‘Halloween’ and what makes a good horror film

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘“Halloween” and what makes a good horror film’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, FT Weekend listeners, this is Lilah. You might have noticed that we have been trying out a new format on the show, and I’m here with an exciting announcement, which is that on Monday, November 6th, we are relaunching this show with two episodes a week instead of one. It’s going to be called Life & Art from FT Weekend. Mondays will be one-on-one conversations where we ask questions about life. And Fridays will be group chats with my colleagues where we have a discussion about art. Fridays will sound a lot like what you’re about to hear. The show will still be in this feed. Also, thank you for listening and for all the ways you all contribute to the show. As I’m sure you know, making it for you is a total honour for us, and we’re just really thrilled to give you what you asked for, which is more. OK, here’s the episode.

Welcome to FT Weekend. I’m your host Lilah Raptopoulos and we’re entering Halloween week for all of those who celebrate. So today we’re bringing you a special episode about why we like to be scared and what scares us. To do that, we are dissecting the 1978 horror classic, the film Halloween by John Carpenter, partially because this week marks its 45th anniversary. Joining me from London is Manuela Saragosa, the FT’s executive producer of audio and a short story writer who dabbles in horror. One of her stories was in a Stephen King anthology. Hi Manuela.

Manuela Saragosa
Hi Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And also, you’re gonna hate me for this, but it’s the bogeyman. The bogeyman is outside. More importantly, it is FT Weekend Magazine editor Matt Vella. Hi, Matt.

Matt Vella
Hi. The least threatening bogeyman ever. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so just to start, I have to tell you both that I really have always hated horror films. I also have probably not given them the chance they deserve, but I just don’t feel excited about being scared. I don’t get why people enjoy being scared. It feels stupid and bad. (Laughter)

Matt Vella
Is there some childhood trauma?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, maybe I can’t separate reality from fiction. But I actually really liked this movie.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM ‘HALLOWEEN’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So today we’re here to talk about Halloween. And this is the deal with this movie: it is debatably considered one of the first slasher films ever. It definitely defined the genre. And when Halloween came out, it was this tiny indie film. It was 1978. It had a tiny budget. But after it came out, it spread like wildfire by word of mouth and became this huge hit. And over the past 40-something years, there have been 12 remakes and spin-offs, and the franchise has grossed over $880mn.

Manuela Saragosa
Crazy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s wild. Matt, can you quickly . . . what is it about? How would you describe what it’s about?

Matt Vella
So, I mean, the short version is the plot centres on this kid, Michael Myers, who’s institutionalised when he’s six years old for killing his sister with a knife. And many years later, he breaks out, returns to the town and terrorises the town, killing a bunch of teenagers and trying to kill Jamie Lee Curtis’s character who, you know, it’s her first debut role and she plays a babysitter.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s pretty wild to see in the opening credits, introducing Jamie Lee Curtis.

Matt Vella
Yeah, yeah, it’s wild.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So this brings us right into, like, what you both thought, like, what surprised you about it, what you liked about it, what was funny about it. Manuela, this is the first time you watched it. What did you think?

Manuela Saragosa
It was the first time I watched it. So, OK, I appreciate the kind of handheld camera thing where you see things from the point of view of Michael Myers, the villain. And that was all really, I imagine, quite new for its time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was novel, yeah.

Manuela Saragosa
Yeah, it was really novel. But I thought the pacing was off. I thought it was quite dull, actually. I thought a lot of it was dull. I was really expecting. I sat down thinking, right, I’m gonna be worried. I’m gonna be scared, can I say shitless? Scared shitless. And I just wasn’t. I just wasn’t. I just thought, oh, and actually my daughter came downstairs and she said, oh, shall we watch it? And I said, no, don’t bother.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Manuela Saragosa
Yeah, I know. It was just, it was just a quiet spot. And also, I thought the whole thing about these, this, it was so sexist. And seeing it now from our point of view here, you know, how many 40 years later and you see it and you think, oh, all the sex-crazed teenagers get killed, that the virginal girl is saved . . . it’s just so dated. It’s so dated. People say, oh, it became famous because it really did a great job of hamming up the tension. And I did not get that at all.

