Directed by John Carpenter
Review based upon the Anchor Bay Blu-Ray release
In 1974 director John Carpenter emerged with “Dark Star”, made while he was still only a student, which was a hilarious take on the whole 'boldly going' space exploration of Star Trek. Carpenter then spent his time writing various scripts - most notably the thriller “The Eyes of Laura Mars”. He then made “Assault on Precinct 13”, a solid and gratifying thriller about a group of cops and prisoners holed in a police station against marauding street gangs. While “Assault” wasn’t a major financial success, it gained Carpenter critical acclaim as a director. “Halloween” was his next film, and a massive success that consolidated his reputation. It was made on a measly $320,000 budget and shot in 21 days, but nevertheless it became one of the most successful low budget films ever made. Also, along with “Friday the 13th”, it started off the entire slasher craze of the 1980's.
Put simply, Michael Myers is placed in an asylum at the age of six after murdering his sister. Seventeen years later he makes his escape. Pursued by his psychologist Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), he returns to his hometown of Haddonfield on Halloween night, where he stalks three babysitters including Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Frankly the film has little in the way of plot - it almost entirely consists of stalking scenes. Carpenter throws in uncanny you-thought-he-was-somewhere-else moments at the most unexpected points. Michael Myers becomes sort of like a jack-in-the-box po
p-up effect. He’s always behind people and then gone when they turn around. We are kept on breathless edge, always waiting for something to pop around the edge of the frame. Carpenter perpetually surprises us, luring us with red herrings and then jolting us when we least expect it. The film is a classic of peripheral misdirection - there are few other films which seem to have so much occur in the background or edge of the frame as in here. A lot of films copied these jumps and tactics, but few of them conduct it with the subtlety and finesse that Carpenter does.The opening shot of "Halloween" is one of the most classically stylish openings in any horror film; it’s a single Panaglide sequence shot from Michael’s point-of-view, circling the house, pulling a Halloween mask over the lens as he enters and then stabbing his sister. The single shot is finally broken, with Carpenter pulling back as the parents arrive and the mask is removed to reveal with considerable shock a six-year old boy’s face beneath.
Some of Carpenter’s other images are so weird and unearthly the film almost takes on supernatural overtones - like the appearance of Michael Myers before P.J. Soles wearing a sheet and her boyfriend’s glasses over his head, or of Nancy Loomis’s body lying on a bed with a headstone, lit up by a flickering Halloween pumpkin placed above it. Carpenter, who also scores most of his films, creates the film’s memorable musical motif, which adds great eerie atmosphere. It is worth noting that Carpenter claims the music was heavily influenced by the synthesized score (composed by Goblin) that was used in the Dario Argento film “Suspiria”.
The film is also filled with a lot of dark irony, like the moments where the very car that Pleasence is pursuing passes by unnoticed several times when his back is turned, and the child who attempts to scare another girl only to end up being scared himself. There's also the wonderfully sardonic scene where P.J. Soles is being strangled, and her noises are merely taken as another of her prank phone calls by Curtis, who retorts “Are you fooling me? I’ll kill you if this is a joke”.
There is a certain conservative morality that lurks underneath the film too. For one, there is Loomis’s objectification of Michael Myers as evil. “I realized what lived behind that boys eyes was purely and simply evil”, Pleasance says. Later he refers to Michael Myers as having “ ... an emotionless face, the Devil’s eyes”. Alas, evil is the kind of term that any self-respecting psychiatrist tends to avoid as it's a moral term and serves no real use in being able to explain behaviour. It's one that perhaps inadvertently makes Loomis into something of a crackpot as far as psychiatrists go, a characterization that became much more evident in the later sequels. But it also shows the increasing trend in psycho-thriller movies (subsequent entries such as “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Se7en” and “8MM” all being good examples) in seeing psychopathic behaviour not in terms of behavioural motivations but rather in moral terms, as being entirely on the other side of a dividing line that is removed from normal human behaviour.
This was the first slasher film to set up elements copied by “Friday the 13th” and it’s imitators, of teenagers being punished for partying, drinking, taking drugs, being practical jokers, but most of all for having sex. The victims here are sexually active girls, and moreover the Nancy Loomis and particularly P.J. Soles characters are characterized as vain and despicable so that they almost seem to deserve their fates. Of course, Curtis was the first of the heroines who would survive, and it is implied because she remains chaste. She is characterized as being innocent, shy and bookish. Her bedroom is dressed, not as any teenage girl’s might be, with posters of pop stars and hunks, but in conservative art prints and tennis rackets. Her worries are not about leaving her boyfriend behind, but her school books. The most she ever strays across the line is to smoke a joint, and when she does she spends more time worrying about the lingering smell. In the documentary “The American Nightmare” in 2000, Carpenter discussed the making of Halloween, and offered up the wittily perceptive comment “I didn’t mean to put an end to the Sexual Revolution. For that I deeply apologize”.
The film also contains many genre references. “The Thing from Another World”, which Carpenter would later remake as “The Thing” in 1982, at one point appears on a TV. Donald Pleasence’s psychiatrist is named Sam Loomis - which was also the name of the character Marion Crane’s boyfriend in “Psycho”. Of course, there are also all sorts of echoes of “Psycho” created in the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis, who is the daughter of Janet Leigh who played Marion Crane, the original slasher movie victim, in that infamous shower scene.
Despite the many sequels none of them come anywhere near generating the eerie suspense that the first film does, and merely offer up more blood and novelty killing set-pieces. This is why “Halloween” remains a classic, while the others are merely imitators.
10 out of 10
The most important slasher movie ever made... technically and stylistically brilliant with incredible tension and a great payoff
