October 14th: Halloween (1978)
Nation of Origin: USA
Ratings:
Kim: 5 out of 5
Justin: 41/2 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.
