The Shining, It's Alive, Halloween
Somerville Theater (55 Davis Sq., Somerville)
Tonight, 8pm
There are those who prefer their Halloween harrowing, while others simply take the opportunity to masquerade and enjoy the beneficence of candy giving strangers. Either way, Halloween is a holiday of role reversal: a time when the undead walk the streets of Boston and chastely folk drop the pretext of virtue. It's also a time when this Bostonist gets over his fear of horror movies and explores the genre. After all, with so many Vampires walking the streets, the movie
theater seems the safest place.
This Halloween, the Somerville Theater screens two of the greatest horror movies ever made, The Shining and Halloween. It's been a whole two months since the Brattle showed Halloween as part of its "Disturbed Suburbs" series, which verily counts as an eternity for celebrants of tight shot composition and pacing. Unlike the bulk of the slasher genre it initiated, Halloween affects its viewers through the build-up of expectations and psychological manipulation. There's something genuinely terrifying about the character of Michael Myers in the early films, yet also something mundane and, yes, suburban. Michael Myers, just escaped from a sanitarium, is no doubt exhibit A for the utter failure of talk therapy and psychology in general. (What would Freud say about the desire to kill your sister?) If that doesn't cut to the heart of suburban anxiety, then perhaps nothing does.
Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that The Shining is a commentary on the commercialization of American culture and the pervasiveness of media, it's certainly a film that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. It's a meticulously constructed movie, with a different type of tight structure than Halloween but a tight structure nonetheless. Sumptuous tracking shots and set design help tell the story of claustrophobia amidst wide open spaces. If society is suffocating, so too is its complete absence. Kubrick's visualization of Jack's madness is probably the most successful visualization of this most interior of conditions in the history of cinema. And no, you're not crazy. That really is a guy in an animal costume performing fellatio.
With such great films its almost easy to forget there's a third, It's Alive. Consider it the free candy that comes with the cost of the costume.
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