Hacker Cinema
Halloween
1978 · Film · 91 min
Part of Halloween Collection
Directed by John Carpenter
Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.
3 positive2 negative13 neutralfrom 18 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
I always remember a quote I read when I was way younger about Halloween or The Exorcist : "the film's score is a character in its own right".
I effing hate horror movies/stories. I am not sure whether i am too psychologically sensitive or what, but i am different in this from most people i know. How people could produce and enjoyably watch slasher/Halloween/Scream/pointless-murder movies is beyond me.
All of us have a nameless fear of the dread and a darkness inside and it seems to me these sort of movies/stories over-stimulate this part of our mind/brain which i don't think is healthy for the society and the individual.
The world is more deviant than it's ever been. It's just no one cares anymore beacuse it's normalized. Look at Deviant Art, Pixiv, Only Fans, 4chan, etc... It's all over the place. It's just we came to mostly except it. We've got way more explicit popsongs today and music videos that are way more sexualized than 20-30-40 years ago. It's all normalized. In the 70s a film like Halloween was considered too gross. Now movies like Deadpool-vs-Wolverine or the TV show Bad Boys are just full of exploding bodies and guts and no one blinks an eye.
As for people not drinking/smoking/having-sex, yea, because they're all at home looking at those sites I just mentioned, and because between the 1960s/1970s the message sunking that that shit is bad for you. Killing yourself != deviance.
Yeah, I tend to agree. It's disturbing how badly certain groups of people just destroy so much of what they touch.
Almost everyone on HN has witnessed something similar happen in our spheres. We've all seen the marketing dept, accounting dept, and VC chodes band together and push the engineers into the background. They forget the engineers are the people who made the magic happen for the product in the first place. And then, before we know it, the equivalent of a private equity enshitification is happening and its either stripped to nothing of substance or it just coasts along and does the absolute bare minimum to survive. All the heart of the product gone. I know it sounds dramatic, but they kill its soul. I think almost everyone here has seen this happen directly to our own things or to other products.
It looks like they're trying their best to do the same thing to movie studios. Investment firms are buying up studios across the board. Marketers, ad companies, and investors will do their best to suck all of the soul out of movies the same way they're doing it to our field. Pushing the movie makers into the background just like they do to engineers.
The difference from my perspective and the reason I'm not too concerned is this: the tech industry is relatively young and up until recently many of us (myself included) have found ourselves worshiping at the VC/investor's alters. We find ourselves buying into their hype.
Artists on the other hand see the VC/investor's slop alters and see that alter demanding they make a shitty product. In typical artist fasion, they take a long look at that alter, unzip their pants, laugh, and piss on that alter.
While artists have long since learned what happens when you worship at those alters, we in the tech field are just finding out. They've known this since before our industry was even born.
I think this is why we've seen so many phases where movies/music makers, if they have to, they'll just make cheap movies. A good cheaply made movie is still better than a high budget slop shit movie. People show up for good movies, even cheap ones. People forgive the low budget quality if its great.
At the end of the day this is why I'm not too concerned about the future of movies. I have no doubt great movies will still be made. Some of my favorite movies were made outside those people's alters, cheap af. I mean, who doesn't love Halloween or Evil Dead or Clerks!? All of them were made cheap af.
Always remember, Clerks was made by a dude while working as a convenience store clerk. A convenience clerk made it using his credit cards. He had basically no budget.
Yes.
A more obvious example is The Blair Witch Project, which cost less than a million dollars even after all the marketing was done (and cost essentially nothing to make).
The original Halloween was a very low-budget movie considering how long it took to shoot.
Vin Diesel's career was established by his own movie, Strays, which cost less than $50K. Which is zero budget, essentially, for a film that opened at Sundance.
Away from films there are many, many examples of massively popular albums and songs that were made essentially for nothing off the back of simple constraints and creativity.
In the long run, the only way artists will use AI effectively is by deciding on constraints that limit its use.
Because as soon as you don't limit its use, anyone can do what you can do.
So I tend towards thinking that AI won't really move the needle in terms of human creativity. It may reframe it. But nobody is going to be liberated creatively by it.
