Halloween

HALLOWEEN

(1978)

Dir - John Carpenter

Overall: GREAT

 

If there is one thing that critics and intellectuals, (the two of which are often mutually exclusive), like to do, it is to over-analyze a work of art.  John Carpenter's Halloween was a little movie that could, launched into production quickly, shot just as quickly, and released without any expectations that it would become one of the horror genre's biggest game changers.  It was a humble film and in effect still is.  DIY in its execution, Carpenter, his friends or their friends, some independent producers and financiers, plus a cast made up almost exclusively of not big names who were working for scale all rolled up their sleeves and made the movie happen.  No one would predict that it would become one the most financially successful independent movies ever made, let a lone a movie that would immediately begat an entire sub-genre and in turn spawn a franchise that like Michael Myers himself, still refuses to die.

 

Anyone involved in the film's production would have been absurd to foresee any of its immediate or lasting impact, and this is what makes it such a masterwork.  That is to say the movie's unassuming simplicity is its key.  Halloween has its direct slasher roots in things like Italian giallos, Bob Clarke's Black Christmas, and the works of Alfred Hitchcock of course.  Masked or disguised killers picking off naked or half-naked women was nothing new.  The film's success and influence lies more in its execution though.  It takes a little movie that could to change the rules.  More to the point, it takes a creative team behind it who know what the hell they are doing to change the rules.  Carpenter was such a force from behind the lens, (and behind the typewriter and the synthesizer), that tasked with creative control in making a meager babysitter killer movie set on the year's spookiest holiday, proceeded to strip everything down by necessity.  He could not go big or go home.  He had to be clever and go home.

 

"We ain't got time for nothing fancy, just get IN AND OUT of P.J. Soles and let's move on" - See what I did there?

Producer Irwin Yablans and money guy Moustapha Akkad reached out to Carpenter with the title Halloween, the bare bones premise behind it, and after securing a measly $300,000ish budget, it was all systems go with the ragtag group of people on board.  The list was not limited to Deborah Hill, (co-screenwriting, producing, six-year-old Michal Myer's stabbing hand), Dean Cundy, (cinematographer), Tommy Lee Wallace, (production designing, co-editing), and Nick Castle, (himself a filmmaker and buddy of Carpenter's who performed as "The Shape" Michael Myers for allegedly $25 a day).  According to legend, even the actors helped move gear around and set up shots.  It has the same kind of "Whoo-hoo we're making a movie!", all hands on deck energy that George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead had and would have.  Like those films, Halloween was backed into a corner from a production standpoint, and the people who made it had to think on their feet, work within their means, and perhaps most importantly, utilize a concept that was doable within those means.

 

That very concept and the one which film essayists have projected their own intricate theories onto is actually a pedestrian one.  Something along the lines of "Evil exists for the mere sake of it, and it cannot be controlled, cannot be reasoned with, and is still out there".  This is what Halloween is about because that is what Carpenter directly intended it to be about based on the project that he was given and the money to make it with.  In his words, it was "No big deal".

 

A William Shatner mask?  Sure, that'll do.

It is fun to critique Halloween as an allegory about the dangers of sexual promiscuity amongst women and/or horny teenagers, about repressed male desires manifesting themselves violently, about crippling American values where young women are left to fend for themselves due to absent adult figures, about the horrors of suburbia where working class white folks flee from the cities only to still find themselves as easy prey, or as a feminist empowerment vehicle that established the final girl trope where one lady is always left standing up against the killer.  Cases can be made that Halloween works as some conservative morality play where people who take a lackadaisical approach to living in their seemingly safe and neutered little communities still better look after their kids, keep their genitals in their pants, and watch out for the impending doom from outside of town.  It is more accurate though to remember that this is a boogeyman movie first and foremost, one made in an unpretentious manner and all the better because of it.

 

When watching Halloween all of these decades and terrible sequels later, viewers may find it difficult to be in the same state of mind as the original audience was.  This may seem like a "back in my day" boomer complaint, but it is part of the double-edged sword impact that seminal works in a genre manifest in the first place.  Even the initial 1978 audience was annoyed by Jamie Lee Curtis' protagonist repeatedly dropping the knife right next to Michal Myer's clearly not dead torso when she thought that the danger was over.  This was done as part of the audience immersion though.  Curtis' Laurie Strode was meant to be a sympathetic folly to Myer's relentless evil; an unassuming, all American teenager girl, (and the only one of her three friends that was not sexually active by the way), who would make foolish decisions when caught completely off guard by the boogeyman coming to get her.

 

Yeah, might wanna hold onto that pointy sewing needle there Laurie, just to be on the safe side.

We the viewer though have seen too many horror movies and know how stupid it is for her to continually assume that the boogeyman is going to stay down.  This was still the case when the movie came out since the general rule was that the people in a horror movie do not know that they are in a horror movie, (at least until Wes Craven started nodding and winking at the audience some time later with Scream).  Yet today, and after all of the abysmal slasher movies that came in Halloween's wake, we are even MORE annoyed at Laurie's lack of foresight.  This can be seen as a "flaw" if one is to have a cynical perspective; a lazy trope that takes us out of the film because of its over-use.  In other words, the opposite of the film's intended and initial immersion factor where even though we were irked by Laurie's "dumb people in horror movies" behavior, we still liked her and our yelling at the screen was part of the fun.

