLOWEEN posits a 6 year-old child who may well be evil incarnate and who will not ever deviate from that level of pure evil, who escapes a mental hospital and returns to his hometown, where he murdered his teenage sister in 1963, to symbolically reenact that murder by preying on a group of babysitting friends (Curtis, Soles, and Loomis.) Because he's pure evil only appearing to be Michael Meyers, he may be a little hard to kill. Oh, despite having been locked up and all but catatonic for 15 years, he can drive a car & function in society well enough that he's isn't the slobbering wreck a real patient released in those circumstances would be. It's probably the most credible of Carpenter's stories, which include a demonic car, alien occupation, alien visitation, and discovering the Antichist in a jar in a DC church basement. With Carpenter, not only does a preposterous idea not deter me as a filmgoer, it entices me, because I've seen what he does, how he gets me so quickly invested in the characters & what's happening to them that I end up welcoming the preposterousness for giving them something to play against. Is it ridic to discover Satan's son swirling in an ancient glass container in a slummy church basement in Washington, DC? Yep. Would I be as interested in them and their actions/reactions if the Son of Satan weren't involved? Nope.

Coscarelli plies a different brand of preposterous. If little about Michael Meyers feels "real," in some objective conversation outside the theater, I buy right into it and go with Carpenter because it just makes sense to. Don Coscarelli asks me to go with him and I do and it starts to seem like that was a mistake and then he asks me again and I do, again, and repeat. While the spirit of pure supernatural evil residing in some hapless geek in Illinois strains credulity, when I think about it, later, PHANTASM, concerning a 12 year-old boy who discovers the funeral home where his parents are interred actually fronts for an extraterrestrial enterprise to reanimate and reduce corpses in size to three feet tall so they can serve as slave labor on an alien world with a lower center of gravity, never ever makes sense at anytime. I buy into Mike's desolation at the death of his parents and the fear his older brother's longing to leave their hometown and play music creates in him, as I buy all three male principals and enjoy their performances the most, but that doesn't make any of the story of Morningside Funeral Home, Mortuary, and Cemetery and its peculiar proprietor (Angus Scrimm) - "the Tall Man"- more believable or less demented.

Which seems to be the point. PHANTASM is so over the top, so ludicrous, and so unconcerned with telling any story but its own, regardless of my feelings about it, it makes a head-to-head comparison of the two films, and their directors, at least as difficult as belonging to two separate genres. Impossible, really.

I buy Carpenter's premise because of character & story development. My affection for Coscarelli's characters never lessens the absurdity of their dilemma. Even if that isn't Coscarelli's aim, it weakens the film for me. That said, Carpenter's film is a big swing by a filmmaker not really ready to run all the bases but too young & cocky to know what he can't do. The man subsitutes Pasadena in summer for Illinois in fall and makes it work, but it shouldn't. And, like the young, cocky player, he gets into trouble between third and home.

Carpenter doesn't fuse the Pleasence and Curtis storylines until almost the end of the film, and he often doesn't seem to have much for Pleasence to do but mutter dire warnings and pace. HALLOWEEN started life as THE BABYSITTER MURDERS, so most of Carpenter's film focuses on Curtis, Soles, and Loomis but for two characters destined to be murder victims I sure spent a long time getting to know Soles and Loomis, particularly Loomis's Lynda, Curtis's best friend, to have both swatted like flies in the final reel.

Yeah. I'm not 100% on HALLOWEEN. At least, as a story that keeps me on the edge of my seat. It SHOULD, and did for half its runtime, but I was a little relieved to be done when it ended. I'm going to watch it again soon, however, because I admire so much about Carpenter as a filmmaker, in general, and about this film in particular, that I may have my 90% wrong. The difference for me between Carpenter and Coscarelli is this:Both filmmakers take you where they want to go and tell their stories on their own terms, but I've seen both films three times in my life and, while I'll look at HALLOWEEN again as soon as this weekend, it may well be years before I need another outing with PHANTASM. There is much to be said and lots to love and admire in both men's vision, but I'm on Team Carpenter here.

PHANTASM
Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm. Dir. Don Coscarelli, AVCO Embassy, 1979