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Synopsis: Young Michael Myers is a troubled youth. One Halloween night in 1963, he decides to take a big kitchen knife to his older sister.  For this crime, he is packed off to an insane asylum, where he is treated by Dr. Sam Loomis.  Loomis spends "Five years trying to reach him, and the next ten trying to keep him locked up."  Loomis sees something in Myers, a spark of cold, pure, evil hiding behind his black, soulless eyes.  After fifteen years in the asylum, Michael decides to leave.  A couple of days before Halloween, he escapes and heads back to Haddonfield, Illinois.  Haddonfield is home to Laurie Strode, a bright, shy teenager who has agreed to babysit on Halloween night rather than go out partying with her friends.  On the day of Halloween, Laurie can't shake the feeling that she's being shadowed by something.  There always seems to be something just outside the sphere of her perceptions.  Of course, she's right.  Michael Myers has fixed upon Laurie and can be seen following her in mirrors and in random drive-bys.  At school, Laurie is distracted.  When she is asked a question by her English teacher, she doesn't know the answer until Michael drives by the window.  There seems to be some kind of psychic link between them.  After night falls, Michael's bloodlust resurfaces.  He begins to kill of Laurie's friends one by one as a prelude to stalking Laurie herself. Meanwhile, Loomis has traced Michael back to the scene of his crimes.  He catches up to Michael as Michael and Laurie engage in a brutal confrontation.  Loomis blows Michael through a second story window with a revolver.  Laurie tells Loomis that Micheal was "The Boogeyman." "Yes," Loomis tells her, "yes he was."  Loomis looks down to see where Michael fell, only to discover that Michael has disappeared again...

Sui Generis: John Carpenter's "un-Hitched" scare machine has worn some in the wake of an entire cycle of imitators, but it still packs a hell of a punch. Halloween owes a little bit to Hitchcock and Psycho, a LOT to Dario Argento's Deep Red and Bob Clark's Black Christmas, and a tip of the hat to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  In spite of its pedigree, the film stands on its own as a singular creation and the founder of its own subgenre.  This last bit is something of a mixed blessing, given that the "Slasher" movie that Halloween founds is one of the more dubious subgenres in film--but that's not Halloween's fault.  On its own terms, Halloween is a superb piece of cinematic styling.

Performances and Settings:  These are all top notch.  Donald Pleasance is properly grave, panicked, and resolute. He lends a certain amount of credibility to the movie that most other slasher films lack (in large part because slasher movies have, in the main, a cast of teen-agers, or, rather, mid-twentysomething actors playing teenagers). The film "introduces" Jamie Lee Curtis, but it isn't her first screen credit by a long mile (she was on the short lived television series Operation: Petticoat, for instance).  Carpenter has obviously cast her because she is Janet Leigh's daughter, but he got a more than competent actress in the bargain.  Her character is strong, lonely, and smart.  Curtis plays it perfectly.  Nancy Loomis is pretty good as Laurie's friend, Annie. She exudes a confidence that I don't think I've ever seen in a teenaged girl, but what the hell.  P. J. Soles  became something of a b-movie icon during this period with  memorable performances in Carrie, Rock and Roll High School, and Stripes.  Here she plays a sex kitten and plays it to the hilt.  She's probably too old for the part, but she's so good in it that the audience certainly isn't going to care. Haddonfield, Illinois is one of the cinema's creepier pieces of unreal estate.  During the daytime, it has the kind of depopulated feel you get when you drive through the suburbs at 1:30 pm on a school day.  It's quiet.  Carpenter plays this up with his minimalist piano and synth score.  It's an archetypal American setting, but the way Carpenter films it turns it into an existential dreamscape at the same time. At night, Carpenter uses a different approach.  He lights all of the houses in Haddonfield so that they look like so many huge Jack-o-lanterns in a row.  It's very effective.

