THE INDISPENSIBLES – #15: HALLOWEEN
To understand the sheer brilliance and mastery on show in John Carpenter’s Halloween, to truly get why it is a genre masterpiece, you only have to do one very simple thing – get down to your local Blockbuster store, or dig through your Netflix catalogue online and get your hands on the likes of The Burning, Sleepaway Camp, My Bloody Valentine, New Year’s Evil, Happy Birthday to Me, April Fool’s Day, Prom Night, Mother’s Day, Silent Night Deadly Night, Bloody Birthday, Hell Night, Terror Train, Visiting Hours, Mortuary, Night Warning or any other cult ‘slasher’ flick that followed in the wake of Halloween.
In doing so, you’ll see how very easy it is to make watchable but dispensible horror fare but how even easier it is to make almost unbearable trash out of the most simplest of concepts – bad person goes after teens and kills them! (Sleepaway Camp at least has the audacity to be a truly awful movie with a truly friggin’ brilliant final reveal!)
With that understanding you can look back on Halloween and regard it the way it should be seen – As one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, horror ever made; a true genre defining slice of cinema!
Halloween stands head and shoulders above its plethora of inferior copycat movies because its writer/director, John Carpenter, has created material that he knows how to manipulate and shape to great effect, playing with typical horror conventions with abandonment; whether it’s showing his killer in broad daylight, having the nerd instead of the popular girl become the heroine or introduce new and unexpected means of murder to shock and delight his audience. All things we take for granted now, but within the realm of the ‘slasher movie’ Halloween created these things we now consider cliches!
Wikipedia, in its page on ‘Slasher Films’ categorised John Carpenter’s masterpiece as follows:
Halloween (1978): Popularised the “classic” slasher formula and, together with Friday the 13th, helped kick the slasher film craze of the ’80s into high gear. Also established the tropes of the innocent, virtuous “Final Girl” (as opposed to her more free-spirited, promiscuous friends), the long tracking shot representing the point of view of the villain (often accompanied by ominous breathing), and the unstoppable, seemingly immortal masked killer. Halloween was followed by seven sequels, and a remake. Certain slasher movies afterwards (such as Offerings & Sorority House Massacre) closely emulated this motion picture.
You don’t realise on first viewing (it comes with time and repeated viewings) just how timed and effectively precise Carpenter has marked the whole running time. Unlike most modern horror fare where it is a good hour of build up and then thirty odd minutes of ‘horror’ – like, say, Rob Zombie’s remake of this very movie for example? - Carpenter hands out the minimal amount of screen time needed to get us invested then starts up the slaughter and rather amazingly does not let up.
What’s really rather sublime about Halloween is that it possesses a plot that manages to be both simple and yet potentially complex at the same time, as strange as that sounds – A group of unsuspecting teenage girls are stalked by an escaped mental patient, Michael Myers, who murdered his sister on Halloween when he was only six years old. He has returned to his hometown to carry on the carnage from where he left off fifteen years ago, pursued only by his psychiatrist (Donald Pleasence), who believes that his patient is the manifestation of pure evil.
You can watch it as a straight forward, exceptionally well delivered horror or you can dig in a little deeper. What is the Myers’ fascination with our lead female character (Jamie Lee Curtis) more so then the others? Why has he chosen her? Why has he returned to the area? Why didn’t he go rampaging around somewhere else? The plot was straight and lean enough to not detract from the sheer unrelenting pace of the overall piece, but at the same time it left itself some interesting foundations to be built upon. The enormously under-rated (and Carpenter endorsed – he actually reshot a lot of it himself, uncredited, when it was in post-production and credited director Rick Rosenthal was proving to struggle with the project) sequel and the anniversary entry, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, got this – something all other routinely awful and stale sequels did not – and together they make up a more than worthy ‘unofficial’ trilogy with a great ‘second act’ twist and some nice character arcs!
Halloween should never be written off as ‘just’ a slasher picture. The admittedly great fun knock-off, Friday The 13th, is just a slasher flick. A solid one, with some near-iconic elements, but inferior to Halloween. Name another early era slasher movie cast as well as this, or with characters as brilliant conceived as this?
Look to how Carpenter writes the character of Laurie Strode. It defined the genre (which was a good thing for fans of gratuitous nudity) that Laurie would be “pure” whilst her friends were promiscuous, but this is such a banal point to concentrate on when looking at the character. That an entire subgenre of horror built itself up on such foundations is frustrating. Carpenter’s Laurie is fully rounded and brilliantly realised regardless of how economical the script is in terms of characterisation in other regards. This is as much down to Curtis’ performance as it is Carpenter’s handling of her character (so much so that, as far as I’m concerned, she coined the term “Scream Queen”). Whilst her friends send their child charges over to her so they can fuck, Laurie is a young girl who not only wouldn’t dare do such a thing but returns to protect them from “the boogey-man” when she could have fled down the street and to safety!
Mention also has to go to Donald Pleasence who rejuvenated his career, built a lasting connection with Carpenter (they went on to make Escape From New York and Prince of Darkness together!) and created himself a steady pay-stream with the sequels, all from this movie. This is all the more surprising considering he grabbed the role at the last minute, having initally hated the script. He could quite easily have phoned in his performance like you saw many an actor (*cough* Michael Caine *cough*) do on movies they were only doing for the pay-cheque, but he attacks the role with great gusto. He had so much fun with the role, that he returned again and again, and when the movie’s producer Moustapha Akkad asked him how many more Halloween films he was planning to make, the late great Pleasence replied “I stop at twenty-two!”
In the late 80s, Pleasence remarked that there was some irony in the fact that, before Halloween came out, he was typecast as villains and psychos, never having been given the chance to play a good guy or hero. However, after his portrayal of Dr. Loomis in Halloween, he had the exact opposite problem in that no one wanted to see him play bad guys anymore, that the only parts offered to him were avengers and heroes.
Everyone knows that the film was created as a result of a “for hire” job on Carpenter’s part. He was brought in to write a quick, cheap, exploitation piece with the title of The Babysitter Murders. That this is what came from that, is where full respect needs to be given to the talent of Carpenter as a director. Too often written off as a director of “B-movies” (The Thing and Starman, to pull two quickly from his CV, are most certainly not B-movies!), look at some of the techniques he is pulling off in this film – from the opening stedicam shot which presents itself as one continuous take (but actually has a few discreet, delicate edits hidden in amongst it) through to his use of lighting and manipulation of shadow. In terms of this latter point, look back on the scene in which Myers almost glides out of the darkness behind Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode as she stands on the landing having first discovered her friend’s bodies. Carpenter lights the shot so that we see Myers’ iconic mask start to form out of the darkness, way earlier then it legimately should in reality, and yet he manages to preserve the rest of his body from appearing silhouetted so that the head almost floats into view. It is a jaw-droppingly terrifying moment in which the build-up is scarier then the subsequent slash-attack.
To this day, Halloween still contains some of the best scares in the horror genre – the scene in which Laurie runs back across the street, banging and wailing on the front door, as the silhouette of Michael Myers comes walking across the street behind her, looming in for the act, is still one of the all-time greatest nerve shredders!
It is an undisputed masterpiece from its defining stedicam opening through to its ‘Oh Fuck He’s Disappeared’ ending!
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2 Responses to “THE INDISPENSIBLES – #15: HALLOWEEN”
Agree this is the Daddy of slasher movies, never been equalled let alone bettered. The Burning was my fave out of all the others.
Yeah, i own The Burning and have a bit of a soft spot for that. And, as shit as it is asides from THAT ending, Sleepaway Camp too.
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