Halloween (1978)

 

Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis (as Laurie Strode); Nick Castle (as Michael Myers); Donald Pleasence (as Dr. Sam Loomis); Charles Cyphers (as Sheriff Leigh Brackett); Nancy Kyes (as Annie Brackett); P. J. Soles (as Lynda Van Der Klok)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It would be impossible to add anything else to the view of Halloween analytically or in aesthetic. In fact the most interesting thing from my perspective I can add is that it was an immensely slow period of rewatches before I held Halloween as beyond an okay film to one of the best horror films I had seen from the seventies. By this point, I can now watch the film and soak in its virtues with ease, and whilst this review is inevitably going to just going to praise it to the hilt, the most surprising thing for me to revisit here is how for what innovated the slasher as a fully formed genre, it feels an outlier for the tropes it created. For all the films which came after, as frankly it can be said Friday the 13^th (1980) kicked the door open and let the eighties in general be the decade we usually think of tied to the genre. Halloween became its own work in the sub-genre standing proud by its reputation.

This also comes with the fact I used to have a divided attitude to slashers, growing to accept them more and more over the years as I have seen plenty of fun ones, and always willing to give a chance to one I have not seen. Even slasher fans will have to admit, the diehard fan base for that genre, that the level of quality in terms of how well made and beautiful Halloween is a high bar here for others to reach. Even if it deals with exceptionally grim subject matter, it is an entire mountain that John Carpenter with his collaborators has managed to achieve when this film was first released. In the context of said slasher films, and their constant repetition of plot lines, their tropes followed over decades even when they became self-aware, Halloween is simplistic in plot to others and next to its sequels, as while later films including Friday the 13 (1980) would have more complicated back stories, all there is about the first Halloween is a boy named Michael Myers who killed his older sister in the past. After escaping a mental asylum years later, he targets three young woman, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Nancy Kyes as Annie Brackett and P. J. Soles as Lynda Van Der Klok, and that is all we have in terms of the plot

None of the Thorn mythos of later sequels and no folktale mythology is found here, and there is little in terms of an actual body count is even found. This is minimal next to the extremely threadbare slashers of later years is found here, only Donald Pleasance as Myers' psychologist Dr. Sam Loomis giving chase qualifying as a subplot. It was a deceptively simple, explaining why my younger self was not interested in the film at first, and there is little to Myers barring being a figure who stalks a couple of suburbia houses, its economy more frightening in this especially when you view it as a cinematic mirror of the serial killings starting to take their place in urban folklore in the late fifties onwards in the USA. This reality, of a kid who kills for no reason, taps directly into then-modern idea in horror films of remorselessness, as Loomis says there is nothing behind Myers' eyes, crossed with the supernatural by making him a literal bogeyman for Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews), the young boy Laurie is babysitting, to see outside his window at night and be terrified of. Because of Dean Cundey's awe-inspiring cinematography there are times it feels like Myers literally disappears and re-materialises from the shadows like a spectre.

It of course helps that the people he terrorises are written and acted like real people. It is a problem with horror cinema in general, where even in fun and ridiculous movies, unless you are a great writer of esoteric or funny dialogue, I have to admit that they are never necessarily "real" people. Now as a more open minded figure to slashers too, there are also those films still where they have characters who merely speak in quips and generic exposition could annoy me even at my most patient. The combination of John Carpenter openly admitting his influence from classic Hollywood and the unsung quality of the late Debra Hill as a writer means that, alongside great performances, you have characters you care completely for in the context of a minimalistic chiller. Jamie Lee Curtis in particular stood out this time and it is baffling that people created the virginal Final Girl stereotype from the Laurie Strode character when its completely alien, feeling like a puritanical bastardisation of a more complicated and interesting figure. She is a sarcastic but thoughtful figure, who smokes pot but is utterly reliable as a person, merely shy around boys and has other peoples' work begrudgingly dumped on her lap including by her friends. For her first performance in a film, it is great acting by Lee Curtis even when she has to play the moments of screaming and cowering from Myers before she starts to retaliate back. It says a lot that, for the attempts to continue the film without her, by the return of the franchise in the late 2010s, Jamie Lee Curtis is as integral to the legacy as its villain.

As a horror film, the languid pace is perfect. Cundey's cinematography adds a realistic, Americana look in the daytime scenes but at night gives a story almost grounded in reality a phantasmagoric edge in how Michael Myers blends into the shadows. The music by Carpenter himself is iconic, tapping into similar unease from the use of electronic music. What is also worth motioning, whilst a film about death and terror, is that it lavishes a love to Halloween the holiday itself. Old horror films playing on the televisions, including The Thing from Another World (1951) as a premonition of Carpenter's career, to the various appearances of pumpkins beyond the ominous opening credits emphasise the aesthetic of the setting. Barring Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), none of the later films' references to ancient ritual and Samhain had any sense of real mythos to it, more a proudly cheesier pulpy story telling with its own sense of fun but not the same as what this establishes. Here everything is as simple as a very American phantom of a killer who murders indiscriminately, but also treats Halloween as a festival as a homespun and warm holiday, of trick and treating to dressing up in costumes. Not a lot of the slashers I have seen have ever had the sense of a community, merely setting with stock types, to make the terror more disturbing, so the sense of frivolity and childhood innocence found in Haddonfield's suburbia is more startling in hindsight to what horrible things will happen in the narrative. It is a line where, when Annie's father Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) scares Laurie and says everyone deserves a scare on Halloween, that is the core of the namesake film over it, less the gore and big hair of the eighties slashers, but a creepy ghost ride which is yet so close to the places its original audience would be living it that it has grounded, real chill to it. Watching it many Halloweens like many others, it is both a comfort film but, especially with its almost surreal ending where Carpenter shows shots of empty rooms after the tragedy has taken place, also a film that efficiently scrapes a primal nerve of discomfort every single time I view it now.