"The Last Halloween":

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The synopsis for The Last Halloween (2014), a short horror film based on the comic book of the same title by Mark Thibodeau, got me: “As they go from house to house, four young trick-or-treaters collect strange treats that could signal the end of Halloween.”

What are the “strange treats”? Why are they given? What do they signify? Why might they “signal the end of Halloween”?

We are introduced to the four trick-or-treaters, a ghost (Jake Goodman), a witch (Zoe Fraser), the Grim Reaper (Drew Davis), and the devil (Brebdan Heard), as they visit the first of the three houses shown in the short.

A knock at the front door of the first house summons a woman in a pink knit cap (Angela Besharah). Without disengaging the chain-lock, she opens her door a crack, peering warily through the gap. “Wait here,” she orders, returning a moment later with the child's “treat”: a can of pet food. “You be careful out there,” the woman cautions her visitor. The ghost accepts the item without protest, and the group of children move on.

At this point, there is only a few hints that something is wrong: the woman's odd behavior, her strange “treat,” and the cheapness of the ghost's costume—a dirty sheet.

Other clues emerge as the film progresses. There are no streetlights. The next house the children visit, a dark, boarded-up ramshackle affair, looks abandoned. Why would the trick-or-treaters waste their time stopping at such a house? Perhaps they are about to play a “trick”?

Only two of the children, Sam the devil and Janet the witch, appear bold enough to knock at the door; both the ghost and the Grim Reaper wait on the sidewalk in front of the property. The face of the homeowner (Julian Richings), a man with pustules on his face, appears in a gap between planks covering the doorway. “Aren't you a little late to be out this young?” he asks, his inverted syntax another clue, as is the condition of his residence, that all is not well in the suburbs. “Especially with the—” he breaks off his thought, gesturing instead, and disappears inside his house, saying he will see what he can find.

Returning, he admits, “It's not much, I'm afraid,” and drops a plastic bat into the devil's plastic pail. Once again, the offering is accepted without complaint. The man tells Sam that he should “manage more than anyone,” since he is “the devil. Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Horned One.” He cackles as his visitors depart.

The adults whom the children visit seem increasingly disturbed. The woman appeared wary, if not paranoid, and her “treat,” a can of pet food, is bizarre, to say the least. However, she is dressed in ordinary attire, the lights are on in her house, and the house itself appears to be in good repair. She is concerned about the children's safety, bidding them to “be careful.”

The second adult has suffered physical harm, and he seems much less mentally stable than the woman. He lives in an abandoned, boarded-up house, without lights, and offers a plastic bat as a “treat.” His speech includes inverted syntax. He alludes to some mysterious incident, and seems to mistake Sam for the actual devil, calling him “Lucifer.” “Beelzebub,” and “The Horned One.”

However, something is off about the children as well. They are not disturbed by the bizarre “treats” they are given, and they are not afraid of visiting a dark, boarded-up, seemingly abandoned house. They accept the odd behavior of the adults as though neither the adults' odd conduct nor their strange gifts are all that unusual.

The third scene is the longest and most detailed. This time, the trick-or-treaters, passing a sign labeled “EVACUATION ZONE,” visit a house behind a tall wrought-iron fence. A bank of floodlights illuminates as their approach to the property activates a motion sensor.

On the wall above a fireplace, rifles are mounted. A fire burns in the fireplace. A made-up cot stands before the fireplace. A man observes images of the children that are delivered to his computer through a closed-circuit television camera. Outside, his own image appears on a monitor, as he tells the children to “go away.” One of the children, her image appearing on his own monitor, responds, “trick or treat.”

A young woman inside the house looks at a bassinet; it is empty except for a teddy bear. The man tells his visitors to leave, warning them that “bad things happen to trespassers.” The woman inside the house looks down, from a second-story, through a lattice of boards; outside, the trick-or-treaters see her watching them. Downstairs, the man, armed, now, with a rifle, calls to the woman, “Kate! Get down here!”

