GENRE: Science Fiction/Contemporary Horror
SETTING: California, USA
WIKI: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A
FROM PUBLISHER: The streets are quiet. Dead quiet as the shadows lengthen and night falls. It's Halloween. Blood-chilling screams pierce the air. Grinning skulls and grotesque shapes lurk in the gathering darkness. It's Halloween. The streets are filling with small cloaked figures. They're just kids, right? The doorbell rings and your flesh creeps. But it's all in fun, isn't it? No. This Halloween is different. It's the last one.
MY THOUGHTS: I'd like to point out that the author dedicated this book to himself using his real name. I don't like the synopsis the book was given as it doesn't tell you anything about the plot and instead wants you to believe this is a typical slasher novel, which is isn't.
What's not in the film at all: The book's entire prologue isn't. It's Challis sleeping in the lounge room at the hospital, being woken by nurse Agnes, who's complaining about him working double shifts. She's massaging his shoulders. The Agnes in the movie doesn't match with the one in the book.
The novel has him at a convenience store buying cheap masks for his two kids, nine-year-old Bella and seven-year-old Willie. A man and his young son are there and he buys his son a Silver Shamrock Novelties witch mask. As he's going into the store he sees an "uncommonly large person" near the parking lot but lost sight of him. As he pulls away from the store he sees a "tall stiff figure" come out of the shadows and walk past the store. He drives to his ex-wife Linda's house and sees near her front door a "shape." Those sighting are confusing to me. I don't understand why those Silver Shamrock Novelties men in gray suits would be watching him or anyone else in public, especially in a different town than where the mask factory is and where the action takes place later, in a town called Santa Mira.
The scene where Ellie and Challis are traveling to the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in Santa Mira, CA, she tells him of a time when she was six years old and her father bought her a bird. She let the bird out of its cage and her father beat her for it. She said a child never forgives something like that.
Right after that, still in the car, Challis falls asleep and has a very odd dream. He dreamed that he's in another town and there are crying children who are dressed oddly in colorful old fashioned clothes, and a boy with a large head is in a tunnel-like passage with red glowing walls. There's a priest at the end of it. Children came out of wherever they were hiding and followed him. He gathered them into a circle made of rocks. The sun rose up out of it. The priest had a featureless face. He raised a knife, the children screamed, the sky turned red.... and the dream ended. I can see why this was not put in the film because it had nothing to do with anything that I can think of.
Challis meets Marge, the woman staying at the motel, in the parking lot. She's talking about the Silver Shamrock mask and showed him how the round emblem came off when her four-year-old threw it against the wall. She sees the microchip on the back of it, says it looks like the inside of her transister radio, that it must be electronic and asks him to bring her batteries for her to put into her radio to see if she can get the emblem to light up "or whatever it's supposed to do." He also notices the emblem's the size of a U.S. quarter and is made from ceramic. Later on in the book but not the film, Cochran tells Challis that each Silver Shamrock Novelties emblem has a piece of Stonehenge on it.
The film doesn't have Challis and Ellie going to Marge's room right after hearing a lot of noise and finding her dead. In the film they acknowledge a loud sound but that's it. The book's version of this is so much better than the film's.
The lab worker, Teddy, whom Challis is keeping up with about the case of the gray-suited man who burned himself up in the car at the beginning, she's only in the book once, I think, and her death scene's not in the book.
There's a scene in the book where Challis is caught and put in the room at the factory, hands tied with tape and a skeleton mask on and made to watch on a monitor Ellie in another room. Cochran goes into the room with Ellie, she calls him "Daddy" and he gives her a witches mask, comes back into the room with Challis, tells him Ellie is now six years old mentally and that that's a good age to be a victim. He tells Challis that he's bought two minutes of airtime on all three networks (which would be NBC, CBS, ABC) and they're going to air the special commerical at 9 PM.
In the book when Little Buddy was in the room with his parents, watching the Silver Shamrock commerical, it activated the emblem on the mask, making it glow red, which it didn't do in the film. A black spider the size of a hand came out of Little Buddy's mouth then jumped onto his mother's face.
Challis is tied to a chair with black tape or something and he kicks the television screen in, gets a piece of the glass and cuts the tape on his bindings, and escapes. In the book I don't think he's tied to a chair. He gets a Silver Shamrock emblem out of his pocket, the one he took from Marge's room after she died, throws it at the television screen, causing it to explode.
In the book he escapes the room, finds Ellie, they're on a catwalk above all the workers, she spots Cochran and yells out "Daddy!", they all see her, she asks him if she can let the bird fly, she takes out some Silver Shamrock emblems, throws them as if they're birds, they hit the television screens, causing them to explode and the workers to short-circuit, "Their bodies instantly short-circuited and split open in fountains of squirting silicone." The scene in the film is much better because I like how Challis set all the televisions in the room to the Halloween commerical, which caused the emblems to explode when they hit the screens.
The ending is exactly the same except in the book when Challis is calling television stations to get them to not air the 9 PM commercial, he claims he's going to set off a bomb but in the film, he just told the person on the phone to tell whomever's in charge that a bomb's going to go off if it airs.
Other differences: The film's entire opening scene, with the old man running from a car that's following him and clutching a Silver Shamrock Novelties pumpkimask, and the gray-suited man getting crushed between two cars, isn't in the book at all. This scene is far superior to the book's and a suspenseful scene was an excellent way to open the film.
The scene in the film where Challis leaves the liquor store and runs into a man who wants a drink of his liquor then gets killed by two gray-suited men, the man's death scene isn't in the book. In place of that, later, after Marge is killed and put in the car on a stretcher by the men in white coats, in the book Challis sees a headless man in the back of it, dressed like the man from outside the liquor store and assumes it's the same man.
The scene where Challis escapes the motel room through the bathroom window and finds a phone booth down the street, in the book he calls his ex-wife to tell her to get rid of the masks. She misunderstands him as saying to get rid of the masks she'd already bought the kids, Silver Shamrock ones, yells at him, he calls her a "fucking bitch", and she hangs up on him. He leaves the receiver hanging when he leaves the booth and a suited man hangs it up. In the film, the call doesn't go through to her and he hangs the receiver up after the call. Later in the movie when he escapes the room he was held in, he finds a telephone in the building, calls his ex-wife to tell her to get rid of the masks, she misunderstands what he's saying and hangs up on him without him calling her a "fucking bitch."
What's not explained in either book or film is what lead Ellie to wonder if the old man who went to the hospital clutching a Silver Shamrock Novelties pumpkin mask is her father in the first place. I suppose she couldn't get hold of her father and wondered if the dead man, who I assume was mentioned on the news, was her father.
MY THOUGHTS: There's not much to dislike about this film. The opening credits are are best, the theme song with the synthesizer, and the ending, which is the greatest one yet, as it's so damn unexpected. I love the gray-suited men lurking about everywhere showing no facial expressions. I don't understand the dislike for this film.
There are things in the book I wish had been in the film but the film's opening scene is so good that I'll have to say I like the film better than the novel. Wikipedia said the novel was a "best-seller" but I have no idea how many copies were sold, and it was reissued two years later.
A friend bought me a movie poster and I framed it, here.
Enjoy the commercial from the film below.
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