Watched: 10/09/2024
Format: Peacock
Viewing: Third? Fourth?
Director: John Carpenter
This spooky season, I'm mostly trying to check off movies I should have already watched - also movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, so I don't remember the films well at all. This isn't that - but Jamie had not seen Christine (1983), and I kind of consider it worth a viewing. So it's her version of that, I suppose.
I read the Stephen King novel when I was in 6th grade. But I didn't see the movie until some time later - maybe when I was fifteen. I've seen it a couple of times since, including in a hotel room during a conference over a decade ago. It's a bizarre movie - how compelling should a movie about a haunted car be? And yet.
Christine is a John Carpenter movie, and - I think - should be included in consideration of his run of solid work there in the 1980's. I know Carpenter seems grumpy about all of the movies he did as a work-for-hire director, but the pairing of his sensibilities with King really does work. I'd love to see someone re-do Christine without having to strip it down for a movie audience and make it as weird as the book, but as a movie - separate from the book but using the core of it - I think this movie works as a kind of horror, just not the horror of "oh no! A car will get me!" that you might guess on first blush.
To me, the horror of the movie is not so much about a killer, possessed car - which, fair enough (that is a problem!). Instead, it's about helplessly watching a friend go down due to a change in their life, be it addiction, a toxic partner, or some other obsession. This is two lifelong pals who went two different directions, and one of them goes off the deep end, and the other has to deal with the fallout as that person hurts other people.
