“It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Halloween
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Halloween” is the essential American horror film. No other movie in its genre has been as influential, as effective, as brilliantly realized.

Very few thrillers have ever been as economical as “Halloween,” and it serves as proof that carnage was not always at the heart of horror pictures. When so many directors focus one what horrible creatures will leap from the shadows, John Carpenter was more concerned with the lurking prospects of the shadows themselves.

“Halloween” was produced for just over $300,000 in the spring of 1978, and it went on to gross nearly $50 million at the box office, making it the most profitable independent film of its time. Why was it so successful? For the same reason, I think, that the haunted house at a carnival is popular—people respond strongly to being really, truly scared, and “Halloween” is very, very scary.

It is also one of the most stylish slasher movies ever, a fact made evident during the film’s opening moments, a long tracking shot that takes on the point of view of a young boy as he stabs his sister to death. Flash forward fifteen years, and the little boy, now grown, escapes from the confines of his mental institution and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween day.

The killer (simply credited as “The Shape,” he later became known as Michael Myers), donning a creepy white mask, begins to hack and slash his way through any teenager that gets in the way of his knife. Our heroine is a plucky Jamie Lee Curtis (making her feature debut), who is stuck babysitting two neighborhood kids as her promiscuous friends turn up dead.

On Michael’s tracks is Donald Pleasence, who was Michael’s childhood psychiatrist and knows what he is capable of. “Death has come to your little town,” he tells the sheriff, who brushes off the threats. It’s too late anyway.

Modern-day horror films relish violence and brutality, and so many directors wrongly assume that blatant sadism is automatically scary. Look at the “Hostel” and “Saw” series, in which the stories are constructed around the gruesome deaths, or the woeful remakes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Halloween,” which drain the originals of their tension and practically splatter the camera with viscera.

So many scenes in “Halloween” would be easy to spoil with overbearing music, gratuitous gore or rapid-fire editing (all traits with which today’s moviegoers are no doubt familiar). But Carpenter is a master of his medium, and there are moments in this film that have been constructed so tightly that I can’t imagine them being any more effective.

Take, for instance, the famous moment near the end of the film where Curtis thinks she has killed Michael. Of course, he isn’t dead, and as she cowers in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, Michael—who has been lying inert on a bed over Curtis’ shoulder—silently sits up. Chilling.

I can think of at least a dozen modern directors that would supply that moment with a musical sting, or would cut to a close-up shot. It wouldn’t be necessary. Carpenter utilizes his camera superbly, and how he juxtaposes the main action in the foreground with glimpses of ominous figures in the background is one of the film’s great successes.

“Halloween” was the film that single-handedly inspired the boom slasher films in the ‘80s, and although it has spawned sequels, remakes, imitations and spoofs, none of them have captured the electricity that Carpenter did here. Most horror films are sledgehammers; this one is a scalpel.

Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Debra Hill and Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers and Nick Castle. R; 91m.