 
The children have not left; they continue to cry “trick or treat,” and the man continues to tell them to leave. Carrying a lantern and coughing into a handkerchief, the woman descends a flight of stairs; calling the man “Jack,” she says that maybe they should admit the children, as they could need help or might be hungry. Watching the monitor, he sees the children depart and tells the woman, Kate (Emily Alatalo), his wife, that they seem to be leaving. She coughs more, showing her husband the bruise on her neck.

Jack (Ron Basch) says they can't take any more chances, as it is not safe to “open the door to anyone anymore.” He argues, further, that the kids “could be infected” or “crazy,” pointing out that “they think it's Halloween.” Kate's reply, “I think it is Halloween,” suggests that it may be either Jake and the kids or Kate who is deluded. Kate, showing Jack the bruise on her neck, implies that nothing can protect them.

Jake checks the monitor; when he turns around, Kate is gone. The front door slams. The ghost trick-or-treater appears in the room, behind Jack. Arming himself with his rifle, which he had set aside, Jack demands to know what the ghost has done with his wife. When the child does not answer, Jack tells him to take food and leave, but the ghost says, “It's too late, Jaaaccckkk.”

Approaching the trick-or-treater, Jack pulls the sheet off the child, only to discover that, beneath it, is an actual ghost (Ali Adatia). The other children, now adults, appear, repeating, “It's too late, Jack.” The child in the devil costume becomes an actual devil (Adrian G. Griffiths), and the other two trick-or-treaters also transform into the figures represented by their respective costumes, those of the Grim Reaper (Alastair Forbes) and the witch (Kristina Uranowski).

As they surround him, the front door opens, and Jack sees Kate, kneeling on the porch. After a moment, she vanishes, Surrounding him, the monsters move in on him, and the Grim Reaper embraces him. “Happy Halloween,” it says.

The children leave the house, in their original costumes, as fires burn in the windows. After one of the fires in an upstairs window explodes, the camera pans up, showing that other houses, for miles around, are also on fire, as are high-rise buildings in the city beyond.

This short does a good job of introducing bizarre elements that become explicable over a period of time, as details accumulate which, when combined, provide a context for interpreting the whole situation of which the individual elements are each but a part. In other words, the introductions of these details are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (the film as a whole) that the audience (following the lead of director Marc Roussel) put together, incident by incident, until the whole picture is discernible and intelligible as a unified and coherent whole.

This initially piecemeal delivery of specific, isolated details also heightens the horrific tone of the film, its mystery, and its suspense. Each incident is disquieting in itself: the wary woman, the madman, and the housebound survivalist are each, in their own ways, disturbing.

As we move from house to house, the domiciles become worse and worse, as do the inhabitants. What appears abnormal (canned pet food for a Halloween “treat,” inverted syntax and facial injuries, a dead or abducted baby, and a young wife wasting away of some disease while her husband and protector slowly loses contact with reality) seems, in the world of the film, to be normal, while that which is normal (trick-or-treating, wearing traditional Halloween costumes, visiting neighborhood houses on Halloween) appears, increasingly, to be abnormal.

The world is upside-down and inside-out, and it's every man, woman, and child for him- or herself. At first, we have no idea what has happened to the suburbanites the children visit. Then, a clue: the “EVACUATION ZONE” sign. There has been an evacuation. Apparently, for whatever reason, the residents who remain in the suburbs have been left behind. Now, they are facing the consequences: paranoia, madness, self-isolation, distrust of others, sickness, and death.

The parallels to the coronoavirus pandemic are striking, although unintended. (The film was released in 2014; the pandemic began in 2020). Neighbors isolate themselves from everyone else, staying in their homes. They are wary, even paranoid. One couple takes extreme measures, hoarding food and taking refuge in their home. 

