The time has come to deliver one last Inspired Scare here at Slasher Studios. While we are thrilled Halloween is finally upon us, it is a bit sad thinking that this will be the final Inspiring Scares installment we feature on this site. On this very special Halloween, we are featuring horror director Nathan Waters and the great holiday slasher of all time.

“There was a moment in my childhood when I realized the power of scaring people. That moment occurred as I sat on the living room couch of my quiet small-town home and stared unblinkingly at the screen as I soaked up John Carpenter’s seminal slasher opus, “Halloween”.

I remember being absolutely terrified by every aspect of the film. The score, with its brilliantly simple nuances, still haunts and resonates with me to this day. The framing made the inherent safety of the apple pie, picket-fence every-town by the name of Haddonfield seem terrifying and isolated. The sound design combined the safety of the small town with the otherworldly nature of the Shape (who can forget the sound of Michael breathing underneath that mask?!).

The image of the Shape, with his dark overalls and white, blank mask was as influential to my impressionable seven-year-old brain as anything I would see in horror cinema in the years to come. That mask can reflect the individual fears of anyone who looks into it. It is the sheer simplicity of all of these qualities that made that film so damn scary. and what makes Michael (at least in the original film) such an icon in the genre. No other masked killer can claim responsibility for kickstarting an entire new sub-genre which all strived to re-capture lightning in a bottle, with varying degrees of success.

As a filmmaker, I always come back to my first real cinematic love. This little Movie-That-Could inspired me in a way that seeing a Michelangelo painting would inspire a would-be painter. Carpenter’s handle of the cinematic craft set the bar for me as an artist and student, and even though I love his other films, this one will always hold a special place in my heart, because it hit hard, it hit first, and it hit home. No longer can I go walking alone at night without the fear that someone may be following me. I can’t carve a Jack-o-Lantern without thinking of little Tommy and Lindsay darkly fantasizing about the mischief of the “Bogeyman”.

And I will never forget the moment I saw John Carpenter’s name above the title during the opening credits, and I realized the power a director can have over an audience. And I will never forget how seeing this inspired me to want do the same thing in my own horror films.

Hide your knives, lock your doors, and keep your panties on, because this year, the Shape may stalk into your neighborhood, and who knows…maybe he will visit your house on his yearly round of Trick-or-Treat…”

It is getting close to Halloween my horror friends and we have just two Inspired Scares left to share with you and they are both centered around one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, slasher film of all time: John Carpenter’s Halloween. Actor and Composer Lito Velasco shares his experience with the seminal classic and why it has made him the horror lover he is today.

“A gunshot shatters the stillness of the night, followed by brief silence. Five more shots erupt before all is quiet again. The hero exchanges words with the victim and we are safe: evil has been defeated.

Or has it? The ground that the vile shape fell onto is bare. It…HE has escaped again.

No one is safe.

We’re reminded of his powerful presence and insensate evil by the sound of his ragged, robotic breathing. We’re shown locations where his evil manifested: the living room, the stairwell, and the home where it all began. HIS home. Cut to black.

No one is safe.

I inhale sharply as my bulging eyes struggle to adjust to the newly darkened room. I hear my sister and babysitter, Desi breathing shallowly beside me. I FEEL their fear: as icily palpable as my own. None of us dare move or speak.

Desi’s warm hand finds my clammy forearm. “It’s only a movie,” she offers reassuringly. I repeat those words in my head, trying to convince myself with the mantra. We’re safe, right?

Before the end credits roll, the screen cuts to a commercial for the new release, Halloween II. More of the night HE came home. I stop breathing as I realize: the bogeyman lives. HE is lurking, watching, and waiting. HE cannot be stopped.

And no one is safe.

I look to the living room window, peer outside the half-closed blinds, see darkness enveloping the suburban neighborhood that closely resembles the one I’ve just witnessed being stalked by evil.

I am not safe. He knows where I live. And one day…HE will come for me too.

