Drive-In Double Feature: Halloween & Halloween 4
Admiral Twin
October 29, 2023
In director Peter Bogdanovich’s shocking 1968 debut Targets, old Hollywood collides with the new at a drive-in movie theater. Boris Karloff plays a version of himself in this film: the aging, disillusioned movie star Byron Orlok, who, after receiving encouragement from an appreciative young director played by Bogdanovich, agrees to appear at a nearby drive-in to promote his latest film, a creature feature that even Orlok knows is out of touch with the modern audience. Here among the chrome cars, cheap candy and rolling film projector is where Targets’ bloody denouement brings these characters into conflict with Bobby Thompson, a clean-cut gun enthusiast whose character Bogdanovich modeled after the real-life mass murderer Charles Whitman, better known as The Texas Tower Sniper.
Targets deals in heady stuff: good and evil, reality and fiction, art and trash, isolation and the violence that underpins American society. The film has been on my mind lately, in particular Bogdanovich’s final shot: a haunting wide view of the drive-in theater the day after Bobby’s killing spree ends. The lot is empty except for his car. What’s so scary about men in makeup and funny accents when Charles Whitmans roam the earth?
These are the things that frighten me, so I did what I do when I’m feeling tense: I went to the movies. The Admiral Twin Drive-In closed out its season last weekend with a slasher double-feature: Halloween and Halloween 4. I hadn’t seen Halloween in a couple years and I’d been meaning to catch a flick at Admiral Twin since I moved home to Tulsa in 2017. Mostly though, I was curious. What’s the state of the drive-in movie theater these days?
Targets captured that scene in its heyday: a lot full of families crowded into their wood-paneled station wagons, surrounded by flapping pennants. All those post-war suburbanites enjoying the cinema without having to leave their cars. As fixtures of American society, drive-in theaters were paradoxically seen as both family-friendly places and a spot for young people to hook up, an image that director John Carpenter, ever the transgressive, twists in Halloween when Michael Myers strangles a babysitter inside a car. Seen from the outside, it appears to the audience as two figures fogging up the windows, steamy and intimate. (For more of Carpenter skewering the middle class boomer sensibilities he grew up with, you might check out his 1983 Stephen King adaptation Christine, where he drains the ‘50s of nostalgia by depicting the greasers as sadists and recasting a 1958 Plymouth Fury as a vehicle for bodily harm.)
At the Admiral Twin, I look side to side from my Prius and see about 40 cars parked around me. Nearly all are in idle, listening to the film’s soundtrack on 89.9 FM. I notice one couple with their SUV turned around, watching from their open trunk all wrapped up in blankets. They’ve got it right. A horror film at night sounds like spooky fun, but in practice it’s tough to discern the action and appreciate Carpenter’s weirdly homey touch and expert framing on such a dark color palette. (His singular synth score still slays, though.) The drive-in is more about sharing the cinema with somebody else than about savoring it. My gas engine suddenly engages to feed the electric battery, startling me as badly as any scene with Michael and his big kitchen knife. I pop a few Reese’s Pieces and remember the last time I came to this theater, as a kid, piled up in the back of my mom’s van to watch Aladdin.
Auteurs like Bogdanovich and Carpenter clearly held little regard for the drive-in as a cinematic medium, but that hasn’t stopped American audiences from indulging a little nostalgia now and then. Drive-ins hit hard times as in-home entertainment dramatically improved in the 1980s, but Admiral Twin weathered them, as well as a fire that destroyed both of its nine-story-high screens on Labor Day weekend in 2010. It would’ve been a good time to get out of the drive-in business, but the moviegoing public rallied and raised $30,000 to help rebuild them. Tulsa wouldn’t let Admiral Twin die. Looking south from my spot in the lot, I realize that the theater got cut off, like the rest of north Tulsa, by the construction of Interstate 244 in the 1980s. Another casualty of urban renewal.
I snap out of my reverie and back to the screen as Michael takes a couple gunshots to the chest from his psychiatrist, a staple of the franchise played by Donald Pleasance, and Halloween’s credits roll. The Zombies’ “Time of the Season” cuts in over the radio and one of the drive-in staff announces the raffle winners. I make it about ten minutes into Halloween 4 before calling it a night. A few minutes down the road, I hear Pleasance warning some cop about Michael’s supernatural powers, realizing that I’m still picking up Admiral Twin’s signal. By the time I get to 21st Street, it’s fuzzed to the point of inscrutability. All I hear now is radio static, and another station cutting in with old-time Christian country music.
Next for Matt: Probably another screening of Killers of the Flower Moon
