Happy 2nd anniversary, blog (albeit a day late). It's that time again, when we celebrate making it through another year - or six months, to be exact - by going through another horror series from start to finish. This time we're looking at the third part of what I term the "unholy trinity" of slasher movies, John Carpenter's Halloween.
At the age of six, young Michael Myers takes a kitchen knife and stabs his sister to death on Halloween. Fifteen years later, the now-adult Michael decides to escape from the mental institution where he's been since he killed his sister, and returns to his home town of Haddonfield, Illinois - just in time for Halloween once more. Stopping only to kill a man for some overalls and break into a hardware store for a William Shatner mask and a murder kit, he then proceeds to stalk several teenage girls he came across randomly while cruising the streets - the sheriff's daughter Annie, cheerleader Linda and "good girl" Laurie Strode. As the girls go about celebrating Halloween in their own ways, mostly involving smoking pot or having sex, Michael does as well - and in his case he "celebrates" by killing everyone he comes across. At the same time as all of this Michael's psychiatrist Dr. Loomis is on his tail, convinced that Michael will have returned to Haddonfield to continue where he left off, even though the authorities and local police think it's highly unlikely...
So, I have a confession to make. Out of the three "big" slasher series, the Halloween series has always been my least favourite. I never found the character of Michael Myers to be all that interesting (possibly not all that surprisingly considering he has also been known as "The Shape" for a lot of the movies), and the series started to go downhill a lot faster than either the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street series (although in the case of the latter it might be a close thing). That's not really fair of me, however, as certainly the first Halloween film is not only an excellent film but is also a genre legend - often imitated but rarely equalled. Hell, even Friday the 13th effectively tried to make their own version of Halloween two years later.
Furthermore, as I rewatched Halloween for this review, I started to notice things that I'd not noticed before in previous watchings. For one, Michael Myers is actually a pretty cunning and sadistic slasher considering he's always been portrayed as silent and emotionless. Even ignoring just where he learned to drive while in the mental hospital, throughout the film Myers shows a surprising level of forward planning and cunning - breaking into the hardware store to steal the things he needs in advance of the night's killing spree, using a disguise to torment one victim further, blocking exits so that his victims can't escape... he's not nearly the voiceless, faceless "Shape" that we think of when Michael Myers is brought up in conversation.
There's also an element of dark pantomime throughout the film as well, nearly all of it centred on Dr. Loomis who spends most of the film pretty much one step behind Myers but just missing him by moments. At one point Myers drives straight past an oblivious Loomis who has his back to the road, and you almost feel like yelling out, "He's behind you!". We can take this pantomime or fairy tale aspect of it even further with Loomis taking on the role of the woodcutter come to slay the Big Bad Wolf in the nick of time - unlike some of the other slashers of the time period, Halloween decided for whatever reason not to have Laurie save herself completely, even though she puts up a good fight, and has Dr. Loomis to save the day at the film's climax (is that a spoiler? Since everyone knows there's at least half a dozen sequels, I'm thinking not).
The movie's score has also had a huge effect on the film's effectiveness as a horror film and in its place overall in pop culture. John Carpenter's 5/4 score is instantly recognisable by anyone who hears it, and the fact that it is mostly used for the stalking and murder scenes amps up the tension without having to show very much at all of either Michael or the deaths (and if you listen closely, you can hear the beginnings of the score for Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing in there too). Made for $300,000, half of which went on the Panavision cameras alone, Halloween went on to take $47 million at the box office and became a cultural phenomenon.
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