John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is arguably the best horror film of all time. What makes it such a great film? You start with a brilliantly simple concept by Irwin Yablans: A babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman on Halloween night. Then you add perhaps the greatest musical score in horror history by John Carpenter, outstanding cinematography by Dean Cundey, great dialogue and exquisite directing by John Carpenter, and excellent performances by Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence.

No better scene shows the genius of this movie than the final chase sequence. After noticing mysterious events at the house across the street where her friends are having sex, our virginal heroine Laurie Strode (Jaime Lee Curtis) enters the house and goes into the upstairs bedroom.

The scene where the heroine in the slasher film discovers the bodies has been ripped-off so many times that it’s easy to forget how brilliantly it’s done in Carpenter’s classic. First we get a ringing music as she sees her friend Annie lying on the bed with a grave stone behind her head. Then we get Carpenter’s haunting piano music as classmate Bob’s body pops out swinging upside down, and finally, friend Linda’s body in the closet. As Laurie screams and sobs, we see the killer’s masked face slowly emerge behind her.

The suspense is unbearable as Laurie falls over the railings hurting her knee and the killer rushes down the stairs. The suspense is again unbearable as Laurie locks herself in a room and tries to escape the house. Just as the killer punches through the door and enters, Laurie grabs a rake used to lock her in and moves it to open the door. The scene is beautifully lit in dark blue as the camera zooms in on her ass as she stumbles into the yard just in the nick of time, for the first time sexualizing the character.

Nobody in horror history screams better than Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode:

OH GOD PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!

SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!!

FEEL FREE TO HELP ME!!!!

OH GOD!!!!

OH JESUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

My favorite part is when she runs to a neighbor’s house screaming for help. They turn on the lights. She screams for help. They turn off the lights thinking it’s a Halloween prank.

Th irony of Laurie Strode, straight A student perfect girl next door virgin teacher’s pet, spent her whole life being good and wholesome, and yet in her time of need, dismissed as some juvenile delinquent.

She runs back to the house where she is babysitting only to discover the kids are too asleep to here her banging on the front door. But she cleverly adapts by throwing a potted plant to their bedroom window and we see the boy wake up and lazily walk downstairs to let her in. This creates unbearable suspense because the killer is briskly walking across the street towards her.

This is a great film to watch on Halloween, and it’s available on shudder. I saw at it as a kid after Roger Ebert gave it no stars. The 1980s was the golden age of horror. You can’t make movies like this anymore because people will think it’s a self-parody or you’ll have clueless people like commenter Pill saying “your films are so weird, are you an alien with no social intelligence?”. But in the 1980s normal people produced and consumed these gritty films with no sense of irony.

Beloved (1998) is one of the most underrated movies of all time and a great ghost story for the Halloween season. No other film captures the beauty of 19th century America as vividly as this film does. Whenever I think about the Flynn effect, I think about Beloved. How people started scoring about 1 or 2 IQ points higher on the Wechsler every decade because of better nutrition and nothing else. The film captures the wide eyed child-like innocence of reconstruction era Americans and unlike other films which show the violence of slavery, this film, set years after slavery, is about how the memory of slavery haunts the former slaves as they try to start a new life.

After reading the entire novel in one sitting, Oprah purchased the movie rights in the 1980s, telling her lawyers to give Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison whatever she wanted. Oprah, who had built her $2.7 billion dollar empire on shrewd business deals insisted that when it came to this priceless work of art, there’d be no negotiations.

But Oprah soon learned that buying the rights was the easy part. It took ten years for Oprah to find a director. Some felt Beloved (which has been deemed too difficult for university undergrads) was too literary a book to be made into a movie. One director felt it could be a movie, but wanted to decide whether Oprah was right for the lead role.

Finally Oprah struck gold when academy award winning director Jonathan Demme agreed to direct. Sadly, the film got mixed reviews and flopped at the box office and is generally regarded as one of the rare failures of Oprah’s career. Many viewers found it too long and confusing.

Below is an excellent defense of the film by Adam Zanzie which describes the 10 year struggle to get it made.

