HALLOWEEN
Even Harlan Ellison likes this movie, and he hates everything
There seems to be so little to say about this movie other than how good it is. I can't think of another horror movie (much less one this good) that is as straightforward as this one is - everything about it that is good is so blindingly obvious that it seems like it doesn't even need to be written. It's right there on screen, you don't have to dig for it. Halloween isn't just great, it's just so OBVIOUSLY great. There's not much to find by reading between the lines here.
This isn't the first slasher movie, or the goriest slasher movie, or even the one that really touched off the glut of slasher movies which struck a devastating blow to the genre with their abundance and sameness. But it is the most imitated slasher movie (possibly the most imitated HORROR movie of all time), and easily the best.
Of course written and directed by cine-maestro John Carpenter, Halloween opens with a couple of superb, lengthy tracking shots, likely cut in the middle when the subject (from whose point of view we are watching) dons a mask and is momentarily sightless. (actually, it first opens with a credit sequence that just lists names while we very, VERY slowly zoom into the eye of a jack-o'-lantern, with Carpenter's famous Halloween Theme playing. It doesn?t sound like much. But it damn near makes me hide behind my chair every time.) We watch a young couple make out on the couch on Halloween night, 1963, move upstairs, and after the fastest bout of lovemaking ever (beating out even that in Jackie Brown - elapsed time: 55 seconds), part ways, with the male putting on his shirt, leaving, and promising he'll call (yeah, sure). Up the stairs we go, around the corner, and into the bedroom, as our naked young lover brushes her hair. The subject then proceeds to stab her to death. The killer moves back downstairs just as the girl's parents are pulling up to the house, perhaps to do them in as well; but the tracking shot is broken when the parents remove the mask. The killer is revealed to be not only their son, but their very YOUNG son - six years old, actually.
Move forward fifteen years, and the long-speechless and sedate Myers has a burst of energy and breaks out of the mental institution he's been locked in ever since, making his way back to Haddonfield to, well, do what knife-wielding killers do. He breaks into a hardware store and steals his now-infamous white mask (William Shatner, painted over - but Michael doesn't actually start packing on the pounds like Shatner until part six), and sets about his ghastly work, while his very slightly mad psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) desperately enlists the aid of the skeptical (and largely resourceless) Sheriff's department to track the madman down. Meanwhile, four Haddonfield teenagers (three girls and one of their boyfriends) are making their own plans for the evening, never counting on having to entertain this uninvited guest.
So, basically, it's your standard slasher movie plot. But it's just so magnificently pulled off, that nothing feels standard in the end.
Dr. Loomis is the role that Pleasance will likely be best remembered for - as much as I enjoyed You Only Live Twice, it was with some disappointment that I beheld that the 1995 Oscars "In Memory..." sequence showed a shot of him as Blofeld. He gets a great speech about a half hour in regarding his years of "counseling" Michael (I put that in quotes because he may as well have been counseling a tree stump), in the great tradition of horror heroes who get to rant about the evil they pursue, and another, briefer speech later on. He shows just a whiff of madness here, like horror movie psychiatrists are wont to do, never going over the top with it but using it to establish his own single-minded pursuit of his patient, whose best interests he no longer has in mind. The sequels would appropriately show him sliding down that path to madness (well, except for part six), one of the things I appreciated about them. For now, Dr. Loomis is everything one wants or needs him to be.
The rest of the cast is largely nondescript, mostly sympathetic but without much personality. Even our heroine Laurie (played by a young Jamie Lee Curtis) just seems like a sweet girl who we wouldn't want to see killed, but not much more. Nancy Loomis as Annie radiates a tremendous amount of sex appeal, and P.J. Soles' character Linda is defined largely by abundant use of the word "totally" and the fact that she bares her breasts. The sheriff (Charles Cyphers) is much like Laurie in that he's sympathetic so far as we don't wish him any specific harm. Pleasance is easily the only actor you'll notice here, and the only actor you need to.
Nah, it ain't the plot, dialogue, or character that hooks you in this movie. It's pure, stark, blood-freezing terror, a combination of atmospheric and shocker elements that come together as well here as in any movie I've ever seen, Alien being the only movie that comes to mind that produces such harrowing levels of this kind of terror.
The cinematography by Dean Cundey is crucial to the atmosphere that this movie creates. Light is bland, jaundiced, and empty of hope, while the dark is as solid and shrouding as any dark I've ever seen in a movie. Framing the film (and its occasionally cheerful characters) in this bleak, sad world, Carpenter weaves a true nightmare landscape, a stark, lonely place where a murderous villain isn't even really needed to bring the place a certain kind of horror. All this, without any dripping ceilings or towering black spires. Uncanny.
But we do have a murderous villain, and of course Myers is a terrific villain which could easily have been completely without personality. Sure, all we really get to see of him is a mask and a set of overalls (well, we see his face for about half a second), but there's a kind of thought process at work here that movie slashers rarely get to indulge us with. Note the scene where he dons a sheet (like a child's ghost costume) and places one victim's glasses on his head - this is a guy whose maturity was frozen at age six, and he's implementing the best approximation of a Halloween prank he can think of. And he just stands there, for a long time, unable to imagine where he can take this, as if thinking "Okay, she's not scared. What do I do now?" Where he takes it is, of course, a foregone conclusion when the person on the receiving end of the prank goes for the telephone, but Michael behaves convincingly childlike throughout the scene, as if waiting for the expected reaction to a prank, and then reacting accordingly when a different reaction comes to pass.
