Halloween - out now
Costing $300,000 and grossing $60 million, Halloween was the independent slasher film that put director John Carpenter on the map, and established many of the clichés found in thirty years of low-budget horror that followed. Now considered a classic, the film’s success lies in its simplicity. A neat plot coupled with deft camera work gives Halloween a stark realism which plays on our primeval fears.
One dark halloween night, a six-year-old boy named Michael Audrey Myers (Will Sandin) stabs his teenage sister to death with a kitchen knife. Discovered soon afterwards by his parents, the boy is sent to a sanatorium under the care of child psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence). After spending eight years in treatment and a further seven locked up, Myers escapes to his quiet hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, looking for prey.
A 19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis plays the bookish schoolgirl Laurie Strode. Babysitting on hallowe’en night, Laurie is unaware that the adult Myers (Tony Moran), a psychopathic killer wearing an expressionless white mask, is lurking right around the corner, waiting for his moment to pounce and change the course of her life forever. Meanwhile the horrified Dr Loomis waits, as single-mindedly obsessed as the killer he’s chasing.
It’s easy to create violence on screen; less easy to do it well. Avoiding blood and gore, Carpenter creates suspense with smooth, creepy camera movements – panning to one side when something suddenly looms in the foreground – and those frustrating moments which occur when a killer’s at large: lost keys, stuck doorknobs and characters tragically unaware of the looming danger. The camera pays as much attention to the background of shots as to the foreground, and Myers is perplexingly capable of showing up anywhere, at any time. Then there’s that sparse piece of piano work - written by Carpenter himself - which has become as synonymous with horror movies as Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ and the screaming violins of Psycho.
Halloween ingeniously melds the everyday with the unthinkably horrific. Myers chooses ordinary teenagers as his victims - young women worrying about hair, nails and their latest crush - and the experience of babysitting in another person’s home, looking out onto unfamiliar, dark streets, is something to which we can easily relate.
Donald Pleasance brings authority, dignity, and vulnerability to his role as the psychiatrist who once cared for Michael, even shared a bond with him, but is tired of years spent trying to get into his mind and failing. Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent in her screen debut as Laurie Strode, unaffected and softly spoken until she demonstrates why she earned the title “Scream Queen.”
Violent but never gory, Halloween is a masterpiece of pure, terrifying suspense. It adeptly layers peaceful, anonymous suburbia with unknowable, all-pervading darkness. Many far inferior slashers have since adopted its blueprint, spicing things up with an ever increasing body count, but few have managed to create a film so uncompromisingly scary and haunting as this. If you’re in for a proper fright tonight, Halloween is the one to watch.
