In 1976, "Blood SpatterEd Thirteen" was screened at the Milan Film Festival, John Carpenter's second feature film, when he was still unknown.
Poster of "Blood SpatterEd Thirteen Police Station"
Independent filmmaker Owen Abrands and financier Mustafa Akkad were also in the audience, and immediately after the screening, the two decided to ask Carpenter to cast a horror film.
John Carpenter
Two years later, in 1978, the 10-day script, 20-day shooting, $300,000 budget horror film grossed a total of $70 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time.
This movie is "Moonlight Panic".
Poster of Moonlight Panic
Like many of the slasher film pioneers of its time, it used Hitchcock's Horrors as an absolute source of inspiration and became a classic of its own to be homaged to future generations.
After this film, Carpenter also made a name for himself.
Stills from "Horror Story"
According to all the conventions of success and small and large horror films being continuously remade, remade, and restarted, the gold mine IP of "Moonlight Panic" naturally cannot be easily let go by the film industry.
For more than four decades, Moonlight Panic has seen eleven sequels, becoming the longest-running horror film series in the history of American cinema, and the twelfth installment of the series, Moonlight Panic: Killing, has just recently launched on streaming platforms.
Moonlight Panic: Killing poster
This latest sequel, directed by David Gordon Green, inherits the 2018 edition of Moonlight Panic, also directed by him, which, together with Moonlight Panic: The End, is the second reboot of the entire series.
"Moonlight Panic" and "Moonlight Panic: The End" poster
Compared with the 2018 edition of "Moonlight Panic" receiving a lot of positive comments from the media, the reputation of "Moonlight Panic: Killing" is mixed and controversial.
After watching the whole film, my feeling is that this is a work with many regrets, but it is not completely worth watching.
First of all, what is more special is that as a sequel, Moonlight Panic: Killing does not set time intervals to distinguish the sequel from the previous game into two well-defined stories, but instead lets the plot begin directly at the end of the previous movie:
Raule Strod, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is taken to the hospital with an injury, accompanied by his daughter Karen and granddaughter Alison, while Michael, who is locked up in the basement, is accidentally released by the firefighters who come to extinguish the fire, and a killing will begin...
Screenshot of Moonlight Panic: Killing
The story of Moonlight Panic: Killing once again ends before Halloween fades away, and at the end, Michael continues to die and continue to kill, suggesting that the third part will completely end the entire reboot of the story on the same Halloween.
All three films take place on the same night, which is an extremely rare creative idea in the horror series.
However, it is precisely because of this non-traditional trilogy time structure that "Moonlight Panic: Killing", as the second part of the trilogy, is in an awkward position, neither free choice in the time span of the story as the first part, nor can it be free to create without considering the third plot, which is too restricted.
In a limited time, the film can not effectively use the space to lay the atmosphere, but must simply and rudely cut to the main topic, so that the plot time and the real time work synchronously.
We see Moonlight Panic: Killing adds a lot of new character relationships and backgrounds, but the scenes assigned to them are pitifully small, and they are already dying under The Michael knife before the characters stand up.
At the same time, it cannot give a satisfactory, self-justifying ending, but only a temporary rest, an unstable equilibrium, and the resurrection of The ending Michel can no longer be regarded as a reversal (despite the intent), not even a break of expectations, because this is almost inevitable:
Don't forget, this is just a transitional episode, and the plot of the third part can't wait to start.
Second, Green's new Moonlight Panic trilogy is positioned not as a simple sequel or a reboot in the traditional sense (because there is no remake), but somewhere in between:
They are actually "direct sequels" to Carpenter's debut in 1978, that is, to recognize only the status of the first part of the series, ignoring all nine sequels in the middle, and pointing directly to the most orthodox source of the entire series.
The 2018 edition of Moonlight Panic begins 40 years after the 1978 Hadenfield killing, telling the story of Michelle escaping from prison again, while Laurie decides to kill Micheal permanently in order to prevent the killing from happening again.
This setting also led to the fact that Moonlight Panic: Killing and its predecessors both had a strong sense of using Carpenter's original as the most important frame of reference for the work, not only the plot and character continuity, but also the contrast and intertextual relationship between the texts.
Audiovisual effects are also inherited and emulated, such as following the most classic soundtrack in the original and imitating the visual blur effect of the front and back of the anamorphic wide-screen wide-angle lens. Therefore, the evaluation of this latest sequel must not be circumvented in the Carpenter version.
There is no doubt that Carpenter's first Moonlight Panic was the direct cause of the enduring series, and almost all subsequent works can never match carpenter's height in this film. It is also in this part that the tone and signature elements of Moonlight Panic are established for the first time: the eerie killing time of Halloween, the isolated and remote killing places on the outskirts of the town, the simple and straightforward characters and storyline, the concise and powerful piano melody soundtrack, and most importantly, the murderous Michael Myers.
Murderous Michael Myers
These properly combined elements became the basis for the appeal of the future series, and it was also a classic routine that the sequel continued to consume and repeat.