Sure, Michael has his share of cinematic conceits - most obviously, a refusal to actually run while pursuing his victims, and a juggernaut-like unstoppability. Bullets, knives, and coathangers (coathangers?) have a minimal effect against him, dropping him momentarily, but he always gets up. Carpenter pulls this off, however - Michael's injuries knock him down, and give the viewer just enough hope to think that he might STAY down, even though we should know better. If he can bleed, he can die, right? Maybe.
Halloween closes things out in true Carpenter style, with an ending that might be standard for this kind of movie in terms of structure but is stunningly executed. Hearing nothing but the music and heavy breathing, the camera shows us stationary shots of all sorts of places in Haddonfield - where Michael has been, or might be now. All the while, his presence is made to feel closer with the increasing intensity of that breathing, until finally the camera rests where it must. In the hands of a lesser director, the ol' "...but he's still alive!" ending would already have been old in 1978. Carpenter makes it a knockout.
Like I said, there ain't a lot of depth here. "Reading into" this movie only suggests the very slightest more going on than is made explicit; two underlying themes, really. One, is the story's attempt to tap into childhood fears of The Boogeyman. Whether or not the Boogeyman is real doesn't matter when he's trying to kill you. Myers makes an appropriate Boogeyman, faceless, almost formless (he's referred to in the credits as The Shape), an inspirer of pure terror. One thing Halloween's always pulled off is making me feel like a scared kid, kind of the way I approached feeling as a kid when I'd see ads for this on TV, or hear my friends talking about it. I once heard this referred to (disparagingly) as "kiddie horror"; I had to point out to the guy that there's a vast difference between "kiddie horror" and horror that expertly taps into childhood fears and anxieties. This is certainly the latter.
The other theme is of course the old horror standby of sex being a killer. Everybody in this movie who has sex (or even wants sex) dies, except for that guy at the beginning of the film. Everybody who doesn't have sex, well, has a better chance, if not a perfect one. This is not exactly a new idea, and wasn't even new in 1978, but Halloween made it virtually explicit, and setting up another aspect to be endlessly replicated by the film's myriad imitators. (Carpenter and cowriter/producer Debra Hill keep insisting that they never intended this)
Contrary to what Scream would have you believe, Halloween is not much of a party movie - casual glances are certain to result in its dismissal as a dated, tame movie from another generation. I've never had the good fortune to see Halloween on the big screen, but that's got to be the best medium to see it in, where the cold, grasping reality of the nightmare Carpenter creates is impossible to ignore or escape. If you can't see it in a theater, definitely see it in the widescreen format. I know, I know - ALWAYS see a movie in widescreen whenever possible, but that is particularly the case with Halloween, since some of the movie's best scares are invisible (or nonsensical) in the pan-n-scan version.
A novelization by Curtis Richards can be found at the occasional used bookstore - it's surprisingly well-written for this kind of thing, and has an introduction sure to fascinate fans, involving a tribe of celts setting in motion a centuries-lasting curse of doom. The soundtrack by Carpenter is widely available and well worth owning - it even includes a photo inside of Laurie and Michael making out (!) through the mask, probably the product of "off-camera" goofing around. It does not, however, contain Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" (by the original band, for once) - but you should already have a copy of that, shouldn't you?
You might say that this is John Carpenter's first best movie. He doesn't like talking about it much at all these days; mostly because of the sequels, I imagine (even though they were his own damn fault, and the best of them were far better than, say, Village Of The Damned). Gave rise to (to date) six sequels, most of which were much better than they could have been, one of which had nothing to do with any of the others and went off on its own plot. But that, as they say, is another story. (heh heh heh)
Relevant trivia - Halloween was nominated for the Saturn award for Best Horror Film in 1979, but I have no idea whether or not it won. More relevant trivia - two more scenes (which really added nothing significant to the film) were shot during the production of Halloween II to compensate for cuts made in the TV edit of Halloween. One involved Loomis arguing for a young Michael's continued imprisonment in the institution, or something like that, and the other was basically used to help set up the extremely awkward and unlikely "sibling" aspect that Carpenter introduced in Halloween II. (the eye holes in the mask in the opening tracking shot were also shrunken so that no nudity was visible) Still yet more relevant trivia - I've read that the sound effects of Michael stabbing his sister were the same sound effects used in the shower scene in Psycho, much like how Carpenter used the claws of the Creature from the Black Lagoon on the beach-ball alien in Dark Star. I don't know how true this is.
Irrelevant trivia - I used to have a Michael Myers mask, but it shriveled up into a solid, cracked husk when I made the mistake of storing it with a t-shirt stuffed inside instead of paper towels. But man, that made for some fun Halloweens. More irrelevant trivia - I have three Halloween lobby cards. (smile) Still yet more irrelevant trivia - in 1993 or 1994 I recorded a metal version of the Halloween Theme on guitar, bass, and (really bad) computerized drums. The effect was actually pretty cool, and I tried overlaying samples from the movie on to the recording but was unable to make them audible with my VERY limited equipment. (Entombed did the same thing with their song "Hellraiser" in 1993, which I didn't even know about until this year)