The Critics versus Halloween

These are some things that i have always wanted to add to my website so here they are for your viewing pleasure

Halloween as reviewed by Yahoo movies

Perhaps the most influential and successful independent film ever made, HALLOWEEN is the movie that put director John Carpenter on the map as a viable filmmaker. An exercise in simple, pure horror, HALLOWEEN takes us into the world of a mad killer, Michael Myers, who at a very young age stabbed his older sister to death. Locked away for many years in a mental hospital Michael escapes one night and returns to his home to continue his killing spree. Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first role, plays the resourceful babysitter who is chased by the killer on Halloween night. Produced for very little money and a tight shooting schedule, HALLOWEEN was a stunning success when it was released. Written by John Carpenter and his longtime producer Debra Hill, the film set both their careers on fire, with both of them working together many times over the next 25 years. The film also made a star out of Jamie Lee Curtis and turned the slasher movie into a viable, successful genre. HALLOWEEN has been copied, parodied and even turned into a franchise of its own, but the original is still considered the best of the bunch. HALLOWEEN was John Carpenter's first foray into horror, and remains the standard to which all other modern horror films are measured.

Review by Yahoo.com

Don't see Halloween in an empty theater on a weekday afternoon. See it on a weekend night in a packed house. Halloween is a film to be enjoyed with a boisterous crowd; it's an "audience picture," a film designed to get specific reactions from an audience at specific moments.

With Halloween, the most often desired reaction is screaming. It's a beautifully made thriller---more shocking than bloody---that will have you screaming with regularity. Halloween was directed by John Carpenter, 30, a natural filmmaker and a name worth remembering. Eight years ago as a film student Carpenter worked on the Academy Award winning short, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy.

Halloween begins with a magnificent four-minute tracking shot of what turns out to be an 8-year-old boy murdering his sister after he discovers her having sexual relations with her boyfriend. The film is set on Halloween night, 1963, in a sleepy small town in Illinois. The tracking shot begins as the boy is outside his home. Along with him we watch the young couple leave the room, walk upstairs, and go to bed. The young boy then dons a Halloween mask, and director Carpenter, maintaining the correct point-of-view, has his camera and us peer throught the mask as the young boy walks into his sister's bedroom. He is holding a long knife in his hand.

After the stabbing, the film jumps forward to Halloween night, 1978. The young killer is about to break out of the sanitarium where he has been held for the last 15 years. He will return to his hometown, and he will terrorize three teen-age girls. Donald Pleasence plays a psychologist on the killer's trail.

Right about now some people may be thinking, "What can be so good about a film involving a young man attacking young women?" All that can be said in the film's defense is, with the exception of two demure shots of girls undressing, Halloween does not pander to the violence-prone. This film is meant only to thrill.

Rich Corliss, the excellent film critic of the late New Times magazine, offers an even better justification of the violence in Halloween. Corliss says that horror films such as Halloween are ferociously Old Testament; they punish "both the heroine-exhibitionist and the viewer-voyeur." In other words, the girls in Halloween are punished for fooling around with sex, and we the viewers are "punished" (with thrills) for watching the girls.

So much for theory, Halloween works because director Carpenter knows how to shock while making us smile. he repeatedly sets up anticipation of a shock and delays the shock for varying lengths of time. The tension is considerable. More than once during the movie I looked around just to make sure that no one weird was sitting behind me. It's that kind of movie.

Halloween plays on ancient fears of children being left alone, of babysitters being forced to turn to children as allies in moments of stress, of other people doubting what you are certain you saw in the shadows of the night.

Director Carpenter wisely keeps his killer hidden from direct sight. The killer is wearing hospital bandages over his face; he is photographed mostly in shadows.

It's one thing to make an effective thriller out of night scenes, but it's a considerably more difficult achievement to scare the daylights out of us with daylight action. To my mind, the best sequence in Halloween is a dodge-'em game the killer plays behind some shrubbery as the school girls walk home in the afternoon.

