Review: Halloween

      Halloween (1978) was a horror film directed and scored by John Carpenter and co-written with Debra Hill who also produced the film. It was the first movie of the Halloween franchise and kicked off the slasher film craze of the 1980s. Halloween cost only $300,000 to make and made $70 million dollars at the box office which is an 11,000% return on investment (the film has probably made even more money due to TV rights fees and DVD sales) making Halloween one of the most successful independent films of that era. The film involves an escaped mental patient named Michael Myers going back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to stalk and murder a group of teenage girls on Halloween night, the fifteenth anniversary of the murder of his older sister. However, his psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is hot on his trail and is willing to do anything to stop him.

     From a pure filmmaking perspective, Halloween is phenomenal. John Carpenter shows that it’s possible to make a classic film on a shoestring budget. Many of the scenes in Halloween are shot from Michael Myers point of view with only his heavy breathing penetrating the audience’s ears with a sense of morbid foreboding. Even when a scene isn’t being shot from Michael Myers point of view, Carpenter takes a page out of Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and has the camera follow Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut) and her friends around in a very voyeuristic fashion to create the sense that someone is stalking them. Carpenter also provides a nice scare (false or otherwise) for the audience nearly every ten minutes or so meaning that you’re constantly on edge throughout the film, waiting for Michael Myers to strike. Another thing that sets Halloween apart from most slasher movies is the lack of blood. Whenever there is blood on screen you barely even notice it. Carpenter uses dark lighting and his eerie soundtrack to keep the audience in a constant state of suspense.

     The acting in Halloween is hit and miss for the most part. Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance as Laurie Strode set the standard for the ‘final girl’ trope in slasher films as the character is not promiscuous and therefore seems to notice that a psycho killer is stalking her unlike her friend who are so busy trying to get laid that they don’t realize something’s amiss. John Carpenter cast Curtis in the role upon learning that her mother, Janet Leigh played Marion Crane in Psycho (1960) which is largely regarded as the first slasher film. Laurie Strode’s friends in the film are portrayed by actresses P.J. Soles and Nancy Kyes. Their performances are uneven at certain points. In one scene, their performances are just fine and in other scene their delivery of the dialogue falls flat. In fact, one of the girls comes off as so annoying that I was actually kind of glad she got killed. Donald Pleasance’s role as Dr. Sam Loomis is probably his most famous and Pleasance would ride the Halloween money train for four more films until his death in 1995. Pleasance’s performance is able to convince the audience that we’re not dealing with some run of the mill psycho killer. We’re dealing with evil personified. Unfortunately, none law enforcement in the movie take his claims seriously. It’s safe to say that Pleasance would still be portraying Sam Loomis at the age of 98 if he were still alive. It wouldn’t surprise me if they would have made a Halloween film set in a nursing home where an elderly walker using Loomis and Michael Myers duke it out for one final time…until another sequel is made.

     The best thing about Halloween is the soundtrack.  The main theme for Halloween that was composed by John Carpenter is a piano melody in the 10/8 time signature, which is uncommon for most film scores and popular music. The main theme acts very much like how the main theme of Jaws (1975) acts. It immediately signals to the audience that Michael Myers is here before he even actually makes his presence known on camera. Had Carpenter not become a director, he would have had a successful music career. Carpenter actually goes on tour throughout the world now, playing his famous movie scores for a live audience.

     Halloween, is a must-see horror film that created the slasher film genre and every horror movie since has taken it cue from.

Overall Rating: ****1/2

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