Matt Vella
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the music is pretty good tension-wise. But yeah, I completely agree, even if you, like, compare it to some of Hitchcock’s films which are much older, the tension when something like Rope or even Psycho is way higher, even if you’ve seen it already. I mean, part of that is like all movies from the ‘70s seem to be, like, really slowly paced, and that must have some kind of technical reason. But I didn’t find myself bored so much as I just thought it was hilarious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it was funny.

Matt Vella
I mean, the most absurd moment for me was sort of towards the end. There was a teenage couple who are having sex in somebody’s parents’ bed in an empty house. And then the boyfriend goes downstairs, Michael Myers kills him downstairs, and he comes back up to the girlfriend who’s waiting in bed. And he slowly opens the door and he’s got a white sheet over him.

Manuela Saragosa
Was he wearing glasses?

Matt Vella
He’s wearing the boyfriend’s glasses on top and like, I really couldn’t imagine how that could have been scary. And I just couldn’t stop laughing. I just thought it was hilarious, you know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I felt that way also, towards the end, Jamie Lee Curtis stabs Michael Myers with a knife and she’s like relaxing and thinks that she finally killed him and can relax. And then, like, suddenly behind her, like . . . urgh! He just like comes up . . . 

Manuela Saragosa
That scene really annoyed me as well because you kill someone, or you think you’ve killed someone, and then you turn your back on them? I’m just, I mean . . . 

Matt Vella
So many characters in this movie do that. But also the way he, like, comes up, it’s like the Bela Lugosi, like, vampire thing and it’s just, it’s so hammy. It’s got like a ham-handed quality to it, which is very funny.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah.

Manuela Saragosa
I can imagine if I’d seen that back in the ‘80s, it probably would have really scared me and I would have been, you know, it would have made a deep impression, particularly because it takes the familiar and it makes it unfamiliar or scary. And I think that was probably quite new as well at the time, quite a new thing to do to take familiar settings and things and give them a completely different spin.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, exactly. I think what both of you are saying is what I felt too, which is that, like, I really had trouble separating the nostalgia of watching a ‘70s movie from being able to, like, critically have an opinion about it at all. Because there was, like, a lot of joy in just watching young Jamie Lee Curtis, like, wearing these bell-bottoms and smoking weed with her friend in the car on the way to babysitting. And I could kind of only see it like a historic document. I also really, like, respect that it was one of the first movies that came after The Exorcist and after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and it was one of the first movies that, like, kind of took the horror and brought it to your neighbourhood. Like, it wasn’t supernatural, it wasn’t totally implausible. It was just this crazy guy who was weird and he escaped an insane asylum and he went to a normal neighbourhood and, like, stabbed you or choked you with your phone cord until you died.

Matt Vella
Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those things where you see it and you can see all the rules that were, that it’s establishing for maybe movies that are more watchable that came after. So you can appreciate it on that level, but it is hard to sort of like not be kind of shouting at the TV. Another scene that just made me laugh so much was when, one point Jamie Lee Curtis looks outside and he’s standing in the, like, watching her from the laundry.

Manuela Saragosa
Yeah. From the net from the neighbour’s yard where the laundry is hung up . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah. It just looks ridiculous. It could be The Notebook, you know, like, you could, like, see, like, a different version of that where it’s, like, the music is different. I mean, part of it is because he’s kind of a meme character at this point, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. It’s actually really interesting that it feels like the horror gets less horrific over time. And it’s not just because, like, there’s better technology now that makes things look more realistic or more scary, but it seems like it’s maybe something more too, like maybe what we think is going on in the movie changes over time. What do you guys think?

Matt Vella
Yeah, I mean, I feel like watching it this time, to me, it was like, it looked like a movie about suburbia, right? Like all, what I walked away and thinking about was those — it takes place in Illinois — so it’s those big empty streets. Everything is flat. Everything is kind of regimented. There are no people, like everything is empty. And it felt really like, it felt like the commentary about what was going on in suburbia at the time in the United States. That seemed sophisticated to me and interesting and pretty cutting. Like, there’s a point where a grave digger is showing the doctor around and he says, every small town has a story like this, referring to the six-year-old who chopped up his sister. And I’m like, what kind of, like, what town is this? What small towns is this Haddonfield or whatever it’s called near? Like, that’s insane. And then at a point later on, like, the sheriff is just describing the town and it sounds like he’s describing a cemetery. You know, like, I can’t remember exactly what he says, but he’s describing one family next to each other, next to another, next to another. And it’s supposed to be like this dreamy description of the suburbs. But it’s actually exactly what you get in a cemetery, like one plot next to the next plot, which is the same size as the plot that, you know, it’s not comforting at all. It feels like, really alienating. I left wondering, like, did a Hollywood run with quote unquote, like, sexy girls, a knife, like, killer with a knife, when actually there might have been a movie about, like, the alienation of suburbia or whatever.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK, so this is a movie that I actually liked, partially because it didn’t scare me. And Manuela, you didn’t really like it, partially because it didn’t scare you. And it didn’t scare any of us. So what would have made it scary?