To state the obvious, Halloween is not a film for youngsters. It is properly R-rated for its ever-present threat of violence.
 

Review © 1978 THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE. All Rights Reserved.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano."-Alfred Hitchcock

So does John Carpenter. Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho. It's a terrifying and creepy film about what one of the characters calls Evil Personified. Right. And that leads us to the one small piece of plot I'm going to describe. There's this six-year-old kid who commits a murder right at the beginning of the movie, and is sent away, and is described by his psychiatrist as someone he spent eight years trying to help, and then the next seven years trying to keep locked up. But the guy escapes. And he returns on Halloween to the same town and the same street where he committed his first murder. And while the local babysitters telephone their boyfriends and watch The Thing on television, he goes back into action.

Period: That's all I'm going to describe, because Halloween is a visceral experience---we aren't seeing the movie, we're having it happen to us. It's frightening. Maybe you don't like movies that are really scary: Then don't see this one. Seeing it, I was reminded of the favorable review I gave a few years ago to The Last House on the Left, another really terrifying thriller. Readers wrote to ask how I could possibly support such a movie. But it wasn't that I was supporting it so much as that I was describing it: You don't want to be scared? Don't see it. Credit must be paid to filmmakers who make the effort to really frighten us, to make a good thriller when quite possibly a bad one might have made as much money. Hitchcock is acknowledged as a master of suspense; it's hypocrisy to disapprove of other directors in the same genre who want to scare us too.

It's easy to create violence on the screen, but it's hard to do it well. Carpenter is uncannily skilled, for example, at the use of foregrounds in his compositions, and everyone who likes thrillers knows that foregrounds are crucial: The camera establishes the situation, and then it pans to one side, and something unexpectedly looms up in the foreground. Usually it's a tree or a door or a bush. Not always. And it's interesting how he paints his victims. They're all ordinary, everyday people---nobody's supposed to be the star and have a big scene and win an Academy Award. The performances are all the more absorbing because of that; the movie's a slice of life that is carefully painted (in drab daylights and impenetrable nighttimes) before its human monster enters the scene.

We see movies for a lot of reasons. Sometimes we want to be amused. Sometimes we want to escape. Sometimes we want to laugh, or cry, or see sunsets. And sometimes we want to be scared. I'd like to be clear about this. If you don't want to have a really terrifying experience, don't see Halloween.
 

John Carpenter, who made the low-budget scare picture Halloween, has a visual sense of menace. He quickly sets up an atmosphere of fear, and his blue night tones have a fine, chilling ambience---the style is reminiscent of the Halloween episode in Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. But Carpenter isn't very gifted with actors, and he doesn't seem to have any feeling at all for motivation or for plot logic. Halloween has a pitful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that's about it. There's no indication of why he selects any particular target; he's the bogeyman---pure evil---and he wants to kill. The film is largely just a matter of the camera tracking subjectively from the mad killer's point of view, leading you to expect something awful to happen. But the camera also tracks subjectively when he isn't around at all; in fact, there's so much subjective tracking you begin to think everybody in the movie has his own camera.

As a doctor from the lunatic asylum that the killer has escaped from, Donald Pleasence is solid and forceful; enunciating in the impeccable tradition of Lionel Atwill, he delivers idiotic exposition about e-vil. Sometimes you think he's going to have to cross his eyes to keep a straight face. Carpenter doesn't seem to have had any life outside the movies: one can trace almost every idea on the screen to directors such as Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and to the Val Lewton productions. It may even be that Carpenter selected Jamie Lee Curtis to be his pure heroine---the teen-age babysitter, Laurie---because she recalls the serious-faced little blond girl in The Curse of the Cat People. The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis has a hoarse, low, rather inexpressive voice and a plaintive Lauren Bacall-ish look and an attractive gaucheness. For no discernible reason, the bogeyman (who is masked) zeroes in on her near the start of the picture, but he keeps being sidetracked. He has no trouble picking off the teen-agers who "fool around;" only Laurie has the virginal strength to put up a fight.

