Don't watch this alone.
Somewhere in that silent space Where words become forgotten prayers A child sits with tatterred toys Shaking beneath hypnotic stares
The cancer rests within her bones Demon skulls her eyes reflect Eucharist placed upon her tongue Graying product of long neglect
How many children lay dead inside The corners of the human mind Little bones and broken hearts Relics too obscure to find
On the bridge the hero stands Empty briefcase in his hand Ten minutes until All Saints Day Ghosts and goblins in heart of man
What do you do When you run out of places left inside Or of warm nights Or of nice dreams What are you supposed to do
And the dead come forth one by one And tears well within his empty eyes And pieces of him join their ranks The final, solemn compromise
-Uberfetus
The festivities begin. Will you walk away with your soul intact...or will you be changed? Will Death lay his hands upon you and whisper his secrets in your ear tonight? You hope so. Oh god, do you hope to feel his icy touch, to feel his breath against your goose pimpled skin. He's in the air, cooling the fire which you stare into. You feel him in every breath you breathe. The air is thick tonight. As you breathe it in you feel it filter your blood. This same air has filtered others' blood, those who have come before you, and those who will come after. All are present tonight. You can feel their air mixing with your air. Your blood mixing with theirs.
On this night time ceases to exist. The future and the past merge into one mauve blur. Colors and faces swirl before you. Yes that was your great grandfather's childhood figure who passed you that dandelion in your hand. Doubt it not.
We come with no intent to harm, merely to celebrate your life. We are your life and you are ours. The body that lies decomposing under six feet of soil is no longer a vessel but merely an abandoned ship. Waiting in its darkened cell for the light of new beginning. The beginning that is sure to come. New creatures will bring it new life, and it will again become useful. As the sunken ships become new homes for marine life, thus, the body becomes a new home for earthen creatures. Fear not death. It is not the end. It is a threshold to a new beginning. All are one. ALL are ONE. We strive for the same end, only the means are ever changing. Happy Halloween. Happy Samhain. Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again.
Hey! Ho! for Hallowe'en An' all the witches tae be seen Some in black an' some in green Hey! Ho! for Hallowe'en.
Can you live through the night HE came home? The Boogeyman will get you if you don't watch out! Pulse-pounding paranoia screams in your skull as you run for your life! Every step may be your last as you flee from the things that go bump in the night! Feverish with fear, cold sweat clings to your flesh! How real can an electronic nightmare be? Find out!
This game is Wizard Video's second, (and final) attempt at releasing a horror game for the Atari 2600. It is numbered 007, while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was numbered 008, but the two games were released out of order. There is little evidence that this game was actually a licensed translation of the film. It used the same music and plot, but the movie is never actually mentioned, nor is the killer ever referred to as Michael Myers. The cover of the box did have artwork that was suspiciously similar to the Halloween movie poster, but even that is uncredited. The idea behind this game is that you control a babysitter inside a large house filled with defenseless children and a rampaging maniac.
The game is played from a side view of the home. There are two floors to the house and both of them can be viewed at the same time, this kind of looks similar to the game Xenophobe. The game scrolls both left and right, and there are a total of eight screens to explore, which makes for sixteen rooms altogether (counting the two floors). The screens at the far left and far right are safe screens and the killer will never appear on them. Your main objective is to seek out the children wandering the house and lead them to these safe screens. Your secondary objective is to seek out the knife and use it to stab the killer, which gains you a few points and makes him flee from the current screen.
Do you remember playing Berzerk (or Frenzy)? Remember how Evil Otto would always appear soon after you entered a screen, and then move towards you? Well that is exactly how this game works as well, except that the time delay seems a bit more random. Sometimes the killer appears instantly, and other times he waits for several seconds before showing up. Whenever the killer does show up you are treated to a very decent rendition of the "Halloween" theme song, except that you never get to hear too much of it because you have to run away to avoid having your head chopped off.
Allowing the killer to touch either you or one of the children is cause for immediate decapitation of the touched character. Once killed, your babysitter character runs off the screen headless with blood spurting from her neck. You reappear on the next screen with one life subtracted from your total. The children are simply decapitated where they stand, and don't do any of the headless chicken antics that the heroine of the game engages in. My theory as to why the lead character runs away after being killed is that it is a programming shortcut to get her to the next room, but I don't have the source code, so we will probably never know.
The killer is usually very easy to avoid. The easiest method I have found to run past him is to move to the bottom of the screen and wait for him to get close and then run up and past him once he closes in. If you can do this right then he will rarely be able to catch you. This maneuver is a little more difficult to pull off if you are leading one of the children, in that case I recommend running the opposite way instead.
This game is really fun and features some really good music, but it is almost too easy. Atari games are famous for being really difficult, and you shouldn't be able to pick up a new title and be good at it almost instantly. It only took me one play to get this game down pat. After another dozen plays I found that it had become boring, simply because it was just too easy.
Wizard Video sold many copies of this game without labels when they were liquidating their inventory. They simply wrote the name on the cartridge with a black magic marker. The one with the real label is more valuable even though the unlabeled one seems to be slightly more uncommon. The art on the cartridge was identical to the art on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
This game is extremely valuable due to its rarity. Expect to pay over $100 for a copy of this, without the box or manual.
Blinds bend just enough For me to peer out in the night. Street lit with the help of heated halogen.
Children ripping To the next well-lit house, Too fast for their parents.
I return to the dark. Not putting the television on. Fearing it may give me away. Carrier waves, cheerful waves. My stereo, covert pleasure. Toccatas & fugues flow from speakers in unseen corners. My only source of light: an "Itty-Bitty Book Lamp" Picked up at a Waldenbooks. Within its radius, its radiance I sit Watching the LCD bars jump and twitch. Wall of light and music. Muffles the din Of shifting sacks, in greedy hands.
