In reply, one of the thirty or so glowing windows over there blackens, then comes back.
“Noon,” Letha says, confirming it.
Jade nods, hangs up without a goodbye, holding the warm face of the phone to her chest, her feet not even cold in the water. She tells the Mr. Holmes in her head that she’s not falling in love with Terra Nova, sir, don’t worry.
Not all of it, anyway.
SLASHER 101
So okay I know I said this sequel or part 2 of my 2 parter extra credit paper would get here, and here it is, after what I guess we can call the Interview Project Meat Grinder. But if “Soul Crusher” works better then cool. I am still barely a sophomore though anyway, so there’s that. And it’s lucky I am too, since whoever it was that made a Leatherface mask for themselves out of edible panties from the truck stop and then ran down the hall doing boogity boogity hands at everybody didn’t escape down the sophomore hall, but the JUNIOR hall, meaning it was most definitely and undoubtedly for sure a junior. And I might add that all so called evidence should be edible.
But part 2 — masks and cameras, which means going to Italy.
While Psycho was getting its success and formula ripped off all during the 60s, which I’m sure you remember first hand, there was another tradition cooking in the red sauce over in Italy’s boot heel, or maybe the leg part, this isn’t Geography. I’m talking about the Giallo, sir, which is a word that means yellow and a name that means “trashy movie with a bodycount.” As you can tell, a Giallo is like a proto slasher. It is to the slasher what dinosaurs are to birds.
Why the Giallo is super important is that it’s where the camera technique was born that’s basically what Carpenter would do in 1978 for Halloween. Killers in Giallos don’t wear masks I mean, sir. Or, they do wear masks, but they’re HAND
masks. What’s a hand mask you ask? That would be a… GLOVE. Killers in Giallos all wear these black gloves. Those gloves are like that Father Death robe in Scream.
They hide gender and race and body type and marriage status and tattoos and finger count and also knuckle hairiness, Pamela Voorhees, ha ha. But the camera in the Giallo is always looking down AT those gloves doing their bloody work. And because everything is limited to what those killer eyes can see, black gloves are all the disguise that’s needed to keep an identity hidden as setup for the Reveal.
So to conclude already so soon, what was black gloves in the groovy 60s became through John Carpenter’s director camera MASK eyeholes to look through in the 70s, which is what we in Slasher Studies call “SlasherCam,” which for example is Billy’s starting out Point of View in Black Christmas or the shark’s in Jaws, which isn’t just a monster movie but also a slasher, wink wink.
Never mind that that’s Debra Hill’s hands on the actual knife in that Halloween opening, not Kid Michael’s. What you need to pay attention to instead is what those hands are wearing, which proves my point that John Carpenter knew the tradition he was using, the Italian bodycount movie, the Giallo. Those gloves, sir, are WHITE. This is Carpenter saying that, yes, he knows from whence all this bloody business comes, but he’s doing the INVERSION of that, he’s one-upping it all, sir.
This isn’t the only reason Halloween is and was great and forever will be, but this is a 2 page part 2 so I can only talk about the first 5 minutes. But I’ll “BE RIGHT
BACK… ” don’t worry.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
Jade comes to all at once and dives for her phone, frantically changing her school email password to, to.… to “S@v1N!,”
sure, why not, doesn’t matter. Anybody who knows anything about horror or about her could crack it third try, but what’s important is that it’s not what it was last night, this morning, whatever. Meg’s browser at the sheriff’s office might have lodged that one in its memory, giving her access to Jade’s sent box.
Close one.
Jade lies back, her heart pounding, and watches the sun climb the sheet that’s her curtain, calms herself down beat by slower beat with the knowledge that on one side of Indian Lake or the other, maybe halfway around at Camp Blood, this same piercing light is sifting down over the slasher as well, his mask of a face probably looking over to the glowing horizon right now, his eyes still locked in shadow.
Jade can’t help but smile, and feel a certain spring in her step.
Two hours later she’s using rubbing compound on the graffiti scratched into the main men’s bathroom in the high school—so she is setting foot there again—four hours later she’s across the hall at the SKANK STATION, applying eyeliner but also clocking the background of her reflection for if Rexall’s got an eye in the sky, and then six hours after daybreak she’s clocking out for lunch. Her make-up is good, her ruined hair hidden under a different cap, and—“Shit,” she says, catching a wavering image of herself in the glass of the double doors she’s about to push through.