Halloween

Review by Jason Henderson

Video Available from Anchor Bay Entertainment 1978

Director: John Carpenter Producer: Moustapha Akkad

When you watch Halloween, especially in the handsome new widescreen edition, as opposed to that scratchy pan-and-scan that Blockbuster has been carrying for years, there are some ground rules.

The first thing you have to do is forget what you know, all the stuff that came after. The first thing you hear when the credits begin is that Halloween music, a haunting, simple theme. Pretend you've never heard it before. But more importantly, pretend you've never seen this movie before, and not having seen it, you must be in 1978.

1978 means horror is in one of its waning "scared adult" phases, struggling through the period that began earlier in that decade with The Omen and The Exorsist. Horror of late has been big-budget and pompous. This movie Halloween is not pompous. It is simple.

1978 also means that Halloween has not yet recreated horror in its own image. There is no Friday the 13th, a Halloween exploitation ripoff; no Prom Night; not even that other slasher-flick Halloween ripoff, Halloween II. None of that is here yet. There are no cliches yet. The slasher flick isn't even a 'genre' yet.

So, there you are, 1978, your mind clean as you watch Halloween. Let me just list a few things to look for:

Small Town Americana

The town of Haddonfield, Illinois, is pure Rockwell and Bradbury. The leaves are rustling and Halloween as a tradition is shown to have melded with Americana, with kids and pumpkins and scattered leaves racing across the streets. Underneath this veil of hominess lie the obsessions of American youth -- sex, mainly -- and tonight, those obsessions are going to come back to haunt us, bursting through the veil.

Shadows and White

John Carpenter did this movie for a mere ten thousand dollars, and he brings to the work a master's touch: time and time again in the movie, our eyes will be fooled into resting on a light spot, say, a room with a lamp burning, and Carpenter will leave a patch of darkness to the side. The image of the white mask of Michael Meyers slowly congealing from the darkness is chilling and starkly beautiful. The same motif appears earlier, in the drive to the hospital a the beginning, when the black, rainy night is cut by headlights, illuminating gowned mental patients wandering the grounds like ghosts. carpenter understood something about color, and he uses it in Halloween time and time again.

He's not Michael Meyers. He's the Shape.

There's no Michael in there, at least not controlling the body that wanders the idyllic streets of Haddonfield. In his first murder, we follow Michael's eyes up as he looks at his own hand, which is stabbing his sister. The Shape is in control, or Meyers has become The Shape.

And The Shape follows rules. He likes to stop and look at what he's done; he's very curious. He will stop to put his mask back on. Most unusual, he doesn't worry about kids. It's sexually alive teenagers Michael is chasing, but kids... are fellows. Leading one to think The Shape considers itself an innocent.

Pacing

Unlike the formula slasher flick, this move benefits from preceding the formula and following an old-fashioned long-setup pace. Carpenter spends most of the movie lurking, setting up the characters, before finally cranking it up in the final thirty minutes.

Foreground and Background Tricks

Thank god for Anchor Bay's new widescreen edition, because now you can see Halloween, for the first time, exactly as it appeared in the theaters when it came out. And one thing that really makes that important for this movie is Carpenter's very careful use of his camera: he uses the whole view, and then he plays with depth. Our vision is constantly jolted by being drawn from the 'apparent' focus, say, characters in the foreground, to the 'surprise' focus, stepping into the background. Or vice versa. Carpenter plays with expectations, to marvelous effect.

Suspense Versus Violence. Or Lack Thereof.

Oh, sure, there are killings. But this is the slasher-before-the-genre, remember? The gore in this one remains demurely offscreen. The grand guignol roller coasters of Friday the 13th would come later, because it was easier to make a gory slasher than a suspenseful one. There's a point to those movies, but Halloween is not that kind of movie. It's an adult picture, about young adults, who are no longer children, and are being punished for it.