Occasionally the door will bing, buzz or knock, I punch the remote. Willing them further away.
I stood in rapt-jawed attention in the blinding sun in front of the poster hanging at the bone-white giant multiplex in Decatur, Georgia.
My partner in crime over the last few months smiled seeing my childlike joy and said "sure, let's see that one instead".
The movie in question was Rob Zombie's re-imagining of the infamous horror franchise. The original, a late 70s production which put John Carpenter on the map, was a slasher tale about the stalking of Jamie Lee Curtis' character Laurie Strode by her brother Michael Myers, a disturbing metaphor for incest.
As for Rob Zombie, his high-octane horror rock was simultaneously imaginative and a wonderful remix of EC Comics, Alice Cooper, heavy metal and Industrial music. Having transitioned from rock and roll frontman to film director with his direction of the House of 1000 Corpses and the Devil's Rejects, both hommages to grindhouse 70s horror films, he seemed a natural to continue the series.
SPOILER ALERT
Choosing to reimagine the series from the beginning, he interestingly devotes the bulk of the film to factors leading to human monstrosity, as opposed to the results. This Mike Myers we see starts out as a chubby boy whose home life with a stripper as a mother (played by Zombie's wife) and an abusive handicapped foulmouth for a stepfather, provides fertile soil for the monstrous impulses that consume him as an adult. First dispatching his pet rats, he ends up taking pictures of these atrocities which are later discovered and used against him. Zombie imagines Myers as the hideous perfect storm of nature, nurture and neglect.
A bully gaybashing attempt is stopped by a principal, who calls Myers' mother and alerts her to the seriousness of her son's problems. Both boys are dismissed. The bullying is avenged when Myers, wearing a clown mask, beats down his tormentor with a length of wood and then hideously smashes him to death as he pleads, ineffectually, but piteously and horrifically wounded, for his life. Zombie plays this scene to chilling effect as the audience at first partially sides with Myers exacting revenge for his earlier callous treatment, which is hinted at being ongoing for years. Yet he also shows the bully, at the moment of his impending death, to be the frightened child he is and totally undeserving of his incredibly gory demise, and the audience palpably changes its mind about how it feels about the beating. There are no moral absolutes here, no true victim and no true aggressor.
The stress of the discovery of the pre-murder fight and rejection by his sister and stepfather on Hallowe'en trigger a monstrous rampage which only his mother survives (she is at work at the time) as well as his baby sister, whom even he could not bring himself to kill out of love for her.
Sentenced to live in an asylum for the criminally insane, we see his mother and Dr. Loomis, a psychiatrist assigned to him, first watch him slide into a silent world hiding behind hand-made masks, then try to reach him as he slips away from the rest of humanity, and then finally turn his own back on Myers after his mother, unable to take it when Michael attacks a nurse in a moment of inattention, shoots herself dead while tearfully watching home movies of a supposedly happier time with all of her children alive.
His only remaining friend is an ex-con security guard who gives Myers the advice to retreat inside himself, which the dangerously disturbed Myers takes to heart. Towards the end of the film Myers, having grown to a mute seven foot tall monster with prodigious strength, kills the guard and then leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. He goes to reunite with his sister after a particularly disturbing rape of a female inmate by two security guards who make the fatal mistake of repeating the suggestion the childhood bully made about his sexuality. Having escaped from his inner world of maskmaking, jolted out of it by their taunts and the rape, he turns his rage and anger outwards again.
The rest of the movie, plot-wise, is predictable. Loomis begs the police to take him seriously, Myers racks up a body count of various teengaers, and the sister ends up shooting Myers dead, the last frame of the film being her bloodstained and hysterically screaming face superimposed of her crying as a baby, while the camera fades to home movies.
I was stunned. The lights came up and I was absolutely awed. This was a post-Columbine movie, one with sympathy for the devil, and one that suggested that we are ALL complicit in the generation of monsters in our midst. For that daring choice and that point of view, I had to applaud Zombie. Also, for his visual style, raw and visceral and with many a nod to pre-"comedy horror" 1970s grindhouse films. This was a movie in which you were challenged to take more than one point of view, and shift your sympathies often.
From Loomis as a hippie psychiatrist full of psychobabble to a commercial exploitation of his most famous patient to a desperate man who sacrifices his own life to try and atone for his mishandling of his charge. From Laurie Strode being a baby to a strong woman, then a victim, then a survivor, then a banshee-wailing murderess. From Michael Myers being a lonely abused boy to a cold, murdering sociopath to literal boogeyman, then back to a tender brother trying to reconnect with his long lost sister, before trying to kill her in his rage. From the mother, just trying to keep the finances together and promising herself and everyone else that tomorrow she'll get her shit together, to hanging on to the hope that she'll be there for the only child she has left, to distraught and suicidal when she realises her life choices have in part cost her everything.
This is an ugly film. Animals are slaughtered, kids are slapped around and verbally abused. A handicapped man is taunted for his inadequacies. A teenager engages in rather pointless sex (for all intents and purposes selfishly masturbated into by her boyfriend) and is then killed by her own brother. A mentally ill woman is raped by her supposed protectors. And the image of the young bully pleading for his life, sobbing, is well enough acted that it makes you physically ill. Which means that Zombie did his job and did his job very well. This is horror in every sense of the word, which goes beyond shock or fright, but a crawling sense of dread.
But the ugliest thing I saw in that theatre was walking out of the theatre to see about ten children in the single digit ages, having been brought to an R rated film by their parents. That haunted me more than anything else. What the FUCK were they thinking.
Hal`low*een" (?), n.
The evening preceding Allhallows or All Saints' Day.
Burns.
© Webster 1913.
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