Of course, it had to be. The quintessential Halloween movie is the one named after the day itself. It’s the best. It’s John Carpenter’s Halloween.
The film that defines the time of year, it’s also a film that for 31 years now has defined my birthday and although it’s not my favourite film, it’s just simply the best goddamn slice of Halloween viewing that there is.
The best slasher film ever made, Halloween is, by today’s standards, an absolute phenomenon and Carpenter’s finest film.
On October 31st 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois, a six year old boy named Michael Myers stalks and brutally murders his sister with a kitchen knife. Young Michael is then taken to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium where he is confined under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis. There he stays for the next fifteen years, living out his life in a state of catatonic silence. Until October 30th 1978, when Loomis arrives at the sanitarium to find the patients roaming free. Michael steals the Doc’s car and zooms off into the night…
…and back to Haddonfield.
From that point on, pursued by Dr. Loomis, Michael proceeds to stalk young babysitter Laurie Strode and her friends as they go about their Halloween babysitting duties. Why? It will all become clear…
It’s a story that’s well known by now. Halloween is bigger than the genre. It’s one of the most accessible horror films of all time and also, one of the most effective.
The film stars Donald Pleasance (You Only Live Twice, Phenomena) as Sam Loomis, the obsessive doctor who has made keeping Michael locked away his life’s work. Pleasance takes the role and absolutely sells every manic minute of it. Halloween would also feature the feature film debut of a young unknown actress named Jamie Lee Curtis. This is the film that kick-started her “Scream Queen” career that included films such as Terror Train, The Fog and Prom Night.
Halloween also introduced us to now legendary cinema maniac Michael Myers. His image, including the boiler suit and the white, expressionless “William Shatner” mask are as recognisable as Freddy’s glove or Jason#s hockey mask.
Michael is an unstoppable killing machine that is best summed up in the words of Dr. Loomis,
“I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes… the *devil’s* eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil”
Myers is such an impressive villain, he made it onto my (still incomplete) horror sleeve…
Halloween succeeds without resorting to extreme gore set pieces and a death every ten minutes. In fact, barely a drop of blood is spilt on-screen. It’s a genuinely creepy experience, aided by frequent POV shots and Carpenter’s instantly recognisable theme tune.
The franchise has now stretched to seven sequels, including Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which made the bold move in stepping away from the Myers storyline. Rob Zombie’s remake was released in 2007, with the sequel to that film, H2, being released in 2009. The franchise and fans’ love of Michael Myers show no signs of dying with the news that Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer will be collaborating on the third of the reimagined sequels.
Halloween is a real genre-definer. It set the slasher template, later fleshed out and cemented in 1980 by Friday the 13th, a film almost exactly opposite to Carpenter’s. Halloween is a shining example of suspenseful, low budget horror movie making. It’s a classic in every sense of the word. It’s a film that you don’t even have to be a horror fan to enjoy.
So today being Halloween, do yourselves a favour and celebrate Halloween the way it should be done. By watching Halloween. With sweets and beer.
Let’s face it, the movie that invented, and still defines, a genre ….
We’ll start with what makes Halloween a film of magnificence. The soundtrack. If you are one of those people who believes the soundtrack plays no role whatsoever in a film’s success or failure, consider this; Carpenter originally wanted this movie to have no music at all. He shot it in the way in which he intended it to be seen, with minimalist sound enhancements, believing it would give a sense of realism to the movie and elevate it above the norm.
He showed the original test without the music. And people frigging HATED IT, and he hated it himself. All through his life, Carpenter has thought himself a bit of a music guru – his band “The Coupe DeVille’s” are actually heard on the radio in the movie, and if you haven’t seen their “rock video” for the “Big Trouble in Little China” soundtrack, which they wrote and performed, you simply haven’t seen cheese the way it’s MEANT to be seen … anyway … Carpenter got out his keyboard and personally composed the piece which became synonimous with the film.
It does what the silence never did. It elevates the film above and beyond its peers, above and beyond everything that had come before and since. It is eerie, haunting, stays with you for days. It makes memorable scenes of sheer banality … a killer walking slowly across a road whilst a teenage girl tries desperately to open a door, for example … and was one of the first “signature tunes” in modern horror, actually announcing the presence of the killer before the camera knows he’s there.
This was another part of the genius of Halloween … the sheer paranoia inducing cinematogrophy. Carpenter shot the movie in widescreen, and the margins of the movie are, more often than not, framed by darkness, into and out of which the killer steps like some malignant ghost. The experience of watching Halloween on a small screen pales into insignificance compared to watching it as it was shot, on a big screen TV or multiplex, where the darkness bleeds into the frame and twists and turns your perceptions, even if you’ve seen the movie a hundred times.
And the killer … the man in the mask. Let’s talk about the mask first, one of the most famous props in the whole of film history. Who’s face is it supposed to be? Well … in case you didn’t know it, the mask is that of Mr William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk himself. I like to think of it as the best Bill Shatner movie of all time. Quite why anyone would have a Bill Shatner mask lying around I do not know, but John Carpenter did, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. A Ronald Reagan one would have been funny, especially when one considers some of the points the movie makes – namely that being brutally murdered by a raving loon is the price you pay for promiscuity, alcohol and drugs – but there’s something decidely creepy about the way it frames the face ….
Most incredibly of all, of course, is that the killer never says a word! Not one sodding word, which when you watch, for example, the Scream movies and their extended monlogues on why – and who gives a SHIT about why? – is an amazing achievement. The entire backstory of this monster is so beautifully laid out – in particular in two wonderful extended monologues by the great Donald Pleasance – that it’s simply not necessary for Michael Myers to explain himself even for a second. This spooky sonofabitch hasn’t spoken in YEARS … and he aint about to start to American audiences can better understand his inner turmoil ….
Everyone by now knows that the movie launched the career of the Scream Queen, Jamie Lee Curtis, whose role as Laurie Strode was just so fucking perfect, so bang on, that it might never be equalled. You can put all the sexy young thangs in these movies that you want, get them all to flash their jugs all over the place and pout ever so sexily, but Jamie Lee had no need of the sex appeal she would ooze in later years (oh fuck YES, there is not a guy alive would not ride The Tailor of Panama Jamie Lee) but that was part of the magic. She was the “girl next door”, the babysitter you remember from your own childhood; dowdy but fun, with a taste for popcorn, scary movies and who could carve a jack’o'lantern with a penknife …. nowadays babysitters can’t make toast and switch on the box and stick on the IPod … and they call it progress …
Yes, Halloween is still the slasher movie which began the genre and which, until that genre vanishes from our cinemas (probably with a full-scale nuclear war, that’s what it will take to undo what John Carpenter unleashed) will still be the greatest movie in it.
There was a time when directors invented new stuff. When they had balls and ideas. When they were talented motherfuckers who could do every part of the job from the writing the script to composing the tunes. Nowadays, they’re all lacking the skills guys like Carpenter changed cinema with. Andy has mourned the remake of the Wicker Man, one of the greatest sacreliges in all of cinema history – but that movie was loved and hated in equal measure so there was a chance the remake might click with a mass market, although the purists were always going to loathe it …. but Halloween, like Psycho, on which it was very loosly based, was, and is, an unmistakable and undisputed masterwork. The very idea it could be improved, or bettered, or appeal to a wider audience is laughable, verging on offensive. Which means the remake boils down to only one thing … fucking money.
For that, everyone connected with it’s modern “incarnation” should be flogged. Or set in a room with a guy in a Michael Myers mask and the little silver briefcase from 24 ….