 

Yet one could say this about many aspects of Halloween, including its musical score which dictates a mood the whole way through, or the way in which Michael Myers appears and then disappears while characters are looking directly at him, or the jump scares and soundtrack spikes that give us a jolt along the way.  These are movie tricks that have been done ad nauseum, some before Halloween even came out, let alone incessantly since.  Carpenter's film has its fare share of them, but context gives it leniency.  We cannot put ourselves in the headspace of the popcorn-munching public who made the film the sleeper hit that it became.  There is a level of innocence that is lost.  In the case of Halloween, it comes from the fact that it was so skillfully done, so engaging, so atmospheric, so universally creepy that countless other horror films immediately starting snatching up all kinds of its ingredients, almost always without understanding how they worked in unison with each other or more importantly, how they would quickly stop working once done to numbing effect, film after film.

 

Per example, anyone seen this piece of absolute dogshit?

Halloween itself has the even more uphill battle for modern audiences in the fact that it became a franchise.  Continuing the Michael Myers saga is such a moronic idea that one has to laugh at it, in addition to being frustrated by it.  Think about how the movie ends.  As we discussed, Myers repeatedly comes back up each time that Laurie strikes him down.  Fueled by pure uncompromising evil, he will not stop his pursuit no matter how much bodily injury befalls him.  We are shown that Michael Myers is made of flesh and blood from the very opening scene where his six-year-old form in a clown costume murders his sister and stares blankly into the street when his parents come home and unmask him, bloody knife in hand.  We are told from Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis that what he dealt with for fifteen years was an emotionless monster, but a human that was an emotionless monster.

 

Yet Myers seems to possess supernatural endurance, not to mention the eerie ability to disappear in the blink of an eye when patiently stalking his prey.  There is something...more to Michael Myers than merely being a psychopathic killer.  Again, countless other films have done this and many of them bring the killer back again and again in sequels.  In Halloween though, this idea is understated enough to subtly unnerve.  In Terrifier, Art the Clown hacks obnoxious people up in cartoonishly gory fashion, only to blow his head off and just come back alive willy-nilly.  There is nothing unnerving there, just schlock ridiculousness. After taking nearly an hour to kill someone again on screen, silently stalking them while we occasionally hear him breathe, our final glimpse of Michael Myers has him laying on the ground after falling two stories from Loomis emptying his revolver into him.  There is more though, as the film itself does not wrap up until we get one last shot of the ground where he just was and just like he keeps doing, he is no longer where he was.  We then get a fantastic montage of various locations where the action took place before, all still, all dark, all quiet, and all void of Michael Myer's physical frame.  This means that he is still out there.  Evil is still out there, and it has shown us that it will always be out there, always returning, always attacking the most relatable victims that it can.

 

There's something so unsettling about a boy flying a kite at night...and about Michael Myers disappearing...again.

So, why show us more of this in future installments?  Worse yet, why add more of a backstory to Myers?  Why treat him like a character at all and not merely the embodiment of pure evil that he actually is?  The more we see of him, the more exploits of his that we witness, the more horror cliches that clutter up his on screen appearances, the more possible or direct explanations we get as to his origin and motivation, the more it deflates what is so disturbing about him.  Michael Myers does not become more scary when we see him stalking more, killing more, getting back up more, being blown up and surviving more, getting more ooga-booga supernatural nonsense thrown into his roots, or getting whatever the hell appalling garbage Rob Zombie decided to do with him.  He becomes more scary when the camera shows us where he was at the end of Halloween and then...never shows him to us again.  This film's finale is profoundly creepy, arguably the creepiest ever done, yet only if we are to ignore everything that followed it.  Not just the sequels, reboots, and retcons, (or fuck knows what other nostalgia bate that unimaginative studios are going to come up with to keep this shit going), but also the gallons of slasher movies that proceeded it.  By adding more, they only take away what works so well.

 

So yes, context is important.  Watching Halloween as a standalone film, a film that is wonderfully accomplished by a director who grew up on genre pictures and knew what aspects worked, how they worked, and why they worked, is a rewarding experience as much as watching any other outstanding bit of celluloid that has come down the pike.  It is just that it takes some mental manipulation on our parts to see it as such, nearly five decades later.  Thankfully, Halloween is so well done that it can still be enjoyed for the crowd-pleasing movie that it is, both on its lone terms and as a property that begat lesser properties.  This once again brings us to the film's simplicity.  It still works because the concept is simple; "What if the boogeyman was real?  What would that be like?".  The music, (easily some of the best and most famous music in any horror movie), works because it is so simple.  Carpenter's rudimentary keyboard chops came through, his score never gets in the way, they only intensifies an already chilling experience.  The mood is relentless, just as Michael Myers is.  The small budget and means of filming could only produce something so unpretentious and in effect, excellent.  We can over-analyze Halloween, yell at Laurie when she drops the knife, compare it to all the other Halloweens, and take or leave the slasher sub-genre that emerged from its primordial ooze, but if one can actually get in that proper state of mind, nothing can interfere with how much of a masterpiece it is.  Michael Myers is authentic evil.  Halloween is authentic horror.

 

Authentic horror...in photographic form.