Horror Classics: Halloween
Tyler Durden sends us a review of one of our favorite seasonal movies, Halloween.
Article By: Tyler Durden
In honor of its 30th anniversary, and because it is one of my favorite movies, I am going to review the first Halloween movie, followed by the rest of the franchise. The goal is to have at least two reviews a week in order to coincide with the actual date of Halloween.
So here goes!
If, by now, you haven’t heard or seen John Carpenter’s Halloween, you should probably just die. The original Halloween was released in 1978, thus the reason I said 30th anniversary. Written, directed and produced by John Carpenter, Halloween is the epitome of horror films. It even sparked a sub genre known as “slashers”. It spawned 7 pseudo sequels (we will get into that later) and a remake of the original. Needless to say, Halloween is very popular and for good reason.
The story is simple. Boy goes crazy and kills sister. Boy gets sent to hospital and later escapes. Boy tries to return home. Shit goes crazy. People die.
As a result, Michael Myers has become synonymous with horror. To this day, people still dress up as Michael Myers for Halloween as his trademark mask is legendary and unforgetable.
Quick trivia: The mask is actually a deformed and altered version of a William
Shatner mask!
The movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, and special effects artist Nick Castle as Michael Myers or in this movie, “The Shape”. Jamie Lee Curtis would be renowned as a “scream queen” for her role in this movie and Donald Pleasence is phenomenal. He truly is a great actor and really creates an interesting character with a sense of urgency in Loomis, who truly believes that Michael is pure evil. I love the scene where he describes Michael. Oh, what do you know? Here it is!
The movie starts off in Haddonfield, Illinois, with a young Michael Myers peering into his house from the outside. He watches his sister go upstairs, and then goes inside and grabs a knife and kills his sister while she is in her room. Michael is then confronted by his parents and then, off screen, sent to Smith’s Grove, an asylum. At Smith’s Grove, Michael is under the care of a child psychologist names
Dr. Sam Loomis. Loomis eventually determines that Michael is more than meets the eye and tries to have him commited and locked away forever.
15 years later, Michael escapes the asylum, steals a car and heads back to Haddonfield. Loomis knows this and gives chase.
Cut to Laurie at school. All throughout the day, Laurie sees Michael stalking her. At this time, she doesn’t know who he is, but starts to worry because she sees him everywhere. Staring across the street, standing behind bushes and in the clothesline at her house, Michael is following her.
Later on, Laurie is babysitting a neighborhood boy, Tommy. Laurie’s friend Annie is babysitting Lindsay Wallace just across the street. Annie sends Lindsay over to Tommy’s house so that her boyfriend can come over. This ultimately leads to sex, and even starts the trend of horror movies containing teens having sex and then being killed right after or even during. Quite cliche now, but at the time, it was new.
Annie and her boyfriend are both killed by Michael Myers. While Michael moves Annie’s body into the house, Tommy sees Michael and claims he is the Boogeyman. Laurie ends up telling him that the Boogeyman isn’t real.
Later on, Michael kills Laurie’s other friend, Lynda and her boyfriend. This is the famous scene where Michael stabs the boyfriend with the knife and leaves him hanging from the knife in his chest. Also, Michael takes the boy’s ghost costume and wears it into the room that Lynda is in. Thinking that Michael is her boyfriend, Lynda is easy prey.
After getting a strange call from her friend, Laurie begins to become worried and goes over to investigate. She finds the bodies, plus the tombstone of the Myer’s mother in the house. She is attacked by Michael but escapes and runs back to Tommy’s house. Of course, the door is locked, so she screams for help. This scene where Michael is slowly walking across the street is one of my favorite in the movie. Tommy opens the door and lets her in. After Michael breaks in, Tommy and Lindsay escape and are spotted by Loomis and the sheriff. Loomis runs into the house and upstairs and saves Laurie by shooting Michael Myers until he stumbles back over the railing of the second story of the house. Laurie then asks if that was the Boogeyman and Loomis confirms. He then looks over the railing, expecting to see Michael laying in the grass below, but to his shock, Michael is gone! The movie ends with Laurie crying and a montage of the sets from the movie with the sound
of Michael’s breathing. EPIC!
Well, that’s the plot of Halloween. It may seem simple compared to movie’s today, but it can be forgiven because it was so well executed.
The concept of Michael Myers is cool enough, but what really makes me love this movie is the direction. I love Carpenter’s use of shadows. This movie is dark and shadowy. It creates a sense of terror and keeps you searching the shadows for signs of Michael hiding in them. Carpenter also uses both the background and the foreground to keep the movie flowing. Whether it is a character in the foreground doing something while Michael is slinking in the background, Carpenter excells at direction. Also, being a horror movie, you expect to see blood. But Halloween hardly has any at all AND it is still scary! Carpenter had little to no budget on this film, but he managed to prove that big budgets are not necessary and proves that he can make do with the tools he is given.
Also, the music. John Carpenter also created the music for this film. He also did the whole soundtrack in a few days! The Halloween theme is unmistakable. It is forever engrained in my head. I feel that if the music is turned off during the movie, it makes the movie ultimately unwatchable. It defintely makes this film.
Halloween influenced horror indefinetly. After its premiere, horror movies became huge. Spawning countless new creatures and monsters, Halloween truly is inspirational. Like I said earlier, Halloween inspired horror films to include sex crazed teens who are just fodder to the villain and pure, virgin characters who are the hero/ heroines of the movie. Its spawned a remake, which I will get to, comics, a video game, trick-or-treat costumes and toys and hundreds of other merchandise. Halloween is even in the Library of Congress! Cool, huh?
Ok, enough with the review. Hopefully I haven’t bored you and you are on your way to go get this movie if you don’t have it already. I just got done watching it, but now I want to watch it again!
Up next: Rob Zombie’s Halloween!
Related Posts
Tags: halloween, jamie lee curtis, mike myers, slasher films
September 26th, 2008 at 10:07 am
There is no doubt about what you said: Halloween is the epitome of horror/slasher films. It set the bar for everything that came afterward. It’s certainly my favorite movie to watch in October, and it’s one of the few movies that has moments that genuinely freak me out. (Meyers is there, Meyers is gone!)
Nice choice, man.
September 26th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Great movie. They should have stopped with it right here.
And Halloween borrowed a bit from Black Christmas.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Carpenter had zero budget for this, and virtually all of what he did have went into the cameras, which shows throughout. In many ways this is more of a thriller than a slasher movie, and creates far more suspense than any of the knockoffs that followed.
Definitely one of my favorite flicks.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The Gold standard for all Horror movies… Still frightens me today…