The horror movie David Fincher calls “pure and twisted glee”
Some of the very best filmmakers of all time have been creative chameleons, making different types of movies that can be pigeonholed into separate genres. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Martin Scorsese, the American director David Fincher has a similar proficiency for making movies that span a broad range of styles.
Rising to fame in the 1980s, Fincher started his career in the world of music videos, creating short films for the likes of Madonna, Sting, Roy Orbison, Don Henry, Iggy Pop and many others before he took his first steps into the world of cinema with the disastrous sci-fi sequel Alien³. Many filmmakers would likely end their careers after such a flop, but not Fincher, who returned to the industry three years later for the crime thriller Seven with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.
Earning an Academy Award nomination and widespread critical acclaim, Seven catapulted Fincher to industry success, later making such varied greats as 1999’s Fight Club, 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and 2010’s The Social Network. Constantly on the pulse of the industry’s most burning topics of discussion, Fincher has gone on to work in TV, collaborate with Netflix and continue his music video work.
One genre he has rarely forayed into, however, is that of horror, only once dipping his toes in the water in the form of 2007’s Zodiac, a bleak and brutal crime thriller that looks into the real-life murders of the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who took the lives of 37 people but was never found.
When speaking to the Academy about the five movies that changed his life, Fincher touched on one of his favourite horror movies that no doubt inspired the terror of Zodiac, John Carpenter’s Halloween.
“Still the best,” Fincher remarks in relation to its place in the horror genre, “John Carpenter, Debra Hill and Jamie Lee Curtis’ teens were the first real ones I think that I had seen. A murky sense of culpability imbues every thrilling steadicam P.O.V. with heretofore unknown Dread — whilst its “Relentlessness Of Evil” metaphor in Michael Myers was pure and twisted glee”.
Released in 1978, Carpenter’s flick that follows the eerie serial killer Michael Myers during a murder spree one Halloween night is still considered to be one of the greatest horror movies of all time. In addition, it is the movie that is often credited with kicking off the slasher trend that dominated the following decade, sparking copycats such as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises.
Take a look at the trailer for Carpenter’s Halloween below.
