Halloween (1978)

In an ordinary town in Illinois, a killer has broken out of a sanitarium and returned home to kill again on Halloween night.

There's no sense in doing any sort of recap of Halloween, as it is one of the best known, best loved horror movies of the last 35 or 40 years. The killer, Michael Myers, has become a horror icon for fans and mainstream audiences alike. Halloween led to six or seven sequels (depending on how you look at it), a remake, and a sequel to the remake. It also led to an endless parade of imitators, ripoffs, lookalikes, homages, and wannabes.

I love the look of the quiet, normal suburban neighborhood featured throughout the movie. It looks like the kind of neighborhood I grew up in in a lot of ways. It's a very real, very non-Hollywood look that creates a familiar, homey feel. Evidently it was shot in March in Pasedena, so the filmmakers had to supply their own autumnal leaves to place on the ground in each scene, but you'd never know it (unless you happen to look at all the green leaves up on the trees).

The movie is beautifully shot, with director John Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey making the most of nearly every frame. Continuous shots will have Michael subtly appearing in the shadows for a moment, then disappearing by the time the characters turn around. Michael's mask reflects just enough light to appear as a slightly bluer shadow among the black shadows. Those kinds of shots are creepy and effective.

Halloween has a number of great moments, and I fully agree with its place in horror history, but I have never put it on a pedestal like so many do. It has a ton of distracting little script and acting problems and goofy moments that strike sour notes every time I see the movie.

Lines like, "hey jerk, speed kills!" and "well, kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition" just don't make sense in context (John Carpenter agrees with me on the latter, according to the DVD commentary). Furthermore, the Lynda character's whole little improvised monologue about what books she doesn't take home while she waits for Laurie to watch Michael's car come down the street is just awful.

And I don't need to rehash the one frequent criticism people have of the movie, regarding Michael somehow knowing how to drive. My problem with that isn't that he knows how to drive, but that his driving all over the place is so much less scary than him standing and stalking in the shadows.

Despite doing nearly everything right in the actual scare sequences, the movie has never struck me as particularly scary. And, perhaps most damningly, I have never bought into the whole concept of Michael Myers as "The Shape," an inhuman killer that is "pure evil."

The circumstances of his first kill when he was a child, of his escape from the sanitarium (he skittered over the car pretty sprightly for a guy who never runs or anything), of his constant driving around, of his stalking and popping in and out of sight, of his apparent voyeurism, and so on all don't jibe with this idea of a near-supernatural force of death.

I can certainly buy him as a kid who couldn't handle his sister's sexuality (or some other unexplored problem) and snapped, killing her and then going catatonic for 15 years before breaking out to kill again. But none of that requires all of this hoosafudge about "the Devil's eyes," and "Death has come to your town, Sheriff," and the awful, "he's gone! He's from here! The Evil is gone!" out of Michaels's psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis. It makes him come off as a superstitious old fool, not a competent doctor.

This is blasphemy for many people, but in this way I appreciated what Rob Zombie did with his remake more than how the character is treated in the original. If he's a force of "pure evil," then fine, don't give us any insight into his character and motivations. But if he is a human being who has gone psychotic - and I have never been able to see him as anything but that in this first film - then I want to see the process and get to know who Michael is behind the mask. The Rob Zombie movies give that to us, while Carpenter's original does not. Take your pick.

Putting my complaints about the movie aside, the last ten minutes - from the "finding the bodies" scene until the end - are fantastically suspenseful and frightening. That last ten-minute sequence can make you forget about any problems with the first 80 minutes, and are largely where the movie made its fortune. I can totally see coming out of a theater in 1978 talking about how Michael almost got Laurie, how he just wouldn't die, how he really was the "boogeyman."

Without the mastery of that last reel, Halloween would have been a well-shot, well-intentioned exploitation movie with a few good moments that ultimately may have been lost in the shuffle of film history. Instead, it resonated with audiences to the point that the movie launched a franchise, a sub-genre, and an era of filmmaking that has yet to end.