There's one really neat effect: near the beginning, when the madman is driving past, the more brash teen-age girls jeer at him, and the car pauses for an instant, as if the masked figure inside were deciding whether to dispatch the girls right then or bide his time. But Carpenter also wrote the score himself---all four bars--and he's devoted to it. With the seductive tracking shots and the repetitive music, the film stops and starts so many times before anything happens that the bogeyman's turning up just gets to be a nuisance---it means more of the same. Carpenter keeps you tense in an undifferentiated way---nervous and irritated rather than pleasurably excited---and you reach the point of wanting somebody to be killed so the film's rhythms will change. Yet a lot of people seem to be convinced that Halloween is something special---a classic. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness---when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic)---it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.
 

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

In late 1978, a small horror film opened in Bowling Green, Kentucky (before moving on to Chicago and New York City) that would change the face of the genre. Initially dismissed by many serious critics as unworthy of attention or praise, the motion picture looked headed for an oblivion where it would never make back its small, $300,000 budget. Then, months later, Tom Allen's insightful and complimentary essay appeared in The Village Voice. Suddenly, critics began to notice that there was more to this film than initially met the eye.

Because of its title, Halloween has frequently been grouped together with all the other splatter films that populated theaters throughout the late-1970s and early-1980s. However, while Halloween is rightfully considered the father of the modern slasher genre, it is not a member (the Halloween sequels, on the other hand, are). This is not a gruesome motion picture -- there is surprisingly little graphic violence and almost no blood. Halloween is built on suspense, not gore, and initiated more than a few of today's common horror/thriller cliches. The ultimate success of the movie, however, encouraged other film makers to try their hand at this sort of enterprise, and it didn't take long for someone to decide that audiences wanted as many explicitly grisly scenes as the running length would allow. By the time Halloween's sequel was released in 1981, the objective of this sort of movie was no longer to scare its viewers, but to gross them out.

From a shock-and-suspense point-of-view, Halloween is the rival of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. With only a few arguable exceptions (such as The Exorcist), there isn't another post-1970 release that comes close to it in terms of scaring the living hell out of a viewer. Halloween starts out in a creepy fashion with a brutal murder, and never lets up from there. Every frame drips with atmosphere. Who cares that it was filmed during the spring in California instead of during the autumn in fictional Haddonfield, Illinois?

Halloween was the film that earned Jamie Lee Curtis the infamous title of "Scream Queen." She plays Laurie Strode, the virginal protagonist. Curtis' capable interpretation of the gawky, awkward Laurie is frequently overlooked in analyses of the movie and its genre, but she effectively conveys the feelings and aspirations of a shy, insecure teenager. It's hard to believe that the actress would develop (in more ways than one) into a woman whose sexual appeal would drive pictures like A Fish Called Wanda.

The film opens with a long, single-shot prologue that takes place on Halloween night, 1963. A young Michael Myers watches as his older sister, Judith, sneaks upstairs for a quickie with a guy from school. After the boyfriend has departed, Michael takes a knife out of the kitchen drawer, ascends the staircase, and stabs Judith to death. The entire sequence employs the subjective point-of-view, an approach that writer/director John Carpenter returns to repeatedly throughout the movie. Only after the deed is done do we learn that Michael is only a grade-schooler.

The bulk of the movie takes place fifteen years later. Michael, confined to an asylum for the criminally insane for more than ten years, escapes on the night before Halloween. His doctor, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance), believing Michael to be the embodiment of evil, tracks the killer back to his hometown of Haddonfield. From there, it's a race against time as Loomis seeks to locate and stop Michael before he starts again where he left off in 1963.

