Because I’m a giant film geek, I absolutely adore those “what if X directed Y” video mashups. Perhaps my all-time favorites are Patrick (H) Willem’s What If Wes Anderson Directed X-Men and What If Ingmar Bergman Directed The Flash. Now, it looks like we have two new challengers: “Jack and Justin” aka Justin Nijm and Jack Bishop, who you might be familiar with from their online comedy shorts – particularly, Dennis Quaid’s On-Set Freak-Out, which was featured on Jimmy Kimmel.
Recently, they served up a cool-as-hell imagining of what a David Fincher-directed Halloween might look like. Clearly, the pair know their Fincher, as they’ve gone to impressive lengths to emulate the aesthetics and atmosphere of one of his movies, complete with a stabilized camera and color correction. On top of all that, they’ve used Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ remix of the Halloween theme, which the two composers released just last month in time for the holiday.
While the fonts, Seven-esque opening sequence and score are all cribbed from Fincher, what impresses me is how well Carpenter’s directing holds up more than thirty years since the release of the original. I was banging on about this earlier, but for those that haven’t seen it, Halloween is a seriously impressive and forward thinking bit of horror direction, making innovative use of the then relatively new Steadicam technology. Carpenter and Fincher’s styles aren’t so different in the end, which makes this mashup extremely satisfying.
Of course, after a couple of years in the wilderness, Halloween is going to be back in a big way in 2018. Danny McBride and David Gordon Green are doing a sequel to the original film that ignores all the other installments, with a script approved by John Carpenter himself. And, most excitingly, Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie Strode.
Hopefully we’ll get a limited re-release of the original prior to that coming out, because, as this video proves, this is a film that really comes alive on the big screen.
