In today’s video, I talk about optical POV shots, acousmêtre, and just how distracting sex is. Halloween started out as a low-budget exploitation flick, but John Carpenter and Debra Hill created a purely cinematic villain, by maximizing thrills and terror not with gore or effects, but rather unadulterated film techniques.
Michael Myers could only exist in the movies.
The copyright gnomes at YouTube sure had a field day with this one. I’ll be lucky if it ever gets monetized!
If you’d like to see the pure, unadulterated version of this video essay, you can find it in the paid subscribers’ version of this post—
As always, a list of movies from this video is at the bottom of this article.
Novelistic Cinema, Cinematic Novels
To be clear, I don’t want anyone to think I’m ragging on any of the movies I mentioned at the start of the video. I love every one of them. And I’m not claiming they’re not cinematic. Of course they are!
The climax of Silence of the Lambs pulls off a great trick with parallel editing—
I only mean to say that, unlike Halloween, these films started as books.
Still have something to say?
Documenting Halloween
I’m more of a formalist than a historian. While I obviously do enjoy the odd bit of film trivia here and there, I’m interested in why a movie is constructed the way it is, rather than how it was filmed.
If you’re interested in a behind-the-scenes documentary, I recommend A Cut Above the Rest, which was a useful resource in making this video essay—
I also only recently discovered an old interview of Carpenter on the set of Halloween, filmed for the BBC series Arena: Cinema—
How Hitchcockian
Speaking of recent discoveries, I only just learned in passing that there’s an “uncut” version of Psycho! It’s not actually that different, just a few shots, but worth a look if you’re a completionist—
And speaking of old interviews, here’s Hitch talking about his collaboration with Salvador Dali, in a sequence you may have noticed in the middle of today’s essay—
Oh, and don’t neglect to read David Bordwell’s essay on the original Man Who Knew Too Much, which has a lot to say about the climactic scene at the Royal Albert Hall that I also clipped from.1
Reading From a Certain Point of View
A lot of the section on POV shots came from reading Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film. It’s available on Amazon for a king’s ransom, bit thankfully, the Internet Archive has it available for digital loan.
Here’s the specific section I referenced in the video—
The POV shot is a shot in which the camera assumes the position of a subject in order to show us what the subject sees. More precisely, the POV shot is composed of six elements usually distributed in two shots as follows:
Shot A: Point/Glance
Point: establishment of a point in space.
Glance: establishment of an object, ususally off-camera, by glance from the point.
Between Shots A and B:
Transition: temporal continuity or simultaneity.
Shot B: Point/Object
From Point: the camera locates at the point, or very close to the point, in space defined by element one above.
Object: the object of element two above is revealed.
Shots A and B:
Character: the space and time of elements one through five are justified by referred to the presence and normal awareness of a subject.
The sixth element is a narrative construction and underlies every shot in a POV structure. The six elements are specific instances, respectively, of the six general units of classical representation: origin, vision, time, frame, object, and mind.
Michel Chion’s book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, in which he coined the term acousmêtre, is being sold for a more reasonable price. Or you can save some time and watch this video—
Some Laughs
Halloween is one of my favorite movies, but that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at a good-natured parody—
Speaking of parody, “from a certain point of view” always makes me think of this Robot Chicken bit—
Films Cited
Frankenstein (1931)
Dracula (1931)
Psycho
Silence of the Lambs
Jaws
Jurassic Park
Halloween (1978)
Silver Linings Playbook
Deadpool
Halloween: 20 Years Later
Halloween: Curse of Michael Myers
Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest
Homestar Runner, “Teen Girl Squad #1”
Adventures in Babysitting
Steve Jobs
Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter
Halloween (2018)
Halloween Ends
Arena: Cinema, “John Carpenter”
Black Christmas (1974)
Contempt (Le Mepris)
The Innocents (1961)
Scream (1996)
Friday the 13th (1980)
The Evil Dead (1981)
Spellbound
Return of the Jedi
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The Prestige
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror VIII” (segment “The HΩmega Man”)
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Wizard of Oz
The section of my video essay about Michael doing laundry was informed by another Bordwell essay, Three Nights of a Dreamer.