‘Deep Red: The classic Italian horror that inspired ‘Halloween’
Due to the censorship that ruled Hollywood between the 1930s and the ‘60s, the horror genre couldn’t exactly thrive. Scary movies were rather limited in terms of graphic violence and gore, with most of the more daring pieces of horror cinema emerging from indie and European filmmakers.
Then, when the Hays Code was lifted in 1968, horror movies started to emerge that were more frightening than ever before, such as The Exorcist and Carrie. The slasher subgenre arrived in American cinema in the early ‘70s with movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas, taking inspiration from Peeping Tom and Psycho, both from 1960. These movies were gruesome and genuinely scary, inspiring John Carpenter to make Halloween.
The filmmaker had released two features before, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, but Halloween was his first foray into the horror genre. He teamed up with his then-girlfriend Debra Hill, who wrote the screenplay and made Halloween on just £300,000. This low-budget approach gives the movie a less polished and glamorous feel. The movie evokes a sense of roughness, making what we’re watching feel closer to home.
Halloween aims to scare audiences by using a masked killer with no specific motif. Michael Myers targets Laurie and her friends even though they’ve done nothing wrong – they don’t know who he is; he’s simply a crazed killer who wants to satiate his cravings for murder after escaping a psychiatric hospital. Carpenter chooses a quaint-looking suburban neighbourhood as his backdrop, suggesting that such a terrifying spree of killings could take place anywhere, even the places that we assume to be safe. Halloween unnerved viewers, who couldn’t get enough of the film. It ended up grossing over $70million at the box office worldwide.
However, Carpenter wouldn’t have been able to make Halloween if not for a range of movies, which inspired his approach to horror. Besides those mentioned above, he was also influenced by the sci-fi movie Westworld and an Italian horror by Dario Argento – Deep Red. Released in 1975, three years before Halloween, the giallo film blended murder mystery, a slasher set-up and drama to create a stylish and shocking display of horror. Deep Red follows an English musician, played by David Hemmings, as he investigates a murder he witnesses in his apartment block just as he’s returning home. Believing that he’d seen the killer walking away from the crime scene, Hemmings’ character ends up exploring an abandoned haunted house – while several more murders occur in the meantime – trying to figure out exactly what’s happened.
The movie contains several stylistic techniques that can be seen in Halloween. Giallos were a huge source of inspiration for the slasher subgenre, with their narratives typically following a spate of killings done by a murderer whose face we rarely see (black-gloved hands are often shown instead). Besides this, Halloween begins with a murder where the killer is not shown, just like in Deep Red. A knife drops to a child’s feet in Argento’s film, leaving us wondering whether the killer was actually just a kid, and in Halloween, we see a young Myers exiting the house with the bloody knife, having just murdered his sister.
One of the most innovative shots in Halloween is the opening scene’s POV sequence, with the camera presenting the murder as though we are Myers. It’s a visceral and unforgettable opening, but Carpenter didn’t come up with this. Giallos often used POV shots, and in Deep Red, there are several moments where we are given the perspective of the killer.
Additionally, according to James Gracey, who penned the biography, Dario Argento, “Deep Red was a huge influence on John Carpenter,” he wrote. “Argento’s use of widescreen persistently suggests that someone or something could be lurking in the corner of the screen, forever ready to pounce. This was echoed by Carpenter, who also borrowed the idea of a woman alone in her house with a killer moving into frame behind her subsequent attempts to defend herself with a knitting needle…”
Evidently, Deep Red had a massive influence on Halloween, which remains one of the greatest horror movies ever made, in turn inspiring countless others.
