Halloween [R]

On Halloween night in the sleepy little community of Haddonfield, Illinois, 6 year-old Michael Myers brutally murdered his sister. Whilst Michael was institutionalised and has been for 15 years, the horror of his crime has never left the community and the Myers’ house is presumed by the neighbourhood kids to be haunted. When Halloween comes around this year, tales of the boogeyman reach a new level as Michael breaks out of the institution and returns home to satisfy his insatiable bloodlust on the sexually charged teenage neighbourhood babysitters. 

Amidst the memorable slashers in horror movie history, sitting alongside names such as Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees is Michael Myers, and no we’re not talking about the bad-toothed dude from Austin Powers though he can be argued to be incredibly scary as well. We’re talking about John Carpenter’s personification of pure evil: a dude in a creepily blank William Shatner mask killing random people without ever uttering a word. Halloween, aside from its some-would-argue cheesy title is one of the real classics in horror movies and helped to shape the genre in a plethora of ways. It’s fabulous! 

On Halloween night in the sleepy little community of Haddonfield, Illinois, 6 year-old Michael Myers brutally murdered his sister. Whilst Michael was institutionalised and has been for 15 years, the horror of his crime has never left the community and the Myers’ house is presumed by the neighbourhood kids to be haunted. When Halloween comes around this year, tales of the boogeyman reach a new level as Michael breaks out of the institution and returns home to satisfy his insatiable bloodlust on the sexually charged teenage neighbourhood babysitters. 

As I mentioned, Halloween is an iconic movie that helped shape the horror genre to the recognisable set of tricks it is today. The most predominant is the breathtaking (some might say literally) camera direction. What’s fantastic about this movie is that it’s filmed in a sort of first person point of view. We begin literally from the point of view of little Michael (although admittedly the camera was not so great with angles and size here) breathing heavily and wandering through the house. We then get the view streamlined when he puts on a mask and all we can see is what he sees through the eyeholes. A technique that was later adopted by Sam Raimi for The Evil Dead, Carpenter’s jerky camera movements as well as playing with the clarity of distance and foreground creates this real intimacy, one that makes you hells uncomfortable because it feels that you might be the next one slashed! 

On a personal note, if you watch this movie and then indulge in Scream, Wes Craven’s movie suddenly becomes all the more genius as the metafiction and intertextuality gets elevated to new levels! Also too, for those who are cool like me and interested in this stuff, there’s a little bit of horror movie intertextuality at work in here too: an homage to Hitchcock in the character names of Michael’s psychiatrist, Sam Loomis (which was Marion’s boyfriend’s name in Pyscho) and Tom Doyle (from Rear Window) as well as the fact that it’s ‘scream queen’ Jamie Lee Curtis’ first film, daughter of Janet Leigh of Hitchcock’s iconic shower scene. Need I say more about how brilliant this movie is? 

Starring Donald Pleasance, Nancy Kyes, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers, Kyle Richards, Brian Andrews, John Michael Graham, Nancy Stephens, Arthur Malet, Mickey Yablans, Brent Le Page, Adam Hollander, Robert Phalen, and Tony Moran, Halloween is a classic horror movie filled with sex, suspense, violence, murder, and mystery. The fact that there’s not a lot of exposition as to what Michael’s deal is makes it all the more frightening: it’s scarier when slashers are relentless, emotionless, speechless, and have no motive. It’s an absolute classic and I really enjoyed it!