USA
Review: JA Kerswell
This is a reworked version of the review I published way, way back in 1999 (just a year after I started Hysteria Lives!). My writing and grasp of grammar have (hopefully) improved a lot since then. So, while keeping the (Halloween) spirit of the original, I have given it a sprinkle of orange candy for the scariest night of the year...
What can be said about John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN? ... Well, a lot, actually. But what can be said about HALLOWEEN that hasn't already been said countless times? ... Hmmm, not much. However, as the Granddaddy of the modern slasher movie, it deserves a front-and-centre spot on Hysteria Lives!. Even though I'd argue Carpenter’s film certainly wasn't the first slasher movie, it was, after all, the catalyst (albeit unintentionally) for the tidal wave of teenage blood that washed over screens from 1978 to 1984.
Full disclosure: HALLOWEEN is my favourite movie of all time, so I may be a little biased. But by accident, not by design, I saw Rick Rosenthal's 1981 sequel before the original. That was way back in 1983 or so, on video at a friend's house, when I was around 13. The horror bug had always been there (as a young kid I'd always loved scary things), but seeing The Shape for the first time—the slow, relentless and deliciously terrifying presence that was Michael Myers—well, I was hooked. I hankered to see what actually happened before "More Of The Night He Came Home”. I was intrigued to find out why a lunatic doctor was pursuing Myers as relentlessly as Myers pursued Laurie Strode. A few years later I finally caught it, although, curiously, I remember seeing the original for the first time less than I remember the sequel. But I do remember thinking that, as far as scary movies go, it was perhaps the most deliciously frightening film I had ever seen (and perhaps still is).
Even now, some 43 years after I first saw HALLOWEEN, I still love every God damn minute of it. I can't stop my heart from nearly beating out of my chest during the last fifteen minutes—even though I practically know the dialogue off by heart. It is an endlessly fascinating and enduring film, despite being envisaged purely as an exploitation movie. It was commissioned by independent film producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad, who wanted to create a film about a psycho killer who stalks babysitters. John Carpenter and producer and co-creator Debra Hill expected it to play for one week at drive-ins and then be forgotten. Yet fans remember it fondly, and it still casts its spell of suspense and terror on audiences as it did when it first hit screens in 1978. Not to mention, HALLOWEEN continues to shape modern horror and remains an enduring franchise in its own right (as of this writing, we wait to see what the 50th anniversary will bring).
The plot? Well, it doesn't really matter. HALLOWEEN is one of the few films where a lack of plot isn't a hindrance; in fact, it's the opposite—one of its strengths. It is a lean, mean, seductive shock machine that soars precisely because it jettisons all but essential exposition. What's left is the bare bones of a story. A six-year-old boy stabs his sister to death, and fifteen years later, on the anniversary of her murder—Halloween—he escapes and returns to his hometown to carry on an apparently motiveless killing spree. That's it.
The first 10 iconic minutes are a masterclass in filmmaking (albeit somewhat lifted from Philip Gilbert’s 1971 proto-slasher BLOOD & LACE). Told from little Mikey Myers' point of view, the sequence opens with him staring at the front of the house, then prowling its side, pausing to watch his sister and her boyfriend leave the sofa and go upstairs for a (very) brief session of hanky-panky. We watch as he takes a butcher's knife from the kitchen drawer, then, after the boyfriend has left, creeps up to his sister's room. His features hidden behind a clown mask, he stabs her to death. He then returns downstairs, goes out through the front door, and stops outside the house just as his parents return home. They pull his mask off—revealing his blank face (a catatonic cherub), still clutching the bloody knife. Their only words to him are an incredulous, "Michael?" ... Now, this sequence alone is incredible—it never fails to impress (even with the knowledge that it is not all one take, as it originally looks), and it sets the scene beautifully for the night of horror that lies ahead ...
HALLOWEEN's simplicity works beautifully, even for its characters. All of them are fairly one-dimensional, yet completely believable. This includes Jamie Lee Curtis' portrayal of Laurie Strode (playing very much against type), the geeky, virginal and unwilling Final Girl, who wishes she could be more like her friends, bubbly airhead ("totally!") Lynda (P.J. Soles) and the sarcastic but amiable Annie (Nancy Loomis), who all unwittingly become the focus of Myers' murderous intentions. It also includes Donald Pleasence's brilliantly unhinged Dr Loomis, Myers’ long-term psychiatrist (it's hard to think of anyone else playing the role, but both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were offered it and declined). The only other adult inhabitants of Haddonfield of any note are Lynda's boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) and Annie's father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who both seem curiously disposable. However, on a night that has culturally been relegated to providing entertainment for children, the irony is that it is the two kids that Laurie Strode ends up babysitting, Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews) and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), who are the first residents of the sleepy town to recognise the true nature of the night and the terrifying reality of The Boogey Man ...