Moonlight Panic 3: Season of the Witches changed its mind and told a story that had nothing to do with the previous game, causing viewers at the time to feel that they had been deceived and the box office plummeted.
So the producers recalled Michael and his sharp edge in the fourth part, and the series continued to sell well.
Moonlight Panic 3: Season of the Witches poster
As can be seen here, the terrifying image of Michael is the most critical core in "Moonlight Panic".
Unlike the general image of horror, he is not a physical body, nor is he a completely inhuman supernatural entity, but an intermediate form of half-man, half-devil.
This can be seen only from the impressive, extremely maddening mask: the prototype of Michael's mask was not originally a horror mask, but the mask of Captain Kirk in Star Trek, but after a series of modifications such as enlarged eye holes and white paint sprayed as a whole, the mask that originally simulated a human face was gradually contaminated with inhuman factors and became strange, which actually took advantage of the "Uncanny Valley" effect.
Create an image that is very similar to a human face but has a significant gap that cannot be ignored, adding a layer of physiological resistance to the face of the murderer.
Extremely maddening mask
In most of the films in the Moonlight Panic series, Michael hides under a mask and never shows his face easily.
We will never see Michael's expression, let alone hear him speak, even when he is mad at killing people—which is a decisive difference from Freddy or other unmasked murderers in "Ghost Street", who constantly laughs and taunts the victim.
Stills from "Ghost Street"
All we see is an inhuman, unsmiling white face, symbolizing a silent deterrent.
At the same time, Michael's killings are generally not violent, but calm and mechanical, he will never run, only walk calmly.
Micheal's superhuman strength and massive body ensure that he does not have to wrestle with the victim, and all he does with a knife is a clean and calm slash, which is different from the violent physical movement of Jason who uses a baseball bat or uses a chainsaw.
After losing the intensity of his movements, Michael loses the physical action characteristics of the human body and becomes a cold, precise killing machine.
Screenshot of Carpenter's Moonlight Panic
This is highlighted in carpenter's edition of Moonlight Panic.
In the first half of the film, before the killing has fully begun, the heroine Laurie Sterode, who is being followed by Michael, constantly sees the former standing on a street corner watching him.
This also establishes in the minds of the audience the most initial fearful image of Michel— a silent, motionless figure peering at himself with unpredictable intent.
And Carpenter's own classic soundtrack is also a 5/4 uniform beat that mechanically repeats the same minimalist piano notes, never changing the speed of the notes, so it does not play a role in setting off emotional changes like the general horror film soundtrack; on the contrary, it is better to say that it is "no change in emotions", corresponding to the mechanical, silent, and never-ending killing action of Michel when he appears.
In Green's version of Moonlight Panic: Killing, this is not well observed. In order to increase the film's tricks and bloodiness in terms of killing, when Michel kills people, he is not simply killing people, but also abusing and torturing the victims. In this way, his image of calm slaughter has been damaged.
Not to mention the scene at the end of the film where Micheal is beaten down by an angry mob.
However, given the success of the 2018 edition of Moonlight Panic in restoring the Carpenteric Michial image, we also have reason to believe that in Moonlight Panic: Killing, Green's changes were conscious deconstructions rather than creative mistakes.
One of the main lines of the film is the mob's reverse hunting of Michel, and in the anger of the people, Micheal's original calm sense of deterrence is overthrown, and even the mask is removed and turned into a body that has been beaten to the ground.
However, his eventual resurrection also proves that the power of human anger is meaningless for the undead demons; or, rather, the anger of the people is not a sign of courage, but another expression of the fear in their hearts, so that they will kill an innocent mentally ill person as a murderer by mistake— people have lost their minds and become crazy in fear.
And as the film says, Micheal is also drawing strength from the spread and spread of this fear, becoming more and more powerful.
This is another layer of thinking that Moonlight Panic: Killing offers in addition to the classic slasher section of the repeating series.
Like Rob Zambie's two remakes, Green's reboot expands Michelle's character from an unprovoked, uninhibited psychotic murderer to a deeper, more connotative image.
But unlike the Zambi version, which gives Micheal a thorough psychoanalysis of characters' prehistory, humanity, psychology, obsession, and even emotion, Green's moonlight panic: Killing is more of a satirical way to prove that Michel is actually not so complicated.
We saw in the movies where people shouted "Evil Dies Tonight!" Micheal is defined as a demon that must be removed; but in reality, Micheal is just an animal that succumbs to a simple instinct to kill, as the film points out: he stands in front of the window on the second floor of his house, not looking at the whole town, but just admiring himself in the mirror like a beast.
People are accustomed to demonizing and demonizing their opponents and making their actions morally just, which is also the weakness of human beings compared to Micheal Myers.
The "Halloween Kills" in Moonlight Panic: Killing is not only a micheal, but also the people of Hadenfield, but they have failed in this killing precisely because the pure, animalistic desire to kill has triumphed over a moral judgment that claims to be just, heroic, but in fact breeds fear.
In this sense, the reversal of the ending is indeed a powerful satire on human nature.