Manuela Saragosa
I think a more fleshed-out villain. I think there was no back story to that villain at all, Michael Myers. It was completely senseless. Like, what is he doing? You know, what happened to him before the age of six? Did his parents not realise he was a psychopath? You know, all of this kind of back . . . So there was so much more they could have done. And it felt very kind of, it was a bare-bones script, wasn’t it?

Matt Vella
What would have scared you, Lilah? Since you’re the most . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what would have scared me more . . . honestly? Bloody faces, chainsaws, stringy, disgusting hair, you know. I expected — it’s called a slasher film, I expected as a category that it would be more gross, and those are the things that I hate the most. Jeepers Creepers, The Ring, you know, Exorcist. It didn’t do any of that.

Manuela Saragosa
I mean, I think it’s gore, isn’t it? And it’s cheap thrills, jump scares, that kind of thing. That’s the point of those kind of horror movies rather than this sort of heightened anxiety that drags on for sort of one and a half hours of the film where you kind of don’t know where it’s going. You kind of know from the beginning of this film what’s going to happen. It’s so obvious. There’s no surprise there. So the magic of the film, I suppose, is in the jump scares and the sort of, you know, opening the door and there he is and he comes through the door and they weren’t expecting it.

Matt Vella
I mean it feels like, you know, the genre’s like gotten much wider and there are probably a million sort of variations on . . . slasher is probably not really even a useful term anymore just because there’s so many micro genres or whatever you want to call them. Like, I think stuff that’s really gory, that’s about body horror, Saw kind of things, I don’t find them scary. I just find it kind of gross and not pleasant. Yeah, but then there are like, there is the whole genre of kind of high, high-tension horror movies. There have been a lot of fantastic ones. All of Jordan Peele’s movies kind of operate on that frequency where you kind of know what’s gonna happen, but then it’s the unbearable tension of getting there.

Manuela Saragosa
Immediately after I finished watching Halloween, I watched The Babadook, which I think is one of the best horror movies ever made, you know, just . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Why?

Manuela Saragosa
I think because it’s psychological, but it is horror. There is an element of supernatural in it. And it’s about grief and it’s sort of about grief personified. It sort of haunts this mother and child. She’s lost her husband in a car crash and this being haunts them and it is actually her grief. But also she turns against her child. So it’s so unnatural and it’s so, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. Then you think, oh my God, what is she going to do? But it’s so well done and it’s so well-written. And it was such a contrast to Halloween.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. The Babadook is an Australian psychological horror film. It’s from 2014.

Manuela Saragosa
Yes, it is. Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Babadook is really an interesting example. And also, Matt, Get Out is a really interesting example because it is a movie that, like, takes something that you know, like, you know, like a white guy who says, I voted for Obama both times and then brings it in to sort of the most extreme example of a thing that a lot of people feel every day and sticks with you forever. Or that movie sticks with me. I think about it all the time. So what are we pinpointing here? Like, what makes a movie good at scaring people? What makes a scary movie, like, good at its job?

Matt Vella
I think the way that the answer to that changes is sort of telling us what’s going on in the world because like Halloween is just this somewhat, I mean, you know, we don’t really know his back-story, as you said, and he’s just a kind of supernatural force. And I thought one thing that was interesting is that this movie comes out, like, a year after Star Wars, I think, and it’s like very Darth Vader. Like, every time you see his perspective, you hear that breathing and there’s something kind of, like, terrifying on a Freudian level about that breathing. It’s, like, dying is not the scary thing. It’s not being able to die that’s a scary thing. And that breath is that, like, you know, it’s the relative who won’t die. That’s the horror. But you don’t, like, none of that is scary because a supernatural dude in overalls and a mask is not scary to us in 2023.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Manuela Saragosa
It depends on the situation.