Tech people, I suspect, tend to assume that AI brings "full creative freedom" to artists the same way a patron does when they say "you can have full creative freedom".
It's not the same kind of freedom.
My daughter [in Argentina] knows more about Halloween than about the local Independence Day. Every kids show in Netflix has a special episode about Halloween.
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
To take one of your examples, the easiest target: letterboxing is a thing because film is created by filmmakers and cinematographers who must decide what pictures go in the frames of their film. As such, they choose to place objects in certain ways, reveal things (think John Carpenter using extreme widescreen in 'Halloween') through use of the edge of the film frame, and make choices of what images go where, much like a painter might outline figures in position on the canvas.
So, whether or not the resulting film had extra space (and perhaps film lights, extras, etc) captured on the initial recording, the film is what's placed in the intended frame.
To think anything else is like wanting to play back the record made in the recording studio, and play all of the hit record takes along with all the outtakes at the same time, just because they were there.
A documentary exists of the making of Steely Dan's 'Aja', in which the song 'Peg' is played. The Dan sit in the studio and audition guitar solo outtakes, which mostly deedle about in an animated way, sometimes with envelope filter, all before Jay Graydon came in with a bottleneck slide and a few well-chosen Hawaiian-guitar-sounding riffs, leading into the hit record's solo.
You might as well ask to hear all the loser solos played back at the same time as Jay Graydon's hit solo. I mean, they exist on the master tape! Surely the winning solution is to listen to every detail, and that's what 'Peg' sounds like now. You got more stuff! Everybody wants more, right? Play three solos at once. That counts as more! It's even been done in other records, why not here? Who's to say wanting more is wrong?
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, apparently. And they did say those first attempts at solos were wrong, and revisiting them, still considered them unspeakably wrong.
So far, nobody has gained access to those masters (I believe they burned up in a fire, not long ago, lost forever?) and put out the popular choice where you can swap out solos or play them all at once to have more.
A while back I decided to see a movie in theaters after a night out and it was allegedly the billionth iteration of some horror franchise (Scream I think? Maybe Halloween?). Turned out to not even really be a horror movie, but some dopey drama/romance. Waste of my money, but thankfully it wasn’t much money.
> Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023
-- NOT OP --
In the general case, no, but consider the cases of:
1. "Altered media" e.g. (1) Star Wars, (2) THX 1138.
2. "Remixed media" e.g. (1) Terminator 2 not having its theatrical CDS mix, (2) Earthquake not having its SENSURROUND mix
3. "Omitted media" e.g. (1) Halloween not having its original mono soundtrack, (2) The Exorcist not having its original mono soundtrack
4. "Missing media" e.g. (1) The Star Wars Holiday Special, (2) HBO's "Real Sex" documentary show
5. "Censored media" e.g. (1) Fantasia, (2) Song of the South
There are entire online communities dedicated to finding, restoring, and preserving items like the ones mentioned above.
So, is piracy OK in these cases? I emphatically believe it is.
Yeah that is not an electrical hiccup in the audio - that’s a human. I am guessing Slavic by the inflection cadence. Also, Cozy Bear and all that.
Longtime guitarist, producer, film fanatic here and this is really going to be interesting.
It does remind me of last Halloween where I had my jumpsuit and hockey mask to be Jason Voorhies and I got a small mp3 player and looped an hour of “ki-ki-ma-ma-ma” lifted from YouTube and played thru a little amp on my porch. Play scarecrow and only move to scare the big kids or their parents haha.
Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest.
Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list.
Meanwhile, the studios became more risk averse as people started preferring to watch at home. Then theaters shut down and studios became more risk averse. And Netflix and Amazon arose and started playing studio games and studios became even more risk averse.
That trajectory of fear is mirrored in the content. The 1970s were known for directorial freedom and risk-taking. The 70s gave us Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Star Wars, Animal House, Annie Hall, Rocky, Halloween, Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, MASH, and more - not all high art but all complete gems. Every decade since, we've seen a gradual progression toward samey-ness.
Also for me was the scariest movie I saw growing up even against Child’s Play, Halloween, Friday 13th.
