Malaysia Sun - Malaysian news as it happens

Halloween (1978) [DVD]

Director : John Carpenter

Screenplay : John Carpenter and Debra Hill

MPAA Rating : R

Year of Release : 1978

Stars : Donald Pleasence (Dr. Samuel J. Loomis), Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode), Nancy Loomis (Annie Brackett), P.J. Soles (Lynda Van Der Klok), Charles Cyphers (Sheriff Leigh Brackett), Kyle Richards (Lindsey Wallace), Brian Andrews (Tommy Doyle), John Michael Graham (Bob Simms), Nick Castle (Michael Myers)

John Carpenter’s Halloween is a stripped down, primal horror movie. Made on a shoestring budget in the late 1970s before “slasher movie” was a worn-out derogatory phrase, Halloween went on to become the most economically successful independent movie at the time (made for about $300,000, it grossed some $70 million in theaters), spawned largely by word-of-mouth and surprisingly good critical notices.

In terms of heartland American horror, Halloween is certainly the best and most influential movie since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film most responsible for instigating the crucial shift in the horror genre that moved terror away from farway, exotic locations and into the American home. The boogeyman doesn’t come from Transylvania and he wasn’t created in a mad scientist’s lab; rather, he is a deviant byproduct of the American family. In Halloween, the boogeyman is Michael Myers, who, as a child, stabbed his sister to death with a butcher knife and then spent the next 15 years locked up in mental institution.

When he escapes, he returns to his home town because that’s what he knows. His psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), tries to explain Myers in the only way he can: as pure evil. This is a clever move on the part of screenwriters John Carpenter and Debra Hill, as it frees Michael from the constraints of motivation; when someone is “pure evil,” that is more than enough to explain everything he does. By also tinting Michael with the aura of the supernatural—suggesting that he both is and is not human, which is implicitly suggested in his nickname, “The Shape”—they make him that much more frightening.

The horror in Halloween works largely because of the ordinariness of the setting: the small, midwestern town of Haddonfield, Illinois, both instantly recognizable and instantly forgettable. It is populated by average, normal people who strike us as realistic and sympathetic. The main characters are a trio of teenage girls, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh, in her first role), Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis), and Lynda Van Der Klok (P.J. Soles). Laurie is the virginal brain of the group, always wishing she were more extroverted and uninhibited like her friends. On Halloween night, they spend the evening babysitting at different houses, while Michael Myers stalks in the shadows outside, picking them off one by one for reasons that are only fathomable to him.

It’s an almost ludicrously simple set-up, and if that’s all there were, Halloween would be a shallow film, indeed. Yet, what sets the film apart from its many imitators is Carpenter’s intuitive sense of the power of cinematic style. The opening sequence is a great example, as it uses what would become the film’s primary visual motif, an extended, gliding point-of-view shot, to depict the murder of Michael Myers’ sister. Critics of Halloween, and slasher films in general, have complained that such a shot forces us to identify with the killer, which is an ethically problematic move. What they don’t take into account, though, is the subtle ways in which the POV shot works and the manner in which our identification shifts. Like Hitchcock, Carpenter is playing us.

For the first half of the shot, we don’t know whose eyes we’re looking through or what that person’s intent is. It starts out innocently enough, but gradually takes on an aura of voyeurism and maliciousness. When we see a hand grab a butcher’s knife and begin ascending the stairs, it creates an interior struggle, as we simultaneously realize what is going to happen and that we are powerless to stop it. This is one of the primal strengths of horror movies: witnessing without the ability to intervene (which is why audiences yell at impending screen victims not to go into the dark basement). And, of course, the use of the POV shot is used primarily to obscure the killer’s identity, so that when he walks outside and the film cuts to an external shot of Michael’s parents removing the mask, we register with shock that it is a child who did this, not some physically grotesque monster. At that moment, the film has us and it never lets go.

Apart from the point-of-view shots, Carpenter also proves himself to be a master of utilizing the horizontal space of the widescreen frame (when Fritz Lang says in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt that CinemaScope is only good for shooting snakes and funerals, he clearly hadn’t thought much about the horror genre). Throughout the film, Carpenter generates chills by simply situating Michael Myers in the corner of the frame where you may or may not see him. In one of the film’s most striking moments, Laurie backs up into a dark corner, and as her eyes adjust to the darkness, the ghostly face of Michael’s white mask slowly appears in a doorframe behind her. The widescreen is crucial in this regard, as Carpenter plays with our sense of security that the center of the frame is the place to look; instead, he makes us jittery by constantly forcing us to scan the entirety of the frame, always checking the corners.

Since its release 25 years ago, Halloween has, against all odds, been labeled a classic, not just of the horror genre, but of American filmmaking in general. That label often weighs a film down, but even after repeated viewings, Carpenter’s minor masterpiece holds up as a staunchly effective thriller that will always stand head and shoulders above the cinematic progeny it spawned.

©2003 James Kendrick