With the holiday Halloween around the corner, it only makes sense that John Carpenter’s classic Halloween is back in theaters for a limited run.
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the film, and Halloween was a big indie phenomenon that launched the mad slasher film, and made a ton of money on a paltry $320,000 budget.
As the L.A. Times reports, the Halloween re-release will be playing in 560 U.S. theaters, and more screens in the U.K. Being that a lot of horror fans grew up in the VCR generation, and more are enjoying it today in DVD, Blu-ray and VOD formats, there’s a lot of people who haven’t seen Halloween in theaters, where audiences often screamed through most of the film.
And as Malek Akkad, whose father, the late Moustapha Akkad, produced Halloween, told the Times, the movie “even introduced the holiday Halloween to places in the world where they never celebrated it before.”
It’s great to see classic horror films making theatrical revivals like this, much like when Grindhouse Releasing brought the original Evil Dead back to theaters several years ago. While there’s currently no plans to bring any of George Romero’s classics back to theaters, there’s actually been talk about getting him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
We’re still living in zombie times these days with the incredible success of The Walking Dead, and Romero’s now the godfather of the modern zombie. So a group of undead fans are trying to get George his star on that famous boulevard. As the L.A. Times notes, The Village People, Lassie and Mickey Mouse have stars on Hollywood Boulevard, why not George? The site Indiegogo is also trying to raise the $30,000 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce would need to set the star up and maintain it, if it meets the chamber’s approval.
John Carpenter and Simon Pegg both gave video endorsements about the importance of Romero getting his place on the walk of fame, even though Matt Mogk, who founded the Zombie Research Society, told the Times that Romero is “a humble guy who wouldn’t invite this kind of attention.”
Horror films have a huge fan base, among the ranks I’m proudly a part of, but they may always struggle to get mainstream respect. Horror has always been lowballed by the majors, and only one horror flick, Silence of the Lambs, won an Academy Award for Best Picture. It still doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of respect, and to those who’ve always dismissed them as purely geek domain, you don’t know what you’re missing.
