lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: USA

Rat­ings:
Kim: 5 out of 5
Justin: 4^1/2 out of 5

Notes:

What could be said about Hal­loween that hasn’t already been said? Prob­a­bly noth­ing, so pre­pare for my ram­bling now.

The bot­tom line is that Kim & I were sick of watch­ing crappy movies and needed to watch some­thing depend­able before we’d ever find the will to move on to any­thing else. My knee-jerk response to watch­ing Hal­loween (and The Thing for that mat­ter) has been the same for years: What the hell hap­pened to John Car­pen­ter? He was like the low-budget Hitch­cock right through the 1980s and then he washed out com­mer­cially on Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle China (a movie every­one loves now but not when it came out) and it was all down­hill from there. Like Hitch­cock, Car­pen­ter has touched on nearly every genre of film imag­in­able but always gets asso­ci­ated with hor­ror and sci-fi themes. Unlike Hitchock, his films got worse instead of better.

Hal­loween is, by most accounts, respon­si­ble for kick-starting the slasher craze that took place in the 1980’s. Once peo­ple saw how suc­cess­ful this film was for its ridicu­lously low pro­duc­tion value, scar­ing kids became a prof­itable indus­try. Fri­day The 13th is essen­tially a cheap(er) knock-off that didn’t come into its own until its 2nd or 3rd sequel (if even then). Typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with the trap­pings of exploita­tion film– gra­tu­itous sex and vio­lence for the sake of putting asses in seats, but I think Hal­loween is dif­fer­ent. Yeah, Michael Myers is essen­tially a Young Repub­li­can. killing young girls who do naughty things with an ambigu­ous moti­va­tion (his moti­va­tion was more inter­est­ingly detailed in Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake in.. which I thought was really great), but there’s enough qual­ity film ele­ments in Hal­loween to out­weigh the low­brow nudity and bru­tal murdering.

For the bet­ter part of the film no one dies, there’s just a con­stant creepy ten­sion cre­ated by Michael’s pres­ence. The audi­ence knows the one thing that the ever stu­dious Lau­rie Strode doesn’t know: that her friends are all about to die and she’s next on the list. The audi­ence also knows the one thing pre­vent­ing Dr. Loomis from sav­ing her small town from a blood­bath: where Michael Myers is. It’s such an excel­lent for­mula for get­ting an audi­ence involved in a film. This theme of keep­ing the audi­ence one-step ahead is ram­pant through­out the film in sub­tle ways– and it only works if you can get some kind of con­nec­tion with char­ac­ters, which is easy with the lik­able Lau­rie Strode (but you secretly want Annie and her big mouth to die much sooner). I am sure when this flick came out in 1978 peo­ple were yelling their faces off at the screen.  As I have men­tioned before, I’m also a big fan of the unas­sum­ing vic­tim in the fore­ground with a vacant Michael Myers lurk­ing blurry in the back­ground. It’s so sim­ple but so effective.

This is also one of the moments in John Carpenter’s career where his film score blends per­fectly with the film and doesn’t sound clunky and goofy. It’s clas­sic and it enhances the entire expe­ri­ence of the movie.