Underrated Films: Halloween

I'm never really sure precisely what I think of John Carpenter. One of the few directors to be possessed of both a flair for genuinely nightmarish imagery and, when the mood takes him, the rare ability to direct intelligent yet wildly entertaining popcorn capers, Carpenter has made a handful of films for which I and great many other people hold in deep affection – Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, each a well-constructed jaunt through an entirely sui generis terrain of outlandishness and menace – and one, The Thing, which skirts close to perfection and remains (alongside David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly) the gold standard of the horror remake. So it is with no small degree of trepidation, when enthusing with similarly-minded film fans, that I’m required to broach the subject of Halloween – the director’s hugely influential 1978 masked killer pic – and mumblingly reveal that, actually, I slightly prefer Rob Zombie’s maligned 2007 remake.

I wrote a reappraisal of Rob Zombie's maligned 2007 of Halloween for The Quietus. You can see the original post here.