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Halloween
Directed by John Carpenter
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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John Carpenter's low budget wonder may not be the very best film he's ever made (I tend to go with his 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 as his finest film), but it is nevertheless, in every sense of the word, a horror classic. Brilliantly paced and packed with more genuine atmosphere than a dozen Wes Craven films, Halloween is a suspenseful, funny, scary movie that is just as good today as it was 20 years ago – maybe better. That Carpenter's simple tale of a babysitter being stalked by the "boogie man" himself in the guise of an escaped mental patient has aged well not only speaks of Carpenter's innate talents as a storyteller, but attests to the efficacy of low budget horror – when you have story and atmosphere, you don't need gore or special effects. Like Alfred Hitchcock, whose spirit looms large in this film, Carpenter knows exactly how to get the audience on the edge of its seat and how to keep it there. There is not a wasted shot here, no obvious B-movie padding, no ill-timed scares. Halloween is the real deal.
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 Halloween John Carpenter VHS Tape - $12.99 Rated - R |
We meet Laurie's pals – fellow babysitter and daughter of the local Sheriff, Annie (Nancy Loomis) and horny cheerleader Lynda (P.J. Soles) – whose biggest problems seem to be about where to rendezvous with their boyfriends. Laurie, however, is the school smart girl, the one who has no social life because she's busy studying. But it's Laurie's virginity that Carpenter and co-writer and producer Debra Hill have made the magnet that draws Myers straight towards her. Before the night is over Laurie will get a sneak preview of adulthood, effectively acting as a single mother of two kids who has to save the world from the Boogie Man.
If the finely observed character sketches of teenage American girls no longer seem to ring true in the above-it-all '90s, the film's connections with urban legends have never faded. Michael Myers, the embodiment of every story you've ever heard about the psycho that escaped from the nut house, moves forward as purposefully as a shark towards his food, and it's that angle of the film that makes it work like a Swiss watch. Of course, it helps that Carpenter got all the small details right too – those flickering jack o' lanterns seem to be in every room of those old two-story wooden houses, and the slight breeze that rustles the leaves in the trees remind one of an Antonioni film and give Haddonfield an atmosphere of spookiness that is sustained perfectly throughout the film.
And then there's that music. Written by Carpenter himself, ostensibly to cut costs, it is the very model of great film scoring. Never overdone but haunting and memorable in every way, that little piano figure is as important to this film as Bernard Herrmann's music was to Psycho. If you've never seen Halloween, see it. It's not very violent and, apart from the opening scene, bloodless. The film's bad rep comes from the fact that it spawned an entire generation of classless slasher films like Friday the 13th. (If you thought that was a good horror movie, skip this and proceed straight to the hackery of Kevin Williamson' Scream). Be assured, however, that this film is a Rolls Royce among hockey-masked Yugos; quite simply, it is one of the finest horror films ever made.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.