月光光心慌慌1978

John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is a seminal low-budget slasher that spawns an ever-growing horror franchise, 40 years after its genesis, as the genre’s spooky ropes become proverbial, it is inexorable that its gripping and scary quotients are considerably blunted for new audience. But since it is such a money-spinner, one of the most successful independent movie ever, so that it obtains a Teflon shield owing to its capitalist high-water mark.

One of its most innovative esthetics is the perverse use of subjective POV, prominently in the prologue, when a cold-blooded murder is seamlessly edited from the unseen executor’s chilling viewpoint on a Halloween night, with a shocking reveal that the perpetrator is a six-year-old “bad seed”.

15 years later, another Halloween day, after escaping from the sanatorium he has been incarcerated ever since, the said “bad seed” Michael Myers (Castle) is back in the sleepy town Haddonfield, Illinois, and his new target is a bookish high school girl Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her two more world-savvy friends Lynda (Soles) and Annie (Kyes), the ensuing suspense is conjured up by rote, and Carpenter archly teases us when and how Myers’ unwitting victims will meet their makers, and knowingly refrains from producing a gory fest, blood is rarely shed, and everything looks more sinister under the Stygian lighting and Panavision expansion, in a forlorn suburbia, all Carpenter needs is two houses across each other and a thickset, silent man wearing a white mask to give audience the creeps we are craving for.

The usual trappings of the genre, like gratuitous nudity, misogynist whiff, teenager lust and angst, are all prescribed in right dosage, plus the moral yardstick, Laurie is the final girl mostly because she is not sexed up like her two ill-fated friends, yet amidst the ludicrousness of screaming, panicking and stabbing, it is rather bathetic she doesn’t emerge eventually as the savior herself (she has to leave the sharp knife beside a seemingly unconscious Myers not once but twice, turns her back to him and weep instead), it is a man who comes to her rescue in the person of Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasence), Myers’ psychiatrist, ok, baby steps, a heroine’s self-making would run through the entire franchise for our scream queen Ms. Curtis, sinking her teeth in her very first movie.

As yours truly sees it, HALLOWEEN’s undimmed renown is more rooted in that it is a de facto exemplar of shoestring filmmaking that hits the jackpot, than its artistic value or cinematic flourishes, it is a no-frills, bantamweight horror/thriller, an archetypal adrenaline generator, and more than anything, bequeaths its unsettling, plonking theme strains to the posterity, invoking the eternal haunting of a creepy, preposterously bulletproof bogeyman.

referential entries: Carpenter’s THE THING (1982, 7.3/10); Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960, 9.2/10).

最近心情焦虑，看不进书也看不进电影，甚至到了看见电影就头疼的程度。此种状态下，我随意打开了《月光光心慌慌》。这是我很长一段时间内都没有涉及的恐怖类型片。但在看到它的一瞬间，我被一阵豁然袭来，我突然意识到自己当初不可控制地爱上电影这个东西时，就是受到了恐怖片的影响，是恐怖片将我引进了电影世界。

可以简单粗暴的说，恐怖片是以一种极简主义的粗糙美学阐释了观影者对于影像的本质需求和心理构筑。我对于它能够提供这样的窥视机制，为偷窥者（我）创造一个不受理性控制的灰色地带，发泄自身变态的心理欲望的特点表现出了极大兴趣。 回到《月光光》这部作品上，影片利用大量主观镜头展现一个视域受限的世界，客观环境被抹除的同时是主观视角的全然代入，我们看不到杀手面具下的实体，却能够感受到他的呼吸，进而意识到他的无处不在。而这个与自我想象形象匹配的潜在认知，正是我们作为观者在银幕上的能指。我们就是杀死角色的凶手——这样一个被构建的“游戏世界”的虚拟获胜者（也就能解释在影片最后，杀手被射杀后的无故消失）。人性之恶在“窥视”的原始视觉快感中得到释放，而此种暴力的根源正是来自观者强烈的愤世嫉俗感以及对现实的逃避。甚至可以基此认为，《月光光》创造了一种新型叙事，此类恐怖片一定程度上是以“前互动式电影”的形式作为数字语境下交互模式的早期溯源。

其次，“暴力”常与“色情”同构，杀手恐怖片抓住观者对于凌辱施虐的癖好将色情元素编码进叙事，将“窥视”转化为“窥淫”（窥视的极端化），在猎奇叙事景观之中将受害者（尤其是女性受害者）与淫欲捆绑在一起，例如本片中一位女性以穿着敞开衬衫，袒胸露乳的情况下以吊诡且极具父性隐喻意味的方式被吊死，希区柯克的《电话谋杀案》以及迈克尔鲍威尔的《偷窥狂》中也使用了同样的，以迎合男性视线的手段“处死”女性。在赛博空间肆意延展的当下，此种对于展现在影像上的特定行为会逐步强化性别的异质性。

最后，卡朋特在电影叙事中大量、泛滥的运用惊悚音乐为整体影像塑造“时间的景深感”，先于画面出现的音乐参与心理叙事，将关键信息前置，成为影片恐惧情绪升级的“标记点”，由此在观者观影时反射性地触发心理预期机制。在声效系统日趋完善的电影制作之中，此片的尝试不失为具有前瞻性的寓言。

言而总之，在大批量的任务型观影中偶尔涉及恐怖惊悚类电影，还是能召回我对于电影最初的，本真的热爱——一种对官能刺激的纯粹享受，以及对于电影本质的浅尝。