Feb 02 2009
“Halloween” (1978) ****
Preview
Starring: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers, Kyle Richards, and Brian Andrews.
Directed by: John Carpenter.
Story:
It’s Halloween night, 1963, in the fictional suburban midwestern town of Haddonfield, Illinois. A six year old boy by the name of Michael Myers murders his seventeen year old sister Judith with a big kitchen knife in their house. His parents come home to find him in a trance of sorts. Bewildered by all of this, they send him to the psychiatric facility, Smith’s Grove - Warren County Sanitarium, under the care of Dr. Sam Loomis, a child psychiatrist. His first eight years of treatment lead Dr. Loomis to believe that Michael is nothing but pure evil, therefore he spends the next seven years trying to keep him locked up, but all that changes when Myers escapes from the facility, stealing the institution’s car, and returning to his hometown of Haddonfield. Upon arrival, Michael begins stalking a teenager Laurie Strode and her group of friends as Dr. Loomis and the authorities pursue him.
The story seeded the foreground for the many cliches we see in a long line of slasher films, “Halloween” being the first of them - Leaving the door unlocked, falling down more than once while getting chased, taking a breather right next to the killer after you think you’ve killed him, and so on - All of these cliches originated from the Godfather of slasher films, “Halloween”. Many elements of the film seem inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). As far as the gross out factor goes, the film contains very little gore. Also, as opposed to the countless sequels that followed “Halloween”, this is the only one to seldom show the masked Michael Myers frequently until the last twenty or so minutes.
Characters:
The characters of “Halloween” are a slasher trend in of themselves. The film is a social statement of sorts regarding immoral teenagers in the America of the 1970s, hence many of the people that Myers slaughters are sexually promiscuous substance abusers, meanwhile the film’s heroine (Jamie Lee Curtis) is portrayed as the chaste and innocent one (with the exception of one scene where she uses marijuana). Director John Carpenter did in fact deny such statements, but that didn’t stop the perceived parallel between one character’s moral strengths and overall likelihood of surviving a slasher horror film from becoming one of the ‘rules’, so to speak, for many films in the genre to follow.
Overall:
It is almost impossible to recreate the style of filmmaking and storytelling that John Carpenter created “Halloween” in 1978 as it wouldn’t share the same success it had then in today’s world of the over-saturated horror genre - And no, “remaking” the original was never going to work in the first place, Rob Zombie. And as far as sequels go, safe to say, “Halloween II” isn’t all that bad a follow-up as say…(cough)…”Halloween III: Season of the Witch”. More on those two in the reviews to come.
Rating: ****
