A mere month after John Carpenter scared the living shit out of everyone with Halloween; he directed this limp made-for-television thriller starring Lauren Hutton as a television director who is being stalked by a psycho. Hutton moves into a luxurious high rise with open windows, which makes her easy prey for a voyeur with a telescope. He soon starts sending her mysterious “gifts” and crank calling her. The police can’t do anything because he doesn’t “threaten” her; even after he murders her best friend. Finally she turns the tables on her attacker and tosses him out the window.

Carpenter (who also wrote the screenplay) does what he can to elevate the film from it’s obvious Movie-of-the-Week status, with uneven results. He apes Hitchcock (especially Rear Window) as often as he can (even the music and opening titles are reminiscent of Hitchcock), which gives the movie sporadic jolts of energy. The biggest problem with the film is the constraints of the network censors who neutered the movie from providing any real suspense. Carpenter fans may want to see it for the curious career footnote that it is. Fans of Hitchcock retreads NOT directed by Brian DePalma will also want to check it out.

Hutton is fine in the woman-in-peril role, but it’s Adrienne Barbeau (who would later go on to marry Carpenter) as Huton’s spunky lesbian sidekick who’s the most fun. Frequent Carpenter co-star Charles Cyphers also turns up as an ineffectual cop.

AKA: High Rise.

Director John Carpenter returns along with screenwriters Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan for another hour long episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. This one’s got a lot of hot button issues and will probably piss a lot of people off, but it’s also very well made. The story centers on a girl named Angelique (Caitlin Wachs) who goes to an abortion clinic and is pursued by her pro-life nutbag father (Ron Perlman in an intense performance) who is adamantly against her getting the procedure done. The doctors soon learn they have more than a psycho father to contend with when Angelique tells them that her baby (who’s growing at an accelerated rate) is the product of a demon rape and the big horned proud papa shows up to murder his way to the delivery room as well.

Carpenter does a neatly turned revision on his classic Assault on Precinct 13 while also imbuing the episode with some of the ickier moments that made The Thing memorable as well. (The baby looks like a close cousin to the spider-head monster in The Thing.) He also provides the viewers with one stomach churning scene where Perlman performs an impromptu abortion on a MALE doctor. EWW. Unfortunately the episode comes to an abrupt halt and ultimately leaves a lot to be desired in the end (it would have benefited from being feature length and not another hour long cable show). Despite that small complaint, Carpenter does deliver the goods when it comes to the gore and there’s a bunch of excellent CGI enhanced gunshot wounds which are some of the best I’ve seen. If it wasn’t for the woefully unsatisfying ending, Pro-Life could have been among his best work, but as it stands, it’s still a solid entry in Carpenter’s oeuvre.

Director John (Halloween) Carpenter returns to In the Mouth of Madness territory with this tale co-written by Drew McWeeny (AKA: Moriarty from Aintitcoolnews.com). This time instead of a book that drives people crazy, it’s a rare film. Norman (Boondock Saints) Reedus stars as a film buff who is hired by millionaire Udo (Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein) Kier to find the lost film at any cost. Besides In the Mouth of Madness, it also borrows heavily from 8 MM and The Ring as well, but at least it’s gory as all get out. Among the highlights is a pretty good severed head, a vicious eye stabbing and the show stopping scene in which someone’s innards gets ran through a film projector. Now that’s what I call gut wrenching cinema!

The scariest movie ever made. Period. You don’t watch Halloween. You experience it. Director John Carpenter crafted the ultimate horror film, one that spawned thousands of imitators and too many inferior sequels. The reason Halloween works so well is because Carpenter keeps it simple. Michael Myers, evil personified comes home to Haddonfield Illinois to stalk teenage babysitters on Halloween night. Later sequels would try to explain Michael’s origins and tell us WHY he killed, but it’s scarier when you DON’T know. Michael is evil. He kills people. That’s enough for me.

Carpenter uses two main ingredients to create suspense. The first is his brilliant, minimalist score, a score that rivals even John Williams’ music in Jaws for creating sheer horror. His music cues coupled with Carpenter’s use of jump scares are a potent combination. The second is his use of the steady cam. His tracking shots of the victims, both through the eyes of the viewers and through the eyes of the killer (like the brilliant opening sequence) pull the audience into each sequence, setting them up for the next scare. And then there is the mask. Has there been a scarier mask in all horror film history? The ghost white William Shatner mask matches Michael’s own blank emotionless face and allows the audience to project whatever fears onto his eerie visage.

But what really drives Halloween is not the scares, but the characters. Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis, Michael’s intense, fanatical physician gives one of the greatest performances in horror history. Loomis is the only person who realizes what Michael’s really capable of and his paranoia is infectious. Jamie Lee Curtis has a quiet vulnerability as Laurie, the final survivor and main target of Michael’s menace and with this role secured her place as one of the greatest scream queens of all time.

The final twenty minutes of Halloween is among the scariest ever captured on film. Carpenter ratchets up the tension during the brutal sequence where Michael relentlessly stalks Laurie from house to house before the incredible finale where Loomis shoots him six times causing him to fall off a ledge and escape back into the night.

When Halloween was first released, it became the biggest independent movie of all time and overnight cemented Carpenter’s place as the genre’s leading master of horror. Today, it’s still as terrifying as ever.

Stop reading this and go watch it.