Michael's primary victims are Laurie and her two best friends, Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (P.J. Soles). Throughout the film, Michael is shown gradually closing in on the girls, until, in the final act, Laurie is involved in a face-to-face fight for her life. Much has been made of the fact that the key to survival in Halloween is being a virgin. The three girls who have sex with their boyfriends (Judith Myers, Annie, and Lynda) don't survive their encounters with Michael. Laurie, who has nothing to do with boys, does. Co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill have stated numerous times that this was not a conscious theme, but, ever since Halloween, the standard for slasher films has been that sexual promiscuity leads to a violent end.

Nick Castle plays Michael (who is referred to in the end credits as "the Shape") as an implacable, inhuman adversary. Because he wears a painted white Captain Kirk mask, we only once (briefly) see his features, and this makes him all the more frightening. He kills without making a sound or changing his expression, and his movements are often slow and zombie-like. Carpenter is exceedingly careful in chosing the camera angles he uses to shoot Michael. Before the climax, there's never a clear close-up -- he's always concealed by shadows, shown in the distance, or presented as otherwise obscured. This approach makes for an especially ominous villain. Subsequent Halloweens delved more deeply into Michael's origins and his connection to Laurie, but, in this one, he remains an enigma, and the lack of a clear motive makes his actions all the more terrifying.

Another important element of Halloween's success is our ability to identify with the trio of female protagonists, and Carpenter establishes a rapport between the audience and the characters by employing intelligent, realistic dialogue and placing the girls in believable situations. For Annie and Lynda, the most important thing about Halloween night is finding a place to have sex with their boyfriends. For Laurie, it's making sure the kid she's babysitting is having a good time. Annie and Lynda are blissfully unaware of their danger until it's too late, but Laurie recognizes her peril. Meanwhile, if Michael represents pure evil, Sam Loomis is the avenging angel. He's the voice of reason that no one listens to, and, in the end, he's the cavalry coming over the mountain, gun blazing.

Halloween is one of those films where the attention to detail is evident in every frame. While there are many memorable moments, three scenes stand out above the rest. The first is the long, unbroken opening sequence where the young Michael dons a clown mask and murders his sister. Often copied, but never equaled, this scene was unique for its time and reminiscent of Psycho's shower murder for its effect. The second also occurs early in the movie, as Michael escapes from the asylum during a rain storm. To this day, I find these to be the most chilling three minutes of the movie. Finally, there's the scene near the end where Laurie is banging on a locked door while Michael approaches slowly and inexorably from behind. It's a credit to Carpenter that, no matter how many times you've seen the movie, the tension at this point still mounts to a palpable level.

Despite being relatively simple and unsophisticated, Halloween's music is one of its strongest assets. Carpenter's dissonant, jarring themes provide the perfect backdrop for Michael's activity, proving that a film doesn't need a symphonic score by an A-line composer to be effective. Carpenter's Halloween main title, one of the horror genre's best-recognizable tunes, can bring chills even away from the theater. Try putting it in the tape deck when you're alone in the car sometime after midnight on a lonely country road, and see if you feel secure.

The final body count in Halloween is surprisingly low (the immediate sequel, Halloween 2, rectified this matter, but that's another story), but the terror quotient is high. This is the kind of impeccably crafted motion picture that burrows deep into our psyche and connects with the dark, hidden terrors that lurk there. Halloween is not a perfect movie, but no recent horror film has attained this pinnacle (as evidenced by the plaudits heaped upon it in Wes Craven's recent Scream). Likewise, John Carpenter has never come close to recapturing Halloween's artistic or commercial success, though he has tried many times. Halloween remains untouched -- a modern classic of the most horrific kind.

© 1997 James Berardinelli

Film Review by David Gore in 2001

As Dr. Loomis looks up into the black Halloween sky, he can almost see the demon in front of him. "He Came Home," the crazy Doctor mutters to the audience. Right. "I spent eight years trying to reach him, seven more trying to make sure he was locked away," Loomis pleads. The thing he's talking about is Michæl Myers, his most dangerous patient, and one of the scariest villains in movie history, as shown with a fleshy William Shatner mask on. Of course, all of this is contained into arguably, the greatest horror film of the past thirty years.

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