I don’t remember the first time I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween. I don’t think I saw it while in high school; it was probably college that found me first seeing it. Whenever it was, I’ve seen it many times since. It has become part of my DNA. I love it deep down in my bones. So I was surprised to realize that I’ve never actually written about it. I’ve written about several of the sequels and the remakes, but never the original. I’ve gotten into the habit over the last several years of watching one of the Halloween movies on Halloween, so I decided it was high time I watched the original on this, the spookiest of evenings, and then finally wrote something about it.
Reading some of my other Halloween reviews, I find that I’ve talked quite a lot about Carpenter’s film and its place in popular culture, so I don’t want to go too heavy in that direction here. Though it is often cited as the first slasher, you can actually go back as far as Psycho and Peeping Tom (both released in 1960) to find films that fit the mold. Italian giallos certainly had a lot of influence over the slasher genre and could even be considered slashers themselves. Technically Black Christmas, a very good slasher itself, was released a few years before Halloween. But it was Carpenter’s film that popularized the genre and solidified the tropes.
While this is true, I would argue that Friday the 13th (1980) truly solidified everything the slasher would become over the remaining decade. Sean S. Cunningham was clearly inspired by Halloween‘s success, and he distilled the Carpenter film down to its very essence. It has a group of sexy teens getting killed off one by one by a blade-wielding maniac. The final girl is virginal and thus pure in the film’s point of view. The killings all stem from something in the killers’ past. Etc. Even the title is taking the holiday premise from Carpenter. Friday the 13th takes the tropes established in Halloween and grinds them down, then exploits the hell out of them. The sex and nudity are more gratuitous, the violence more gore-filled.
Carpenter is on record stating that the notion that Laurie Strode survives Halloween due to her “purity” was purely accidental. And it’s true, Laurie isn’t some paragon of virtue. We see her smoking in one scene, and she doesn’t seem opposed to drinking or the fact that her friends are screwing their boyfriends at the drop of a hat. Her virginity seems to be more of a product of her own shyness and lack of confidence than any sense of morality. She is a “good girl” in the sense that she tries hard at school and genuinely seems to care about the kids she’s sitting with (unlike one of her friends who constantly yells at her charge and dumps her off at Laurie’s as soon as possible.)
Friday the 13th doubles down on the tropes. Its success led to many more slashers in the ensuing years, and most of them kept the distilled versions of these ideas and codified them.
It is always surprising to me how much Halloween takes its time getting to the killing. There is a murder in the opening flashback and then a long period of nothing. After a fantastic credit sequence (featuring a beautifully lit jack-o’-lantern and that iconic score), we open in 1963. A long POV shot shows us Michael Myers stabbing his sister to death (after she’s had some sexy fun times with her boyfriend). But the sex is off-screen, and the violence is fairly tame. Even the nudity feels not particularly gratuitous.
Then we move to the present day (1978) and find Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) for some reason driving to the asylum where Michael Myers is kept with a nurse in the middle of the night. Michael has escaped, attacks the nurse, and gets away. Dr. Loomis tracks him to his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. Loomis is our expositional bank. He keeps finding people to talk to about how Michael Myers isn’t human, he’s evil incarnate, he’s an unstoppable killing machine. Intercut with his hunt for Michael, we find Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) going to school and hanging out with her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (PJ Soles.) They are typical teenagers. They smoke, they drive around town, and they talk about boys. Laurie gets teased because she cares about her grades and she’s shy around boys, but they genuinely seem to like each other.
In the background is Michael Myers. Standing tall, dressed in coveralls with that weird mask on, just stalking them. We’ll see him driving around, following Laurie. He’s standing outside her bedroom window or her classroom or down the road, but then he’ll quickly disappear. Because Loomis is constantly telling us about how evil Myers is, we feel that tension. Even when Laurie is doing something perfectly boring like making popcorn for the little boy she’s sitting, we know Michael is out there, just waiting to kill her.
The sequels will give Michael Myers a connection to Laurie. This will give him a reason to constantly be coming after her, but in this first film that connection hasn’t been made. His obsession with her is random, and all the more terrifying for it.
When the killings do come, they are fairly tame. There is very little bloodletting or gore. Michael does stab one guy so hard the knife pins him to a wall, and there is another scene in which a body is staged on a bed, and others fall out of closets, but they’d pass a TV edit these days.
But they work because they are so well staged by Carpenter. The way he sets them up and films them, the way he has spent the first 45 minutes setting up Michael Myers as this merciless killer, makes them incredibly effective. Dean Cundey’s cinematography is evocative. A lot of the scenes happen in darkness, but he finds a way to let just enough light in to shine across Michael’s face, or his victims as they flee in terror.
It isn’t a perfect film. There are times when it’s a very small-budget show. You can see some of the seems, but I don’t care. I just love every loving minute of it. It doesn’t get better than Halloween in terms of slashers.
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