As for The Shape, critic Mark Kermode perhaps describes Michael Myers best when he says, “No rhyme, no reason, no motive—just fear”. There's something terrible and unnatural about him that is best left unexplained. He is an enigma. A ghost in the night. No matter how hard we try and work him out, we can't. Again, this is what makes Myers such a successful Boogey Man—he is the unknown. We fear that beneath that expressionless ghoul mask lies an equally expressionless face—perhaps with the blank look unchanged since his parents pulled the mask from him fifteen years earlier. Before the night he killed his sister, he was presumably a normal kid, one who just snapped, or became an empty vessel for some kind of evil (as made more explicit in the tie-in novelisation). Again, this ambiguity drives the film’s relentless ability to generate unease while still entertaining.
On that Halloween night in 1978, the adult Myers appears to have a passionless yet intense interest in his ghoulish work—pinning one of the teens to the kitchen door with a butcher's knife, he stands back and surveys his work, cocking his head this way and that with almost childlike curiosity. In a film that seems uninterested in mixing horror and broad humour, Myers pretends to be a dead boyfriend in a Halloween costume as a stereotypical ghost—the glasses fooling Lynda—which should be kinda funny; indeed, she initially thinks it is a harmless, yet quickly irritating, trick on Halloween night. But despite the scene's absurdity, there is no humour. We know Bob is dead, and Myers is under the sheet. This willing perversion of humour only makes the scene more ghoulish and scarier. The ghost drag is just another mask to lurk behind, ultimately an amuse-bouche for the Boogey Man before Lynda’s murder.
Interestingly, Carpenter and Hill buck the (then) accepted notion of raving insanity on film. Myers is horribly calm and patient, purposefully striding (never running) after his prey, as relentless in his pursuit as a shark that senses blood in the water. As Carpenter puts it, he is a “machine killer” (a deliberate echo of Yul Brynner’s dangerous defective android gunslinger in WESTWORLD (1973)). Without a distinct personality, we can project our own fears onto Myers, which Carpenter clearly intends when he says Myers “is a blank slate”.
Myers is not just some lunatic who has escaped from a mental asylum and returned home. Although it's been hotly contested for years, I think the evidence clearly shows that HALLOWEEN—and Michael Myers specifically—has an element of the supernatural. After all, he is The Boogey Man. Carpenter has stated that he wanted to “… kick him up into a legendary kind of situation where he's much more an element of nature. I thought that would be more frightening. Make him almost a force—so then the mask, which ties in with Halloween, blanks out his human features for most of the film, making him then some sort of force of evil—irrational… unstoppable". He elaborates, “I added a slight supernatural edge to this guy—sure he’s this person who escapes from a mental institution, and he comes back to revisit this small town, but he can't be killed, and there's a certain feeling that maybe he's not quite a human being.”
The Shape is a ghostly, floating white jack-o'-lantern emerging from a sea of blackness in many scenes. It is demonstrated most effectively in the scene where Jamie Lee Curtis has found her friends slain and is reeling in horror on the landing, as Myers attempts to envelop her, slowly fading into sight from the depths of some dark abyss like a malevolent spider.
The film effectively contrasts Halloween's violent pagan roots (which Myers, as The Boogey Man, represents) with the cosy version Jamie Lee and the other inhabitants of Haddonfield celebrate every year—one in which true horror has been lost beneath Disneyfication and familiarity. What also makes Myers even more disturbing for the inhabitants of Haddonfield is that, although The Shape represents the unknown—the thing in the dark—he is, in some ways, one of them. However, his motives are inscrutable. As a standalone (without the retrofitting of the 1981 sequel that makes Michael and Laurie siblings), the most terrifying thing of all is the sheer randomness. It seems Myers latches onto Laurie and her friends simply because he stumbles across them, but the implication is that he could have targeted anyone. By that rationale, it isn’t a stretch to think that it could even be a member of the audience (the rollercoaster effect where you experience the thrill but you are 99% sure that you will get off alive)—and it shouldn’t be overlooked that the United States was in the midst of the beginning of its worst wave of serial killings, where often victims were chosen at random.
