Ep12 Positive Cinematic Spotlight - Halloween - a podcast by Academy for Success

Welcome back, Wolf Pack, to another Positive Cinematic Spotlight! As October comes to a close, and Halloween looms, waiting for us behind the shrubbery of the workweek to jump out at us on Saturday, we wind down our horror movie focus with the eponymous slasher template, Halloween.

Halloween came out in 1978 heavily influenced by writer, director, and composer John Carpenter. While movies which we call slashers have existed for many years, including the previously discussed Psycho, Halloween gets special notice, including being added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” because of its massive success, which led to what some say were 100s of similar efforts over the next 6 years. Many slasher tropes can be traced back to Halloween: a killer stalks victims in a typically safe place until the “last” victim of the movie, called the Final Girl, although occasionally the character can be male, fends off the villain to survive. The Final Girl is typically unique among her friends who become the killer’s victims by her innocence.

What’s interesting about Halloween is how little John Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill realized the effect the film they were making would have on the horror movie genre. In fact, the base idea wasn’t either Carpenter’s or Hill’s. Irwin Yablans founded Compass Pictures and chose young director Carpenter to helm the company’s debut film about babysitters being stalked at night. Yablans also suggested that it be set on October 31st.

As Carpenter describes it, “Halloween was a blast. It was just a bunch of kids making a movie.” Co-writer Hill agreed saying, “We were kids playing in the most exciting sandbox on the planet.”


I see similarities in Carpenter’s and Hill’s experience creating Halloween and the experiences many of us are having this year in our classrooms. Regardless of how long we’ve been teaching, we’ve had to change so much, add so much to our repertoire that many of us feel inexperienced. But, like Carpenter and Hill, we can look at this as “playing in the most exciting sandbox on the planet.” But unlike the writers, we teachers like to help each other out, so we have support on how to make fun and engaging lessons.

I have seen and heard many laments about virtual teaching and feeling disconnected from our students, and I can certainly commiserate. But rather than focus on that unfortunate effect, we can focus on creating lessons, presentations, and virtual activities that we both have fun creating, and have fun sharing with our students. Enjoy the creation and experimentation of new technologies and formats for our lessons. And if you can’t figure out how to make the lesson you envision, ask fellow teachers, investigate online, collaborate. I’ve found myself stymied by an inability to create the activity I envision because of time, distance, and technological limitations, only to find, with patient searching for answers and persistence, solutions from other teachers. We love when we see our students have that “Aha” moment as they figure out what we are teaching them and it suddenly makes sense for them. This year, we can have that Aha moment as well as we learn different ways to present our lessons and standards.

Continue the good work you are doing, Wolf Pack. Thank you for doing all that you do, thank you for being the best, and thank you for your innovative efforts to educate and connect with our students.

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