Matt Vella
Yeah, I guess. But not in the same way that Get Out is, like, wrecks you because, sort of, liberal racism or whatever you want to call it is something that is, you know . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Insidious and everywhere and current . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah, we’ve all been kind of trying to figure that out, or a lot of people have been kind of unpacking that. And it’s interesting that all of Jordan Peele’s movies, they have that sort of social relations element is the core, like, scary thing, rather than, like, some guy with a knife, which is scary but I think our relations between each other is, like, the source of all our great horror at the moment, or grief, as you said about The Babadook. Like, that’s a kind of interpersonal thing.

Manuela Saragosa
I think you’re right. And things that pick up on sort of social issues of the day, like racism, they kind of take those primal fears and turbocharge it in horror movies. So even people who might not have thought about it in any great detail can certainly feel it when they see a movie like Get Out. You know, you may not have been subjected to prejudice, but my God, by the end of that movie, you know what that feels like.

Matt Vella
Everyone has been somebody in that movie.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s interesting to hear you both explain this. It’s actually making me like the idea of scary movies more because when I was brainstorming this before, I had all of these ideas of why people might like scary movies that I was gonna throw at you like, is it that it triggers adrenaline and we feel alive afterwards? Is it that it, you know, helps us explore dark stuff through another storyline? But it sounds like it’s something different, like, it’s more than that. Like it’s actually taking fears or anxieties that we already have and just making them quite literal so we can look at them better. Does that sound right?

Matt Vella
Yeah. I think that it’s pretty insightful, like, no one wants to, like, really think about death, right? It’s not that fun, to understate the case, but to be able to kind of see it on screen and to be able to either laugh at it or to like, escape it, that seems like a pretty obvious . . . 

Manuela Saragosa
And actually, talking about that, some of the funniest movies I’ve seen have been horror comedies, like, The Return of the Living Dead. I remember seeing that as a teenager, I was absolutely in hysterics. And I find also that when you’re frightened, already frightened, you laugh even more. So it’s sort of this hysteria kind of thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So as we sort of start to wrap up, I’m curious, what is it then? Why do you think we like being scared?

Manuela Saragosa
Yeah, I think it makes you feel things more intensely, if that makes sense. Definitely the horror movies I’ve enjoyed the most have made me think as well. Made me think and see things slightly differently in a way that I hadn’t thought about them before. What about you, Lilah, why do you hate horror?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, I was thinking about it, and I realised that actually part of what I hate about it is just that, like, I know that, like, people like horror when they feel, like, kind of safe and they can detach what’s happening from reality. But as a child, I watched Titanic from outside of the theatre, I might have trouble detaching what I see from reality. And so even when there’s like a scary guy walking around in the middle of the suburb . . .

Matt Vella
I’m sorry. What? You were scared of what was gonna happen in Titanic?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I didn’t want them to die. I just, it’s just too much empathy, Matt. I’m too good of a person.

Matt Vella
But you knew the boat was gonna sink when you walked into it.

Manuela Saragosa
I remember watching that movie and thinking for the first one and a half hours it didn’t sink, and we were all in there, we were a bunch of, you know, young people just waiting for this boat to bloody starting sink, I think, oh, come on, just, can you sink already?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, no. I was ready to go after it started, after the iceberg showed up. But I do feel like you guys are convincing me of something, which is that these horror films allow us to look at things that are hard for, like, us at a certain time in the world or a time in society to look at and really make them quite literal and make them quite tangible so that we can actually kind of grapple with them and walk away and actually feel like something is staying with us that we can learn.

Manuela Saragosa
I think you hit the nail on the head there.

Matt Vella
Yeah, totally.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think we did it together. OK, Matt and Manuela, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.

Matt Vella
Thank you. Thanks.

Manuela Saragosa
Thanks, Lilah. Thanks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life & Arts podcast of the Financial Times. We have some links to some spooky Halloween content in the show notes. Those links will all get you past the paywall on FT.com. We also have incredible discounts if you want a subscription to the FT. Those offers are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. If you want to say hi, we love hearing from you. You can email us at FTWeekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter, or I will begrudgingly say X, @FTWeekendpod. And I am always here to chat with all of you on Instagram @LilahRap.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and lover of the film Halloween. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

[MUSIC PLAYING]