The King of Horror Speaks – Weekend
[ad_1]
The Peacock miniseries John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams promised to be the highlight of the current TV Halloween season but ended up being a puzzling exercise in a genre unfamiliar to the director.
The first thing that appears on the screen is the title: “Based on true events.” Then (to the accompaniment of subtly disturbing music) the idyllic mansion, as if straight from a real estate catalogue, before our eyes turns into a dilapidated gloomy house, either “on the edge of the cemetery”, or “thousands of corpses”. And behind the scenes, a low, muffled voice (for some reason it seems that the owner of such a voice must have an impressive gray mustache) says measuredly: “In our suburbs, evil lurks behind closed doors, and real stories make you shiver because they are real. From now on, you will never be able to look at your neighbors the same way again. I’m John Carpenter, and this is Suburban Screams…”
During his sixty-year film career – the future classic shot his first short film, Revenge of the Colossal Monsters (1962), as expected, when he was not quite fifteen in his own backyard – John Carpenter dealt with television twice – and both times brilliantly. Immediately after the stunning triumph of “Halloween” (1978), he directed the chamber voyeur thriller “Someone is Watching Me!” from his own script. (1978), inheriting Hitchcock no less than Brian De Palma’s soon-to-be-prominent Hitchcock homages, and in “Elvis” (1979), which for more than forty years occupied the place of the canonical biopic of the King, for the first, but by no means the last time, he collaborated on set with Kurt Russell. And already in the mid-2000s, after five years of silence, he shot two short stories for the anthology “Masters of Horror”, and one of them, “Cigarette Burn” (2005), was worth not only the series as a whole (and among the “masters” of that time there were entirely titans, from Argento to Miike), but also the best full-length horror films, and even entire franchises of that time.
Unfortunately, in the case of the new series from the real Carpenter, perhaps only the same voiceover and the instantly recognizable font of the opening credits, unchanged for his films. And also, perhaps, a certain number of signature visual “Carpenterisms”, swamp lights flickering in one scene or another. But there are three other directors listed in the credits of each episode, and it’s hard to say with certainty which of them did what. We present six “true stories” from the dark side of one-story America in the spirit of the crime-supernatural shows of the Discovery Channel or the recent “Unsolved Mysteries” (2020) on Netflix. Talking heads of witnesses and eyewitnesses, artistic reconstruction of events, archival newspaper headlines on full screen. The elusive telephone stalker stalks his victim with increasing sophistication year after year; a murderer who escaped from prison returns to his hometown and gets in touch with a local newspaperman; a group of teenagers gets into trouble after a session with a witchcraft board; a family unwisely moves to a place that was cursed back in the days of the first settlers; a young man falls in love with a girl who lives next door in a house with a bad reputation; a murderer with an ax in a rabbit mask has been disturbing the peace of Virginians every now and then for almost the last hundred years… But even if you are imbued with the authenticity of these stories (which, according to Carpenter, “that’s why they’re scary…”), then, alas, their quality is somewhere ranging from a more or less atmospheric reconstruction of a “suburban legend” to a very literal understanding of the Internet joke about a “script competition for uninteresting films.” Here, willy-nilly, the seditious thought creeps in that everything is learned by comparison, and perhaps another recent personal project of this kind – “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” – is not without certain merits.
It is not very clear why this particular project interested Carpenter. It can be assumed that in this way he paid tribute to the little that still allows us to treat television with interest and respect. Which was not always an all-planetary zombie-fighter (Carpenter dealt with it once and for all in his most politicized film, “Aliens Among Us,” 1988), but showed either an old black and white Western, or a film about animals in Africa, or even a show like “The Suburbans.” screams,” in which yet another provincial farmer shook the remains of a sheep torn to pieces by a Chupacabra in front of the camera. Deep America is full of these kinds of stories, and there is no doubt that Carpenter and company have many more such “screams” in store. But waiting for the next season with bated breath hardly makes sense.
Just look at the credits.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