The Doors of Perception: I saw an interview with Carpenter many, many years ago in which Carpenter described the genesis of the technique he used in Halloween.  He claimed that he was watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is a loud movie, and it occured to him that silence would be even scarier.  Halloween is full of silences, that leave the audience groping in the dark to see if the Monster is lurking there.  Carpenter takes this approach a step further, though, and his prowling POV camera transforms the film into a meditation on perception.  This takes its toll on his characters, who always have the feeling that there is something just outside their ability to perceive it, and it takes its toll on the audience, who are in much the same boat as the characters.  Carpenter's best trick is to convince the audience that they have seen a movie containing extreme violence, even though they haven't.  Carpenter doesn't spill any blood in Halloween.  You see the knife, you see the victim, but you never see the knife enter the victim.  It's one of the great slight of hand acts in movies.  Carpenter's mastery of audience manipulation seems unconsciously deft, natural even (or as natural as such manipulation gets). If Val Lewton had ever decided to make a slasher movie, it might resemble Halloween.*
 
The Power of Myth: Halloween slowly transforms itself from a "killer on the loose" film into something that resonates deep in the reptile brain.  Carpenter gradually hints that Michael is more than just a killer over the course of the film.  When Donald Pleasance exclaims "He's gone! The Evil is gone!" he's not kidding.  Michael Myers isn't credited in the film's credits. He is, rather, "The Shape."  By the end of the movie, the audience is ready to believe, as Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis do, that Michael IS The Boogeyman. In this regard, Halloween draws not from any cinematic source, but from urban legends and campfire stories.  Michael is "The Hook," escaped from the asylum to prey on promiscuous teenagers.  Carpenter is canny enough to use this to subvert the audience's expectations and plug holes in the plot.  If, for instance, Michael has been locked up for the last fifteen years, where did he learn to drive a car? Before the audience can ask that question, the chief of police in Haddonfield asks it. Dr. Loomis exclaims that "He was doing pretty good last night!" thus plugging the hole and adding another level of strangeness to Michael without actually having to answer the question.  Given the mythic context of the movie, the audience accepts this at face value.  

Remake and Remodel: I've been saying this for years: I'm convinced that Halloween is actually a remake, of sorts, of The Thing.  I know, I know: Michael's infamous mask was actually a William Shatner mask painted flourescent white and all, and Carpenter went on to remake The Thing as such, but look carefully at the way Michael moves and look at his profile from a distance and you will see a strong resemblance to James Arness in The Thing.  Further, some character names and crew pseudonyms are drawn from The Thing (for instance, the chief of police is named for screenwriter Leigh Brackett).  The Thing's opening credits and the scene where the soldiers mark out the flying saucer's circumference show up on a late night movie marathon.  And, as a last piece of evidence: when Loomis shoots Michael at the end of the movie, Michael moves in a very specific way, patterned specifically after the movements of James Arness at the end of The Thing as the creature is electrocuted.  

Well, so what? Carpenter has never made any bones about his admiration for Howard Hawks. His Assault on Precinct 13 remakes Rio Bravo while cross polinating Hawks with Night of the Living Dead. Carpenter wears his influences on his sleeve. This aspect of Halloween twists things, however. Remember, Michael Myers isn't named in the credits. He is billed, rather, as "The Shape." Why would Carpenter do these things? This is Carpenter's subtlest piece of misdirection: He has convinced the audience that they are watching a movie about a nut with a knife, when in fact they are watching something else entirely. Not only that, he is TELLING the audience this in the text of the movie, but plays on the audience's perceptions of what they are seeing on screen to radically change what they think they are seeing in their mind's eye. Meyers ISN'T a run of the mill psycho. He is The Shape, The Thing from the Outer Dark, The Outsider. As Loomis calls him: The Evil. And this, I submit, is why Halloween is as scary as it is. Halloween presents two levels of prosaic reality: the reality of Haddonfield, Illinois and the reality of a slasher movie, but skews things so that there are darker things squirming beneath each of them. Carpenter doesn't tear away the curtain, per se, but he shows shadows luking beyond. Enough to give that sense of dislocation, that sense of frission. Enough to transform his film into a myth all by its lonesome.

Of course, all of this is icing.  Halloween has one purpose and one purpose only: to scare the audience.  In this regard, it is an efficient, single-minded juggernaut.  And if it isn't the profound horror movie that Night of the Living Dead is or that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is, so what? Halloween makes up for its essential shallowness by virtue of being fun. It's a Halloween confection, calculated to say "Boo!"

*The Lewton formula relied on the audience's imagination.  The model for this approach is the original Cat People from 1942, in which everything is hinted and suggested rather than made explicitly clear.  Halloween follows this model.  While Halloween is one of the most imitated movies ever made, this aspect of the film is the least copied part of the package.  With The Friday the 13th films, the grue is explicit and nasty and the Slasher movie subgenre began to go disastrously wrong, almost out of the gate....back
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

*Interestingly enough, where Halloween allowed Curtis to plug into her mother's cinematic heritage, the series based on Operation: Petticoat enabled her to plug into her father's heritage. Tony Curtis was the second in command on the film version.   Back