Halloween
Suburban Slasher | 91 Minutes | 1978 | United States
(2/4)
Director: John Carpenter | Producer: Debra Hill | Screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill | Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Nick Castle, P.J. Soles, Nancy Loomis, Charles Cyphers | Music: John Carpenter | Cinematography: Dean Cundey | Editors: Tommy Wallace, Charles Bornstein
In the suburban neighbourhood of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963, while other kids are out trick-or-treating, a six-year-old boy without any apparent motivation creeps up the stairs, slips on a mask, and slashes to death his near-nude teenage sister.
Fifteen years later he’s still confined to Smith’s Grove, a sanatorium for psychiatric patients in northern Illinois, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis, prepares to take him before a judge to be tried as an adult. Loomis plans on doping him up to ensure that he’s never released, but Michael Myers escapes and heads back to Haddonfield. Probably he’s looking for a girl to kill who reminds him of his sister, or perhaps it’s just muscle memory. Either way it turns out that evil cannot be sated, and nastiness is no better off when doomed to repeat itself.
The most shocking thing about the original Halloween, the cult slasher flick that spawned one of cinema’s most successful horror franchises, is its formless action and enveloping tedium. A fairly nondescript baddie shuffles through a couple of suburban homes, killing a handful of high-school teens without rhyme or reason.
Only Jamie Lee Curtis – who in her breakthrough role plays a very fledgling sort of heroine, but as an actress is capable of suppressing her intellect in a way that comes across both knowing and vulnerable – and Charles Cyphers as the town sheriff manage to come close to the realisation of actual human beings. Otherwise there’s no effort to establish any of the characters, and snatches of dialogue no doubt intended to capture the life of teenage concerns instead sound flustered and overly irritable. It hardly helps that many of the core players look too old for their teenage roles.
Halloween has a peculiar way of parlaying its strengths into weaknesses. The town of Haddonfield and the suburban neighbourhood which the movie inhabits feel cannily enclosed, and there’s a staid and unsettling logic to the pattern of houses and the progression of streets as our heroine Laurie Strode walks watched by Myers. Time doesn’t flow coherently – a car ride of a few blocks sees the bright light of day shift to the dark of night – and editing cuts and identikit houses give us the sense that we’re going in circles.
But shoddy characterisation and Myers’ limited scope make the movie in the end too enclosed, too shallow: Myers is of the same small world, and he doesn’t feel threatening beyond the close confines of these few houses. Only our brief visit to the sanatorium, a rural stop to discover the slain body of a mechanic, and a break-in at a hardware store offer sketches of space, and by the mid-point of the film we’re stuck babysitting.
The best scene in Halloween is its opening, an unbroken shot from a first-person perspective that takes us from the front of the Myers’ house to a voyeuristic view through a side window of two teenagers frolicking. They smooch on the couch, hear a noise from outside, then the teenage boy holds a Halloween mask to his face and continues kissing and pecking.
They go upstairs. We see the bedroom light go out, then swing round the back of the white detached house, up the porch steps, through the back door, and a knife is snatched from a drawer in the kitchen, past the kitchen stove, dining table, and rocking chair, pausing before the hallway as the boyfriend says his goodbyes and makes an exit: the couple’s lovemaking has lasted little more than a minute. And now we venture upstairs, and hear the girl contentedly humming.
Alas when Michael Myers – for we are watching from his perspective – spots the Halloween mask on the floor, strewn with clothes tossed in the act of disrobing, he picks it up and puts it on and we go inside the mask of the killer. Through two narrow eye-holes we see his sister naked beyond her underpants, sitting and brushing her hair in the bedroom mirror. She shouts at her brother in irritation then cries out in terror, as a few dull thudding sound effects and the glint of the knife make clear that she is being butchered. There’s a makeshift yet imperturbable rhythm to the sequence, but the spell is broken when Myers puts on the mask, making the climax feel tawdry and gimmicky.
Halloween draws from the Psycho school of inferring its hack and slash, although for a knife-wielding monotone Michael Myers strangles several of his victims before elaborately posing their bodies. Whether we are literally seeing through his eyes, or tracing his shape before his intended victims realise his presence, we often share in his perspective in some way, but neither he nor his victims are interesting enough to be worth caring.
The iconic Halloween theme is overplayed in the first half of the film, recurring again and again as Myers poses in the distance, so that it teeters on parody and speaks only to itself, at best telegraphing the action rather than building the atmosphere and boding portent.
In the end Laurie Strode does have a stab at the man who has killed her friends, but it’s out of despair and feels neither subversive nor transgressive. Dr. Loomis makes the save, after spending much of the film loitering around the wrong house with a hayseed expression. Whatever the intent, Halloween reinforces the old trope whereby lasciviousness gets punished. It plays to its low-budget aesthetic in a way that seems amateurish rather than pulpy, rests on its laurels with a mask in place of a psychotic killer, and bumps about in a manner more homely than thrilling.
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