Not everyone survives: the bassinet is empty, as are many of the houses in the neighborhood. Food seems to be in short supply: the kids' “treats” include canned pet food and a plastic bat. The crisis is not local; it affects other communities, including at least one nearby city, and there has been an organized evacuation of the affected areas. These similarities, of course, make the short even eerier and more disturbing, even if they have no direct relationship to the coronaviruss pandemic.

Just as the coronavirus has brought out the worst in some people—those who hoard essential supplies, engage in price gouging, spit on produce, ignore government directives for minimizing health risks, boast of their luxurious accommodations, and complain about minor inconveniences—the catastrophe that has befallen the communities in The Last Halloween brings out the worst in some of the movie's cast of characters. Jack refuses to open his door to the trick-or-treaters, refuses to help them, refuses to share his horde of food with them, is prepared to kill them. 

The children themselves are transformed into monsters. They are unforgiving toward Jack. They have laid waste to the neighborhood and, the end of the film suggests, to others communities as well. Under the right—or the wrong—circumstances, anyone, the movie implies, could be a Jack, a ghost, a Grim Reaper, a witch, or a devil.

On a positive note, however, it is possible, also, to be generous, even if wary: the woman who gives the ghost a can of her pet food offers something from her larder that she could have eaten herself. The type of the item—pet food—suggests the desperation in which she finds herself: she is so hungry and so low on food supplies that she is willing to eat pet food. Despite such extremity, she is, nevertheless, willing to share what she can. Her act of self-sacrifice, although bizarre, is also heroic. She represents the opposite extreme of Jack, the alternative to his self-centeredness, which excludes any others, except his wife, whom, ironically, he is unable to save.

Subliminal Horror

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

“Subliminal” refers to text, images, auditory statements, or other objects or props that escape one’s conscious notice but (according to theory, at least) are recognized on a subconscious level. Supposedly, subliminal techniques are used to sell everything from movie theater popcorn to alcoholic beverages. Some even go so far as to say that governments, including that of the United States, use such messages to propagandize and brainwash their citizens.

Subliminal messages are also used in printed and filmed horror stories, albeit rarely, it would seem.

In fact, I’ve seen the use of a subliminal image in a horror movie. It occurred at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho--not in the original film, but in a release of the movie on videotape or DVD (I don’t recall which now, as this experience occurred several years ago, but I believe it was a videotape.) As Norman Bates, at the end of his killing spree, sits in a jail cell, dressed as his mother, Norma, a human skull flashes over his face.

I remember feeling especially uneasy during this scene, although it hadn’t seemed as frightening or eerie when I’d first witnessed the scene, as a child. On an impulse, I played the sequence again, in slow motion, and the skull, which I hadn’t noticed before (consciously, at least) was visible as it appeared briefly, over Norman’s face, and then vanished again, just as abruptly, the superimposition of the skull image over Norman’s face occupying only the space of a few frames. I’d heard of subliminal images, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one myself.

Apparently, subliminal images are used much more widely than one might suppose, not only in advertising, but also in popular entertainment media, including Walt Disney’s art and big-name comic books’ illustrations.

In Who Killed Roger Rabbit, Roger’s wife, Jessica, is shown, sans panties, exiting a taxicab.

 


The cover for the DVD release of Disney’s The Little Mermaid shows an erect phallus among the spires of a castle; a constellation of stars in The Lion King spells out S-E-X; and a nude painting is shown in a background setting in The Rescuers. It seems that, posthumously, Uncle Walt’s not nearly as family friendly as he was when he’d been among the living.




The “S” word also makes its appearance in New X-Men #118--at least 18 times, by one count.

In horror fiction, it’s more likely to be the gruesome and the ghastly or the bloody and the gory that sells, rather than sex, and it’s just such subliminal texts and images that are occasionally found, as in Psycho.

Another example of the use of such images occurs in the original Hitchcock version of the film itself. In three frames (equating to approximately 1/8 of a second) of the shower scene, in which Norman-as-Norma, attacks Marion Crane as she is showering, the knife thrust is reversed, so that it appears to penetrate her lower abdomen.

