Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (John Carpenter's Christine)

[VFX: car on fire]

Okay. What do we make of John Carpenter's Stephen King's Haunted Car: The Movie? There's actually something I can really jam with in here, but we gotta build up to it. Unfortunately since it involves the titular Haunted Car, I am going to really have to stretch. No worries. No worries, y'all. If you know me, you know I'm good at stalling out a point and rambling. For God's sakes I'm doing it right now, even. I don't think I'm going to get a paragraph here before I actually have to talk about it, but I'm damn close. Let's talk about the book a little, then, since this is an adaptation. I'm not sure what drew John Carpenter to this King work, specifically. Oh. I literally just did a Wikipedia glance and it turns out this was just a "well I got nothing else going" kind of deal and Carpenter actually wanted to direct an adaptation of King's novel Firestarter. Interesting factoid. Okay. Let's talk about the book. Christine, not Firestarter.

King's most famous and pertinent comment about the book is that he wrote himself into a corner with it. As I recall, the first and last third are told in first-person perspective from the POV of the jock best friend Dennis. Then King didn't know how the fuck to get to the story in the middle if it was first-person POV so he puts Dennis out via football injury and tells the middle of the book in third-person. This has the accidental effect of putting our protagonist out of it just as the shit hits the fan and people start getting killed, and kind of works. You can see it in the film, too, as none of the spooky haunted car shit starts happening until after Dennis gets put in the hospital. Accident or not, it's a story beat that works. What about the rest of it? Well, the setting of the movie in the "recent" past of 1978 stands out to me. It's set the same year the movie Grease came out and has a car from the 50's with lots of rock and roll on the soundtrack. Grease, one may recall, is a musical about 50's nostalgia. There's something under the hood here (HAW HAW HAW HAW) involving what we call the nostalgia cycle nowadays, this old rusted thing from a time long gone being wistfully restored. Hell, the actor playing the bully Buddy kind of looks like John Travolta in a weird way, and the scene where he and his goons wreck Christine made me think of that Greased Lightning scene in Grease. 

Of course, there's a darkness inherent in that wistful nostalgia, an ignorance of what was shit about the time in favor of remembering and rehashing the good shit. Restoring Christine and the rock and roll and the greasers also means bringing back all that bad shit, and this car has a hell of a history. I believe the book implied the car was haunted by her previous shitheel owner, but I could be misremembering. Either way, the movie makes it clear from its opening that the car was bad news from the moment she was assembled. The way it does this is by playing "Bad To The Bone" and letting you pay attention to the lyrics. Oh, God. Here's where we go bananas. Christine, as a car, cannot speak. Even so, the car lets her intentions be known at multiple points in the movie. She does this by blasting rock and roll through her radio, and the lyrics of the songs are how she expresses her vendettas and her sweet nothings. Hmm. Communicating through song? That reminds me of a book someone wrote about a Japanese cartoon this one time. Why, in fact, I remember a shitheel from that same Japanese cartoon weaponizing love at some point. That's what Christine does with the sick co-dependent relationship between its geeky Arnie Cunningham and his haunted car. As he gains more confidence and delves further into darkness because of his love for the car, so does her car power grow. She tries to kill his date while blasting rock and roll songs about love, drives herself, runs down all of her boyfriend's bullies, and self-regenerates herself. Even as she's being crushed in the ending her radio is taunting, blasting that rock and roll will never die. It was love all along, As Arnie puts it, near the end of the movie as he's fully committed to this dark nostalgic revival:

"Let me tell you a little something about love. It has a voracious appetite. It eats everything... friendship, family. It kills me, how much it eats. I'll tell you something else. Feed it right, and it can be a beautiful thing... and thats what we have. When someone believes in you, you can do any fucking thing in the universe... And when you believe right back in that someone... then watch out, world, cause nobody can stop you ever!"

Christine's the dark mirror of Symphogear. God help us all.