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What’s amazing about the film is that the older I get the scarier the film is. I must have seen the film a half dozen times now. I first watched it when I was a kid, maybe 11 or 12, and I just kind of loved the gore effects. Was just riveted by them. Every subsequent rewatch has unsettled me a little more and watching it a few nights back the film struck me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. It literally had me on edge. I think the film works as a horror film both visually and conceptually, but I think the concept takes a little getting used to. The idea of being replaced and almost not knowing your replaced, having an enemy within, almost outweighs the body horror stuff in terms of sheer terror for me now. Maybe it’s a societal thing, maybe when you’re younger you care less about people around you and as such age you become more societally conscious. As such the idea of being a threat to people around you, and the people around you being a threat, doesn’t have as much power over an adolescent mind.
I will say this, the film looks incredible in Blu-Ray. Bottin’s FX work is just a marvel in Hi-Definition. It’s amazing to look at the transformations and see so many different things and concepts in there, stuff you might miss in the fuzz of Standard Def. It’s a testament to his work that it still holds up under HD scrutiny and actually works BETTER. There’s so many little touches which give the transformations a nightmarish quality, from the eye motif, to the wagging tongue as the head pulls away from the corpse, to the way windows twitches when he’s set alight. It’s ghoulish and it rewards your attention by being utterly chilling. This is easily my favourite Carpenter film, it’s just an amazing, tense, film and he creates an atmosphere that is almost Hitchcockian. The fact he can maintain full blown tension and paranoia for 45 minutes and never have it diffuse is just a marvel to me.