Although it’s questionable as to whether Hitchcock had any transcendent reason for including the subliminal images of penetration, he apparently did have a thematic purpose in mind for the shower scene itself besides mere titillation. According to Janet Leigh herself, who played Crane in the original film:

Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequence, so when she stepped into the bathtub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.

(Well, as long as Leigh bought the line. . . .)

In The Exorcist, a demon’s face is flashed on the screen on two occasions, once when Father Damien Karras recalls seeing his mother as she is about to enter a subway station and, later, when Regan's mother walks down a hallway, but not so few times per foot of film that it can’t be seen, so this use of imagery doesn’t, strictly speaking, constitute the employment of a subliminal technique.

In a previous post, I showed how Bram Stoker’s deft use of description and innuendo creates what amounts to a sort of literary subliminal coding of the narrative’s text, heightening the story’s fear factor by suggesting that there is some astonishingly powerful force operating behind the scenes, so to speak. Subliminal text and images are today’s equivalents, in extremis, of yesterday’s rhetorical, literary, and cinematographic techniques and, yes, they can be effective. In fact, they can frighten the hell out of you!

Source

Leigh, Janet. Psycho : Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. Harmony Press, 1995.

Flowers of Evil: Horror Film Anthologies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Although the anthology continues to appear among horror films, it hasn’t been seen much since Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, and Twilight Zone: The Movie. The formula for the anthology is simple, but effective. A common theme, cast of characters, or premise unifies the separate stories (often, three to five) which follow. Sometimes, the separate stories are directed by the same director; other times, each is directed by a different director. The technique allows the telling of several, rather than just one, story, permitting variations upon the same theme or a variety of perspectives concerning a single series of incidents.

Creepshow (1982) features five stories which are linked by the wind’s turning of the pages of a horror comic that a boy’s father makes him discard. As the wind flips the pages to a new story, the respective stories are dramatized on the screen. In “Father’s Day,” a murdered father returns from the grave on the anniversary of his murder to avenge himself upon his daughter, who killed him. In "The Lonely Death of Jordy Verill," Verill (played by Stephen King) is consumed by a parasitic fungus that arrives upon a meteorite that crashes into his farm. In “Something to Tide You Over,” a cuckolded husband seeks to avenge himself upon his unfaithful wife by burying her in the sand of a beach so that the rising tide will drown her, but things don’t go as planned, and he is the next to suffer the same fate. “The Crate” is a takeoff from the Pandora’s box myth: a woman opens a crate, unleashing the monster inside. In “They’re Sneaking Up On You!,” an employee gains revenge upon his employer by allowing the apartment in which his boss (who is terrified of germs and insects) lives become overrun with cockroaches. A final segment has the boy gain revenge upon his father for making him toss out his horror comic, using a voodoo doll he has ordered from an advertisement in the comic book to give his father a literal pain in the neck.

In Cat’s Eye (1985), which is also known as Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye, General, a cat, roaming a city to locate a girl whom the animal seeks from a supernatural threat, becomes involved in the three stories that follow. Two of the three tales are based upon the short stories “Quitters, Inc.” and “The Ledge” from King’s anthology, Night Shift). In “Quitters,” an unscrupulous business makes sure its clients quit smoking by resorting to the cutting off of fingers whenever they light up after taking the pledge to quit, and, in “The Ledge,” an unfaithful man is allowed to live--if he can walk a five-inch ledge around a high-rise building; he succeeds, turning the table on the man he has cuckolded, and the bet, reversed, begins anew. The feline takes center stage, so to speak, in the last of the three stories in Cat’s Eye, as its valiant rescue of the girl who wants to adopt the stray convinces her mother to let her keep the animal, an idea that the mother had initially opposed.

An earlier example of the horror anthology includes The House That Dripped Blood (1971), in which a Scotland Yard detective investigates a series of bizarre deaths that occurred in the same house. Four segments make up the anthology. In “Method for Murder,” a writer, moving into the house, is haunted by one of his novel’s villains. In “Waxworks,” two men are obsessed with the figure in a wax museum that reminds them of a woman whom they both knew. In “Sweets to the Sweet,” a governess takes issue with her employers’ treatment of their daughter and their denial of permission to let her have a doll. In “The Cloak,” an actor acquires strange powers after buying a cloak from the proprietor of a weird costume shop.

As with any genre (or subgenre) of fiction, individual anthology films tend to be of lesser or greater artistic quality, one indication of which is the appropriateness of the frame story to the stories that follow it. A few of the more artistic of these films are described in Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide: A Topical Guide to 2500 Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Bryan Senn and John Johnson.

In Asylum (1972), a former psychiatrist, having gone mad, is now a patient in a mental asylum, wherein another doctor is challenged to interview patients and identify the former psychiatrist among them. The interviews result in the stories that follow. A frozen, dismembered corpse returns to life to attack an unfaithful, murdering husband. A tailor’s magical suit restores life to the dead. A dual personality leads to murder. Miniature robotic killer dolls go on a murder spree.
In the frame for After Midnight (1989), a psychology professor teaches his students the “psychology of fear” by relating three terror tales of psychotic killers. In one of the following stories, a terrifying frightening joke backfires; in the second story, a group of teenage girls encounters a psychotic murderere and his killer dogs; and, in the third story, a female employee of an all-night answering service is plagued by a maniacal telephone caller.

The plotting of a horror anthology is a good creative writing exercise which may be done in small groups or on an individual basis. The first task of such an enterprise would be deciding upon the opening and closing stories that would frame the segments between the them. After determining how the movie (or, for that matter, a print anthology) would open and close, the individual segments would then be plotted. Alternatively, the opening and closing stories could be provided by the instructor, and the students could then plot and write the segments between them. Another alternative would be for the instructor to provide the bare bones of the sandwiched stories and then have the students write the opening and closing tales that would frame the central stories. In any case, Dead of Night, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Night Gallery, and The Offspring offer set-ups that could be used, and the students’ follow-on stories could be compared with those that actually made the cut, as summarized in Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide.

In the set-up, or frame, for Dead of Night (1945) an architect has a recurring dream in which he enters a country cottage full of people whom he has met in a previous dream; while they gather to discuss his predicament, each relates a weird supernatural event in his own life. In Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Dr. Terror, a fortune teller, uses Tarot cards to reveal the deaths, from supernatural causes, of five men on a train. In the finale, five passengers aboard the train learn that the last card that Dr. Terror turned up was the Death card, and, upon disembarking from the train, they see a newspaper headline proclaiming that they were killed in a train wreck. In Night Gallery (1969), each painting is linked to a tale of terror. In The Offspring, a reporter visit’s a small town to hear four tales of evil from the local librarian.

It is fun and better, perhaps, to create one's own set-ups, or frames. Some possibilities, courtesy of yours truly, might be:

• A series of actresses audition for the title role in a slasher movie, Scream Queen.
• Seeking employment as a writer on a TV series concerning the paranormal and supernatural phenomena that occur in a small town, a scriptwriter pitches three stories to the show's producer. Various types of baseball pitches might suggest both the anthology's title and the storylines for its segments: Fast Pitch, Slow Pitch, and Slider.
• On a twist on The Arabian Nights' set-up, a hitchhiker's life depends upon her amusing a psychotic driver with a series of horror stories.
• A TV show's crew films what happens inside supposedly haunted houses.

There are as many possibilities as one can imagine for creating such set-ups for episodic movie segments which, together, comprise an anthology, which adds to the fun and the rehearsal value of such a creative writing exercise.

Source Cited

Senn, Bryan. Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide: A Topical Index to 2500 Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 1962.