To this day, I don’t know if my parents know the story: being allowed to watch the NBC premiere despite my VERY young age, the film somehow blurring my already vaguely understood and perceived line between fiction and reality (in my defense, I was a very young child at the time), and as a result…me only sleeping two hours that night due to The Shape’s mask haunting my dreams. And I never told them about how those nightmares continued for years.

And yet, as terrified as I was of Michael Myers’ visage and the film, I also became oddly fascinated…obsessed with both.

I taught myself how to play the theme on the piano. On “video rental nights”, I usually picked Halloween. At 10, I bought my first Shape mask, planning to rid my dreams of that blank, pale, emotionless face that plagued my sleep by staring at it as I drifted into slumber.

It worked: gradually the nightmares stopped. And the somehow during those years, the terror turned into love. It strikes me as somewhat bizarre when I see it written so plainly: I’ve embraced the fear that held me captive for so many years. Am I suffering from lifelong Stockholm syndrome? Perhaps. The film set me on my path: my willingness to embrace all things horror, my dream of eliciting scares from viewers with my own projects, my need to hold onto and embrace that fear I felt on that very night. The film has shaped (pun intended) my life in a way I never would have thought possible the first time I viewed the movie.

When asked what my favorite film is, without hesitating, I reply: “John Carpenter’s Halloween”. I’ve purchased various versions of the film in different formats. One of my favorite Halloween costumes is the Shape, and my latest version of his mask occupies a place of honor in our entertainment center. Every night, Michael’s black eyes stare blankly at me, just as they did when I was a child. Only now I respond by smiling broadly instead of shivering.

I apologize for sounding like a narcissist, but I imagine that many people who love Carpenter’s Halloween have come to this adoration in similar fashion. And several reasons for why we love this film are obvious.

It’s terrifying. It scared me like nothing before or since: it actually made me feel unsafe while watching. Undoubtedly my age had something to do with that, but setting and era also had much to do with instilling that fear. The film played upon the fears of suburbanites everywhere at the time. And as Moustapha Akkad said many times, in the era the film was made, everyone knew or had a babysitter. Surely the similarity of my companions and setting to what I saw on-screen was a large reason for the terror I felt.

It’s fun. Yes, it’s a relentlessly frightening film, but it’s not cruel or sadistic. The film sets out to scare you, but I feel like it lets you “enjoy the ride”. Surely my repeated viewings served as evidence that the film worked in this manner. And sharing someone’s first-ever viewing is so much fun: I can see the dread on his or her faces, the terror in their eyes, and I’m able to recapture that feeling again.

It holds up. To this day, I say that despite its minor flaws, it’s one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever seen, even more so when you take into consideration all the limitations on the production. It’s simply a masterpiece of suspense and horror.

Then there are all the reasons why it’s a masterpiece. The music (like the film) grabs you and won’t let go. Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis are superb in their roles. As is Nick Castle and his wonderful, creepily graceful movements as The Shape. The mask is a stroke of genius…allowing viewers to project their own fears onto the blank face.

But perhaps the biggest reason I love the film is because of the evil that Carpenter created in the persona of Michael Myers.

Unlike filmmakers who came after him, he understood that the unexpected makes a villain terrifying. To see an innocent child with a seemingly normal life inexplicably turn into the physical embodiment of evil is inherently more terrifying than the countless imitators, sequels, and reboots that followed which featured clichéd back stories and explanations as to their killer’s motivations (ie, a child from a broken home who suffers abuse from family and peers turning into a psychopath). To witness a man who is “normal” in his stature do impossibly powerful things is scarier than watching a behemoth bulldoze his way through a movie.

These things make Carpenter’s Michael Myers completely terrifying. HE is the personification of evil in the most unexpected of forms and is able to do things no one can comprehend. The ultimate evil lives not in the body of a giant, but in that of a “normal” man. Despite his unassuming size, he is a supernatural force of nature: death personified.

And as the finale of the film tells us…HE…it is everywhere. It is in the living room, the stairwell, and the house next door.

The Shape…no…death…is watching and waiting. And no one is safe.

Of course, it’s only a movie, right?

Just in case, I always check the back seat before getting into our car at night. Just in case.”

Lito Velasco on IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3187470/

We are back here at Slasher Studios with another Inspiring Scare from Manny Serrano as he takes an entertaining look at a Grindhouse installment of Inspiring Scares.

“When I was eight years old, Monkey Shines came out in theaters. My parents worked a lot, and neither of them cared for horror movies. My uncle though, he loved horror. He’s the one who got me started on all of this stuff, more or less shaping my path in life. While most kids were out playing, I was home watching Creepshow and Halloween 3 (among many others) on laserdisc (no young ones, not DVD, LA-SER-DISC). So, he took me to see Monkey Shines and afterwards we would sneak into Bambi, so I could tell my mother all about how funny I thought Thumper was, even though I honestly couldn’t care less. Years later, my grandmother took me to see Freddy’s Dead in 3D. Two important moments in my life, sneaking into Bambi after watching a film about a killer monkey, and sitting next to my grandmother with 3D glasses on, watching Mr. Krueger rip some people asunder.

Rob Zombie tells the story of a time when he was young, he was listening to the Daydream Believer record, when he looks out the window of his house, and sees a man in a wife-beater and boxer shorts running around the street. The man had been stabbed by his wife, and the knife was still sticking out of his stomach. Like a scene in a David Lynch film, the true definition of surrealism hit him like a ton of bricks, as did my experiences. The very same way this surprise screening of Hills Have Eyes 2 may have affected a few of those children.

As it may not be right to subject children to such films against their will, we all had those movies we watched when we were young that our parents didn’t want us to see. First time I had ever seen nudity in a movie was the bathtub scene in The Shining, which my father ran from the kitchen during, in order to grab the remote and quickly fast-forward. You can bet when he wasn’t home, that tape went right back in and was fast-forwarded to that scene.

Innocence is generally lost at some point early on in life, for some much sooner than others. It is not replaced with a corrupted mind though, it is replaced by a curious one. The virginity of your mind has been taken, and you are now aware that there is more out there than your Thundercats and Voltrons.

Curiosity now peaks, rearing its ugly head, and you seek more of it. As frightening as it may be, you still pull one finger away from your eye as Leatherface pounded his hammer into Kirks’ head. It is quite possible that one day, one of those children could grow up to be the next Dario Argento or Clive Barker. He or she may look back on that day and think “that was the day I woke up.”

Now, I’m not a film student, nor do I ever plan to be, but films are something I have chosen to revolve my life around. As of lately, the regular releasing of one bad horror film after another, I must say has discouraged me.

So, after just getting out of the theater having seen Grindhouse, I feel a sense of relief. No, it is not a true-to-guts horror film, but it had damn near everything that it needed to wake you up. I heard a story today of a man who went to an earlier showing and ended up leaving halfway through the film, vomiting in the theater hallway. He was in his mid-to-late 40’s, and said the film was “just too much” for him. God damn did that make me laugh. Not laugh because he got sick, but simply because it was able to affect him in such a way. That’s real film making.

In the 70’s you had what were called “grindhouse” theaters, because they would “grind” out a regular slew of movies, almost non-stop from early morning to late-late-late night. Generally they were cheap and piss-poor films, little to no plot, and most of them centered around excessive violence, nudity, sex, and just about anything offensive and outright vile (we praise you, John Waters!)

As a result of the PC boom in the 80’s to early 90’s, those theaters have become virtually non-existent. The Fair Theater in Elmhurst, Queens being the very last actual grindhouse theater in NYC (thanks a lot, Rudy), and it has been relegated to showing one feature on its main screen, relying on the business from its peep-show-style porn booths. As for the schlocky films, they were all deemed offensive and slapped with the dreaded NC-17 label, which most distributors won’t even touch. They’ve been forced to sell themselves at $4 each in the bargain bins, glorify the “unrated!” version, and hope Walmart agrees to sell it.

The best horror films have always been the independently produced ones and, in the long run, tend to be the most profitable and most memorable. The discouraging part is not that there are bad films being released, but the fact that the big film companies haven’t been able to grasp this concept. They just continue to find the straight-outta-film-school director, who has no real experience or knowledge of what it takes to make an actual film. Let alone the passion that will sit him or her in front of a television screen for 3 days straight, researching the genre of film they are about to be a part of.

Americans tend to pay for the most intellectually devoid film of the moment (for the love of god, The Pacifier!?) and turn it into box office gold. But then, 3 or 4 years down the line, the movie is forgotten. Who really cares about Titanic anymore? The highest grossing film of all time, and it’s a joke; a punchline between couples. Meanwhile, there are still people today who reminisce about seeing Zombie at their drive-in. How many people have ever even HEARD of Zombie?

I guess for the most part, things have always been this way. Hollywood cranks out crap, and the independents are left to be creative and respond to it with better films with substance. As upsetting as it may be that I’ll probably never see a special re-release theater run of Ms. 45 or Tesis in the theaters, it’s probably better that way. Some soccer mom would probably rally to have them shut down anyway, making the films totally impossible to find. As we all know, once the suburban moms with nothing better to do with their lives hate something, then it will probably never see the light of day again. In the process, completely destroying the chance that their child may find it some day in a video store and, god forbid, actually enjoy it.”

Check out Manny’s site at massgravepictures.com.

Today at Slasher Studios, we are finishing off our week of Inspired Scares by taking a look at filmmaker Kerry Beyer, the director of the awesomely 80’s style slasher Spirit Camp, Deep Terror, Code of Evil. He is also acting in the upcoming horror flick Jacob with Michael Biehn. Here he shares with us his terrifying tale of Inspiring Scares.

What movies scared the shit out of you as a child? Lots of films come to mind, but for me, it was Alien. I’ll never forget begging my mom to take me to see it as a child. “Now you know, this isn’t going to be like Star Wars,” she said. I don’t think either of us knew what we were getting into… it was the only time I’ve ever had to leave the theater…

As I think about it now, I can only imagine what was going through my mom’s mind during the “chest-burster” scene. But that wasn’t the scene that freaked me out… I was hanging tough until the point where Ash (Ian Holmes) got his head knocked off. At that point, I had to leave.

All of that milky looking goop, spewing out of the gaping hole where Ash’s head should be, really made me queasy. At that age, it was very unsettling.

As we made our way across the parking lot to the car, I had time to regroup and I begged my mom to take me back into the theater. I must have threatened a temper tantrum, or at least made a very persuasive argument, because for whatever reason, she acquiesced and we were shortly back in the theater.

I think about the power of the filmmaker in that moment… telling a story so compelling that an audience member would endure severe discomfort in exchange for the pleasure of a well crafted and satisfying narrative.

Alien is the embodiment of the “final girl” story structure that is seen in so many horror films, from modern gore-fests to 80’s slashers. “Ripley” is definitely the spiritual mother, so to speak, of the character “Nikki” in my first film Spirit Camp. At the core, they are both stories about female empowerment – a young woman overcomes her weaknesses, finds her strengths, and vanquishes an insurmountable villain.

The beauty of film, perhaps more than any other medium, is the ability to engage audiences on such a visceral level, manipulating emotions from joy to anger, terror to delight… hopefully, leaving audiences better for having taken the journey – even if that means terrorizing the living shit out of them in the process. It is that allure that has compelled me to become a storyteller.

More info for Beyer’s films:
Spirit Camp – “Friday the 13th” meets “Bring it On!”
http://www.kerosenefilms.com/2012/05/spirit-camp.html

Deep Terror – “Die Hard” meets “Hunt for Red October”
http://www.kerosenefilms.com/2012/10/deep-terror.html

Code of Evil – “Conair” meets “Aliens”
http://www.kerosenefilms.com/2012/10/code-of-evil.html