When John Carpenter made Halloween almost 50 years ago, he and Debra Hill were tapping into the myth of the safety of suburbia. Originally titled The Babysitter Murders, it was an exploitation movie that they filmed fast and cheap, sometimes even filming without permits and everyone including Jamie Lee Curtis had more than one job on the set. The Oscar-winning actress helped the crew redo the building used for the Myers house in the opening tracking shot.
But redlining, white flight and the popularity of track housing in the post-WWII created a myth that the cities were more dangerous. How many times have you heard in a true-crime story the phrase, “We didn’t even lock our doors?” The horror of Halloween was that people viewed their homes as their castles they would defend. When being chased by The Shape, Curtis’ Laurie Strode seeks the help of a neighbor who refuses to let her in their house. That is suburbia and the scariest part of the movie. You’re only as safe as you think you are.
Carpenter spear-headed a true-crime anthology Suburban Screams that offers some small snippets of terror but never does work as total horror. And that’s the problem with anthologies. You have to take the bad with the good. However, there’s more bad here than good. Supposedly, all six episodes of the series streaming on Peacock are based on true events or inspired by them. One of the best is “Bunny Man” based on an urban legend of a killer terrorizing people in Fairfax, Va. It actually has some thrills to it.
Just like Unsolved Mysteries from the 1980s and 1990s, it follows a format where we have talking heads recalling the moments followed by re-enactments. Most of the re-enactments aren’t the best mainly because the cheapness can be seen in the production. Carpenter only directs one episode even though the official title is John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams. That episode is “Phone Stalker” and reportedly Carpenter directed the episode from the comfort of his sofa thousands of miles away. And it shows.
“Phone Stalker” focused on a woman, Tracy (Nicole J. Adelman) in Long Island who receives repeated text messages and phone calls over a long period of time. The problem is that is it gives a lot of chills and thrills but some seem totally unbelievable such as the stalker planting cameras all through her house. Also, there’s no resolution. Her stalker is never identified nor arrested.
And most of them end with no resolution. “House Next Door” is set in the 1980s where a teenage boy becomes smitten with his next door neighbor and intrigued by a lot of strange events. But it just scraps the surface as the patriarch, Dr. Kennedy (Crispan Belfage) is a dentist who enjoys torturing and cutting on animals. And even though the episode seems heading somewhere, it’s anti-climatic. It’s also poorly acted and written.
Maybe that was where Unsolved Mysteries had an advantage. It didn’t drag the stories out, but presented them in an under-15 minute block. Most of the episodes run almost thrice that time and that’s way too long for most of these episodes. Even though I watched each one, most of them were dull and forgetful. The first one, “Kelly,” focusing on a ritual in which friends summon the ghost of murder victims at a party is so dull I really can’t remember much.
The second episode, “A Killer Comes Home,” focuses on Allan Joseph Legere. It would’ve played more as a basic true-crime story but the director Jordan Roberts ups the gruesome violence just for shock value. There’s not much to the story except how he terrorized the Canadian town of Miramichi, the local media and their families.
The fifth episode, “Cursed Neighborhood” is another haunted house story that seems like The Amityville Horror but with a more gruesome ending. And that’s the main problem with all episodes. It seems the filmmakers thought if they could make it so gruesome and unsettling, it would appeal to horror fans. Yet, it doesn’t.
Another popular anthology series that mixed facts and made-up stories was Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, which managed to squeeze as many stories into one episode. And the acting was a little better with comic relief. This was Carpenter’s first directing job in 13 years. If this is the best he can do, he ought to just give it up. Filmmaker Brad Anderson directed the underrated horror movie Session 9, which was filmed at the since demolished Danvers State Hospital in the Boston area, while he was on a gurney recovering from a back injury. Carpenter seems to just want to stay away and cash his residual checks and do a little film scoring here and there, which is ok.
But for a filmmaker who prided himself on working outside of the Hollywood system, he seems to have really milked it for what it’s worth lately with this and those last three Halloween movies.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 