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From Welles' radio, "that grinning, glowing, globular invader" fills the screen during the credits. John Carpenter kicks it off with a bit of bravura, pointing toward a comprehensive analysis of Meet Me in St. Louis from another angle: The four-minute POV prowl incorporates half-nude lass and clown mask and carving knife in a potent précis of repression and transgression, followed by a crane shot for the reveal of the killer's blank visage. "No reason, no conscience, no understanding," says the psychiatrist (Donald Pleasence), "purely and simply evil." The escape from the ward gives the dreamlike image of disoriented patients in white under a night rain, a train roaring by underscores the psycho's homecoming (cf. Shadow of a Doubt). The Midwest burg on Halloween has suburban greens starting to brown plus a stolen tombstone in the graveyard. "Death has come to your little town." The widescreen was invented for stalking, says Carpenter, the Boogeyman zeroes in on a trio of coeds, timid (Jamie Lee Curtis) and buoyant (P.J. Soles) and sardonic (Nancy Loomis). Left, right, foreground, background, a Panavision rectangle vibrating with quiet, floating dread, filmmaking of uncanny elegance. The ghostly sheet with glasses is a child's joke following a murder, one costume over another. (Other kids meanwhile are glued to the TV playing a Hawks classic.) The monster is a shape (Borges' "El Golem"), Pleasence's Van Helsing is a grave fellow but for the private smile he flashes after spooking some trick-or-treaters. Immovable fate at the classroom, "Don't Fear the Reaper" on the car radio. "I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare." The heroine finds herself in the Broken Blossoms closet but fights back most fiercely, the foe not quite vanquished flees into the Eighties. Cinematography by Dean Cundey. With Charles Cyphers, John Michael Graham, Kyle Richards, Brian Andrews, Nancy Stephens, and Nick Castle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |