Watched this last night, starting off at about midnight right after I'd gone from one American Psycho to another. First off, yes, the pumpkin at the start does look a LOT less orange than the 35th anniversary transfer but something else I noticed is that the geometry of the title sequence was also quite different, the 4K's credits looking fatter and wider which I'll post a photo of at the end.
I've got to say that I spotted no overt flickering whatsoever, maybe just a hint of density flutter in the darkest moments but whatever it is that's making it blatantly flicker on other people's TVs isn't doing it on mine. Goes without saying that I have no contrast enhancers or motion interpolators turned on, but I'll say it anyway. The black levels themselves are indeed quite thin and grey but this is entirely by design as the 35th transfer is very much the same, it's a look unto itself and I'm already used to it from the 35th so no complaints here.
The colour loses the slightly warmer tint of the 35th and looks more muted, not "monochromatic" by any stretch but definitely with a slightly more desaturated vibe. It doesn't always track from shot to shot and things like skin tones can actually look a touch fuller while the surroundings are less vibrant, sometimes it's the opposite. Reds look excellent on the 4K though, looking truly red while the 35th veers towards more of an orangey cast owing to that warmer hue. Even something like the tail lights of the car that Michael drives away in are nicely improved, not so much the main shot with the nurse but that final shot of the car zooming into the night, the lights are almost completely faded in the 35th but still have a deep red on the 4K.
HDR usage is excellent, not in a "I can see it from space" kinda way but in the way that the flat, bright lighting in the daylight exteriors of the 35th is pulled down into something a bit moodier, revealing a nice little extension to highlight detail in the process. And Nick Castle can rest easy, the reveal of The Shape in the closet still looks wonderful as his ghostly visage is slowly brought up from the darkness.
Grain is more abundant than the 35th, mostly due to the grain being clipped out of the brighter spots on that previous SDR transfer, and although the improvement in detail doesn't immediately leap off the screen (if you're familiar with the 35th, anyways) it's dredging up every last bit of acuity that this 35mm anamorphic source can muster. When I was checking the "speed kills!" scene the horizontal lines on PJ Soles' T-shirt are much more finely resolved, for example. Small gains for sure then, ones that some people will have rolled their eyes at when they just read that, but it's not about lines on a T-shirt but more the cumulative effect that this has, the 4K just looks 'tighter' than the 35th.
While things like the infamous Halloween hair have indeed been painted out for the 4K it actually has more overt dirt & damage in other areas vs the 35th, with more white specks and marks showing up. Even on the white-on-black location titles there are little white dots baked in to the optical visible against the black background that aren't there on the 35th, which looks clean as a whistle in those shots. New transfer = new clean-up pass with different priorities so I'm not knocking it, just pointing it out is all.
Something to add re: the Dolby Vision grey bar problem on Sony sets, I watched this in DV even though all that darkness would inevitably lead to the black bars looking quite grey. Sure enough, in the title sequence the whole image looks raised whereas the 35th Blu-ray titles are deep and dark, letterbox dark, so that glowing pumpkin looks amazing, like it's floating in mid-air in front of me, whereas the pumpkin in DV looked a lot flatter because of the raised blacks. However, when I played the 4K in HDR10 I actually got the exact same thing happen on the title sequence as on the DV, the whole screen still looked sightly raised from black and when I spot-checked several scenes - admittedly having to switch the disc from one player to another - nothing stood out in terms of the black bars being truly blacker or not, and some scenes still had a nice amount of density whenever they had a more contrasty light source in the shot (which is kinda how contrast works).
Overall then I'm not as bowled over by this as some people because the 35th anniversary BD was already clearly sourced from camera negative and was already supervised by Dean Cundey and it already looked great (for what it is), but the 4K adds a pleasant HDR pass and refines the colours further, along with whatever spatial detail it can find. The lack of the original mono track may well be a deal-breaker for some but I've had a few years to get used to the 5.1 remix (expanded into 7.1 a few years back) and so it's not as heinous an outcome for me as on other remixes of this ilk, and it doesn't completely throw out the original effects and foley in the process.
Couple of pics then, not to compare HDR, sharpness or whatever but just to show the difference in the geometry of the opening titles, the 4K is deffo fatter. If not the exact same frame (difficult on titles) then only a frame or so out. Open them in a new window and tab between them, the difference in size should become obvious.
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Hair today, gone tomorrow (look at the bottom of the image, exact same frame on both):
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