Often movie theaters run special programs for periods of the year (or continuously), where they take a showing or two a week on a less busy night, and dedicate it to a series of movies they advertise through fliers. Since it's all planned out in advance for a few months, it's easy to see what's coming whenever you're at that theater. For example, they might to a horror themed series of movies, and you get Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, etc, each their own week and advertised together on a flier or poster months in advance with the date of each.
Merzbow frequently utilizes fetish and BDSM imagery / concepts and from the article perspective (although about death metal, it is similarly seen as "extreme music") I find that part of the article's conclusions interesting, in that for some there may be an endorphin release postulated sounds similar to what might be happening in the BDSM concept known as "sub space" (or occurring in other ways for other people, for example, "runner's high" is from what I understand a similar endorphin release).
As far as the top level comment goes though... maybe I'm misinterpreting the comment because this is summary level material, but yeah, that's an odd assertion to me. Death metal is a niche genre in a style of music that has some significant semi-mainstream elements (metal as a whole). Death metal is similar to other sort-of-tangentially related concepts like say horror media (there is a nice semi-mainstream side and also a lot of fringe horror movie / media styles that have fewer but sometimes more dedicated fans). Many horror movies for instance are flat out iconic at this point (ranging from the original Universal monsters to some of the films of Hitchcock to certain films like, say, Halloween, Jaws, or the Shining). On rare occasions, they are both quite popular and they even win an Academy Award (eg The Silence of the Lambs).
In music, the main thing I will say is that there are metal bands with often violent lyrics and imagery that are more popular (Slayer comes to mind), and non-metal bands with violent imagery that also are popular. Certainly if that violent imagery is slightly modified to a bit more theatrical, the band might even become mainstream (I'm thinking Alice Cooper as an example). The "sonic assault" of death metal in some ways wasn't new -- hardcore punk was an influence for the speed (although hardcore punk is quite a bit less technical) and there's certainly a couple relatively well known bands there in that genre that dabbled in (usually more theatrical but still macabre) horror. (The Damned and The Misfits are two fairly big names in the genre, not "mainstream" but big enough that some people will know of them, and there's plenty of other lesser known "horror punks" around...).
So to me that statement ("why are people interested in xyz that seems to induce a negative emotion when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion") is weird in this context, because this is not a niche question whatsoever overall. The answer to the above question is probably not best answered by looking at the psychology of an obscure genre and more best answered to ask why (in the Silence of the Lambs example) a movie that pushes "negative emotions" of this sort is (at present) #23 on IMDB's top movies of all time.
Wes Craven was a master of horror and a brilliant director. Nightmare on elmstreet is definitly among the most frightning horror film ever seen and ranks at the same spot than Halloween in the movies that made horror matter as an artistic form. he was an author and an artist from the brilliant "the last house on the left" till the end of his carreer.
There are directors who have scored one or many of their own films, such as John Carpenter, Robert Rodriguez, and Clint Eastwood. It's true that excepting the ones who have a strong music background director-composers usually produce somewhat simpler and critically not-acclaimed scores but they also often end up working well. Look at the Halloween theme; it's a very simple melody but it somehow captured the mood of the film and people's imaginations.
I agree with your general point though, a collaboration between the "user" and "expert" will generally produce something superior; but sometimes there can even be a little bit of a liability having the other party around.
The school teacher thing is a poor example though - that's just marketing trying to make an appeal to authority. Something like if a teacher had designed a desk or chair would be better because their job gives them insight into that as opposed to say, a mail carrier.
Alamo Drafthouse was great last time I was there (crap...6 years ago?).
For those of you not fortunate enough to get to Austin, the seating was not regular theater seating, you had some space and a table area for your food and/or bucket of beers. They often showed silly movies like Halloween I, where people will yell out things like "Don't open the door!" There is also wait staff, so you placed an order and they brough it to you. And they had a mix of films, from current movies to niche films.
From their website looks like they have expanded and are showing more first-run movies, but maybe it's still similar. When I started going there, there was only 1 theater downtown on 4th street. Ah...the good old days.
So far, Portland has a couple of theaters I've been to that serve beer/pizza, but you buy it at a regular snack counter and take it with you to your seat. Just not the same.