The stark contrast between Myers, as an embodiment of arcane evil, and the supposed safety of suburbia is intensified by the almost fanatical fervour with which Dr Loomis pursues his former charge (a kind of Van Helsing in brogues). It is ironic that while Myers is silent and deadly, Loomis shows many of the outward signs we might have expected from a movie lunatic up to this point. The Sheriff gives him sideways glances as he rages that "Death has come to your little town”, suggesting he is regarded with both suspicion and ridicule. Less rabid outbursts might have convinced him of imminent danger, but Loomis, though well-meaning, has become unhinged by his belief that Myers is more than merely an escaped lunatic. His refusal to refer to him as human, rather than as something “evil”, shows that he, a man of medicine—specifically of psychiatry, a profession which routinely debunks superstition and belief in possession—has, over the years, come to believe that Myers embodies a horror beyond the realms of natural insanity. In some ways, Loomis takes on the role of a witch-hunter (complete with all the connotations of devils and demonology). He has no doubt that what he is hunting is no longer human; that Myers is some kind of devil (“[with] the blackest eyes").
When, at the end of the movie, Loomis has shot Myers, filling him with enough lead to kill any normal man and sending him over the balcony into the garden below, Pleasance asked Carpenter how he should play it when he looked down and saw that Myers had gone. Carpenter said he could play it either as surprised or as if he knew that would happen—he would know instinctively which was right. He, of course, chose the latter—something that Loomis had suspected all along, as Tommy Jarvis told Laurie Strode, "You can't kill the boogey man!” Pleasence later told Fangoria Magazine in 1989 that this ambiguity was the first indication that a sequel would follow.
It would be wrong to review HALLOWEEN without mentioning Dean Cundey’s superb cinematography, which gives the film what would quickly become recognised as the classic John Carpenter look. Cundey complements Carpenter’s carefully considered visual framing perfectly—something the ugly pan-and-scan version I originally saw in the ‘80s blunted (though I still recognised the film as extraordinary). Carpenter’s much-imitated, driving electronic score is a vital part of the spooky puzzle (and disastrous early screenings without it for studio executives demonstrated just how essential it was to making the film the nerve-shredding crowd-pleaser it is).
One of the charges levelled against HALLOWEEN was that Carpenter initiated the idea of sex=death in the slasher movie, suggesting that the promiscuous were punished for their loose ways. It was a notion perversely popular in the politically conservative early 80s, when the backlash against the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and the free-loving of the ‘70s gave way to a new puritanism and misplaced fear. Although many subsequent films leaned into the sex=death equation (gaining special traction with the release of Sean S. Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH in 1980)—which, if truth be told, had more to do with showing a little t&a than any moral leanings. Carpenter is adamant that he wasn’t moralising in HALLOWEEN. He said that, if anything, the girls were acting normally, as teenagers do.
When UK film critic Mark Kermode interviewed John Carpenter about the film on its 21st anniversary, the director bemoaned that modern audiences needed to be spoon-fed—that the plot and all its details had to be spelt out loud and clearly. He stubbornly refused to do that in HALLOWEEN, echoing Italian director Dario Argento (an influence), who famously said, “We don’t solve mysteries in real life; why should we do it in films?” One thing he says in the interview, though, that I disagree with is his claim that “…none of the sequels have hurt the original". As much as I adore the sequel, I think removing the random nature of Myers’ wrath minorly weakens the film’s effectiveness on rewatches by making Laurie and Michael blood relations. Carpenter admits culpability, "…well, you know, that was the sequel. I didn't want to direct it. I got forced into writing it. It was 2 o'clock in the morning, I had a six-pack of beer, and it was the only idea I could think of." … Now, it's not really Carpenter's fault (unless Pleasance’s recollections are to be believed)—he never intended a sequel in the first place anyway. The original's ending was meant as a kind of TWILIGHT ZONE conclusion—that, as Carpenter states, "Michael Myers, he’s everywhere, he's in the dark—he lives in the dark."
HALLOWEEN was shot in Southern California (standing in for Illinois) on a budget of $300,000 over four weeks in May 1978. It was the definition of a sleeper hit, debuting on October 24, 1978, before a regional rollout. Perhaps surprisingly, critics were divided—from raves to bombs (check out my blog for excerpts from newspaper reviews). However, word of mouth and some very favourable reviews going into 1979, comparing its effectiveness to Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), helped it gain box-office momentum. It eventually became a runaway hit, grossing $47 million in the United States alone, creating an irresistible siren call to every wily producer in Hollywood (and across the United States) to get a slice of the slasher movie pie.
HALLOWEEN remains a film to cherish. Its ability to grab the viewer and scare them is resolutely undiminished. Whilst many slasher films followed—and, of course, many that I adore—Carpenter’s film remains a cut above.
BODY COUNT 5:
Female 3 / Male 2
HALLOWEEN (1978) - trailer