Another white suburban guy who is angry that Rob Zombie turned their beloved Michael Myers into white trash in his 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece Halloween (see video below). I say “get over it”. It’s not as though the franchise was not already tainted by many of the crappy sequels. I do not consider Rob Zombie (or his wife Sherri Moon Zombie) to be white trash because his white trashiness is more of an artistic choice. They are sometimes unwelcome in the rich neighborhoods they can now afford because those people probably don’t get him.

Class expert Paul Fussell (who LOTB blogged a lot about) would probably realize Zombie was not a true prole, but rather someone who transcends class. From wikipedia:

In the final chapter, The X Way Out, Fussell identifies “category X” people who exist outside of the US class structure. Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down— but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. (In the US, Middles and proles are conditioned to believe in meritocracy, despite class mobility being among the lowest in industrialized economies.)^[5] He states that X people do self-directed work without a boss or supervisor; they are writers, artists, musicians and others “creative” types. X people dress comfortably, wearing L. L. Bean, Lands’ End, and thrift store purchases. They drink good wine without commenting on it, speak multiple languages, and generally disregard social norms because they have no interest in class status and disdain the Middles who are so concerned with it. Fussell names the Mark Twain character Huckleberry Finn as an archetypal Category X person.

Many people hated Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake (and its underrated sequel), especially us older fans of John Carpenter’s original 1978 masterpiece. The thing they most complain about is that unlike the suburban kid from the original film, Rob Zombie’s Myers is white trash. Although the original Halloween was one of the best movies ever made, I find Zombie’s remake (and its sequel) to be a fascinating alternative.

Many found it scarier when Myers came from the perfect family because it meant evil could strike anywhere. But I find it scarier to see this dysfuntional family that is so chaotic and unstable that they don’t even notice the evil that is gestating upstairs in their very own home.

Witness the breakfast scene:

William Forsythe is utterly hilarious as Ronnie White (Myers’s mother’s boyfriend): “BITCH I WILL SKULL FUCK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!!”

LMAO! Zombie is a master of trashy white wit.

What the hell does “skull fuck” mean anyway? I just picture him penetrating her with his cranium.

I also like the chemistry between White and Myers’s slutty sister. Even though she sees him as a dirty old man, the two smile at each other when mocking Myers for stroking his rat or his mother for having abortions.

In a scene that never would have made the final cut today, White says of young Myers “he’s probably queer” and predicts he’ll “cut off his dick and change his name to Michelle”.

Like a lot of ageing white trash men with long hair, White seems a little schizo, which some think is the opposite of autism in some ways. Thus it makes sense that White would have the social intelligence to be the first to see how deviant young Myers really was. He was wrong about the details, and sadly quite bigoted against the LGBTQ2+, but in his own redneck way he was trying to warn people “this kids a monstrous freak who will grow up to do gruesome things”

Perhaps bullying evolved as a way of driving bad genes from the tribe. Many fans hate that young Myers was bullied in Zombie’s remake because it gave him a motive which undermines their preferred theme that Myers was pure evil. But I see the bullying as more a product than a cause of Myers’s freakiness.

So I was flipping through the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and most of the top 10 are centibillionaires:

Jeff Bezos $201 billion

Elon Musk $190.5 billion

Mark Zuckerberg $134.5 billion

Bill Gates $134 billion

Larry Page $123 billion

Sergey Brin $118.5 billion

Larry Ellison $117.3 billion

Warren Buffet $102 billion

Steve Balmer $96.5 billion

Michael Bloomberg $70 billion

Despite being 2 to 3% of America, Jews are an astonishing 60% of the top 10! Given that Jews have likely the highest IQ of any U.S. ethnic group, this dramatic overrepresentation suggests centibillionaires have very high IQs.

And indeed two members of the top 10 (Gates and Balmer) scored a perfect 800 on the pre-recentered math SATs which equates to a math IQ of roughly 154+ (U.S. norms). Elon Musk never took the SAT but if he had, he too would have likely scored 800 also considering he got the highest score they had ever seen on IBM’s computer aptitude test (at least if the tweets of his doting mother can be believed). Mark Zuckerberg is widely believed to have scored 800 on both sections of the SAT but the only source for this is the biopic The Social Network, and even if true, he took the easier recentered SAT, though still extremely impressive!

So let’s say about 30% of the 10 richest Americans (according to Forbes) have math IQ’s of 154+. In the general population, the top 30% are about 8 IQ points smarter than the average American, so assuming something similar in the centibillionaire population, the average math IQ should be 146.

Now usually when dealing with group data, it matters little whether you’re looking at math IQ, verbal IQ, spatial IQ, or just IQ. All these measures are so intercorrelated that they’re essentially interchangeable at the group level, however given that all these high math IQ centibillionaires earned their fortune in high tech, math IQ might give a biased measure. But given about a 0.9 correlation between math SAT and composite SAT, we can conservatively assume they have an average IQ of (0.9) 46 + 100 = 141 (U.S. norms; 140 U.S. white norms) though this feels like an over-correction.

To put this in perspective, the average U.S. homeless person has an IQ of about 80 (U.S. white norms).

If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and money, we’d expect a 129 point IQ gap between the 10 richest Americans and the poorest 0.17% (the homeless) but instead we get just under half of that, consistent with a correlation of 0.48 between IQ and permanent income, at least in men (the correlation in women is distorted by the fact that many enjoy money through marriage instead of direct earnings)

To quote Daniel Seligman, “people who are at the top in American life, are probably there because they’re more intelligent than the rest of us”

As I’ve said many times, intelligence is arguably the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage.

As for the conspiracy theorists who think there are secret billionaires even richer than Jeff Bezos, any errors on the Forbes list would likely have the effect of underestimating the correlation between IQ and money (unless this supposed hidden wealth is inherited or illegal).

In 1995, Oprah’s net worth ballooned to $340 million, allowing her to qualify for Forbes annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans. She had already been the richest woman in entertainment for several years, but the Forbes list put her in a new category, along side the big boys like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Stephen Spielberg. Even though she was dead last on the list, it didn’t matter; she was on the Forbes 400. One of the 400 richest people in the richest country in the history of the World. The only black and only performer to make the list that year.

You could tell she had a new confidence, and she even started dressing more business like and got a new hair style:

At one point she jokingly refered to herself as “Miss Forbes list” and at another point she clapped her hands together and said “y’all know I got a lot of money”.

Even a highly intelligent relative who had nothing but disdain for daytime talk shows and rolled his eyes whenever I mentioned Oprah, suddenly had a new found respect for her, simply because she made that list. At the time it was unimaginable that a mere daytime talk show host, let alone a black female one, could make that list. Even better, with Oprah’s hot new contract, Forbes predicted she’s become a billionaire (unheard of for blacks in those days).

Every year when the leaves changed colours I would bike to the local corner story to get the annual Forbes 400. “Is Oprah a billionaire yet?” I asked the clerk in 1996, “no $415 million”

“Is Oprah a billionaire yet?” I asked in 1997. “no $550 million”

“Is Oprah a billionaire yet?” I asked in 2002. “no $975 million”

At this point Forbes was just being stingy. Round up to a billion already, you’re killing me.

Finally in 2003, Forbes made it official. Oprah was the rarest of creatures: A black billionaire and for three straight years she was the ONLY black billionaire (especially in the United States).

However in the years since black billionaires have become more an more common. No longer the unicons they were in 2007, there are now roughly half a dozen black billionaires in America alone.

Sadly, instead of making our elite more integrated, the rise of black billionaires has meant billionaires are less elite.

In 1982 only $90 million made you one of the 400 richest Americans and roughly $2 billion made you #1, but today you need over $2.9 billion just to make the Forbes 400 and over $200 billion just to be number one.

A new generation of blacks had finally reached the promise land, only to find that the promise land has moved and they’ve been priced out.

And for the first time ever, even Oprah, whose $2.6 billion fortune has stagnated since ending her hugely successful talk show ten years ago, failed to make the cut. Luckily, this rare failure has been eclipsed by the news that Donald Trump has also has been priced out of the Forbes 400 this year. It’s the first time in a quarter century either of these two iconic names (which had become synonymous with wealth itself) have failed to make the rich list.

End of an era indeed.