Hey everyone! I know it's been a while since my last post, but I couldn't pass up the offer by one of my friends to post a guest review. So, here is Sean Brage's review of the original Halloween
. Make sure to keep an eye out for his comparison between this film and the Rob Zombie remake, the first in what will hopefully be a series of columns comparing remakes with their original source material.Halloween: past and present.
In 1978, John Carpenter released his breakthrough hit horror film, Halloween, and critics and moviegoers alike agreed: the movie was scary as all get out. Filmed on a humble budget with a cast of unknowns, Carpenter set out to give audiences something new, something the horror genre hadn't really seen yet.
The era in which Halloween arrived was a strange one for horror. The genre was gaining new ground and popularity, with directors such as Dario Argento and Wes Craven embracing horror as a true art form, not just a way to fill seats and sell popcorn, as it had been with horror in the 50s and 60s. But horror films were largely spiritual and supernaturally themed, often with elaborate back-stories, occult sub-plots, and at times overwhelming themes of light, darkness, and social commentary. Enter John Carpenter, originally hired on to direct a new kind of horror movie, simply entitled The Babysitter Murders. It wasn't long before Carpenter had re-written the script, recreated from scratch the premise, and filmed a movie that would become a landmark for the genre.
Set in small-town Illinois, Halloween opens with an almost impossibly simple sequence of events. We witness in first-person a shaky, frantic sequence leading us through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedroom where we witness a murder through the eyes of the killer. Reversing the role of audience and killer was just the first groundbreaking sequence in Carpenter's original Halloween. Carpenter's film is terrifying, keeping you glued to the couch and checking your closet every night for weeks; the strength of scares comes from Halloween's simplicity. A killer kills someone, and then 15 years later, he returns to continue killing people. We don't know why, and not knowing makes the evil of these events so much more chilling. Without an elaborate "origin" back-story, we're presented with "evil on two legs," a single-minded madman who could appear in any of our windows at any time. But it's not just the simple storyline that adds to Halloween's credibility. Carpenter's filming of Halloween was revolutionary, showing a focus on we the viewers, striving to put us into a situation that keeps us biting our nails and shaking from fright. Carpenter's use of long, tracking shots would become a staple of the genre, but is fresh and original in his '78 entry. Keeping the camera tight in extended single-angle sequences gets the audience craning their necks, trying to see around the next corner before the unthinkable happens. It's the same kind of filmmaking that would go on to making Stanley Kubrick's The Shining legendary, and in John Carpenter's Halloween, it is terrifying.
Another of the films strengths comes from its understatement, its willingness to take things slow. Rather than making the kills the focus or showering the screen with gore, the highlights of the film are the times when nothing is happening. Instead, it's seeing The Shape peering through a window at a non-the-wiser character, the panning shots showing him in the shadows one moment and gone the next. The anticipation of what could happen is what stops hearts and gets us sweating in this film. Carpenter also managed to save up a good portion of scares for the later 1/4 of the film, so that when something finally does happen, it happens big, leaving us no room to catch our breath.
Lending to the strength of the film is newcomer Jamie Lee Curtis in her first movie role as the first "last girl" in the first slasher film. Her role would go on to be a much-copied cliché of the genre, but adds to the groundbreaking nature of Halloween. While Ms. Curtis truly shines as the "virginal survivor," my favorite role in the film goes to the indispensable Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis, personal psychiatrist to the killer, a man hell-bent on finding and destroying the man he blames himself for letting go. Loomis is at once the film's most sane and most insane voice, a man beyond the edge, trying to explain to the world that this killer is "pure evil." Loomis's monologues on the nature of Michael Myers are chilling and delivered with the brilliance of a stalwart stage actor. Pleasance's character would go on to be one of the only redeeming qualities of the films subsequent and lesser sequels, and in the original he is what makes the story human, lending himself to our relief while giving us due reason to be afraid of Michael Myers.
If you think that good horror films weren't made before Hostel, or if you think that bereft of grisly and "creative" death scenes a film suffers, I encourage you to pick up a copy of John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, turn the lights off, and let yourself be placed inside that house, trying to understand and escape the circumstances of the film. It will shake you, without disturbing you via explicit gore or eliciting cheap thrills via explicit nudity like horror films of today. Halloween is a landmark of the genre, and still serves up true scares after 31 years.
