R0BTRAIN's Bad Ass Cinema: Halloween

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So it’s October again, and without fail the annual Horror movie marathon has started up at my house. My buddy Shaun is a freak about Horror and especially Slasher films, so he’s been savoring this opportunity to bust out his collection and watch promiscuous teenagers get knocked off by the dozen. Beyond question his favorite series of the bunch is Halloween, and the entries featuring Michael Myers. With eight films and a possible remake of the first film on the way, the series just doesn’t seem to want to die, and to some degree that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, movies 2-8 are bad, but they still hold some entertainment value.

The evolution of the Halloween series is an interesting one to follow, with its small beginnings as an independent film, to a franchise backed by Universal Pictures and Dino De Laurentis, to going a bit back to its roots, and now a property owned by Dimension films and Miramax, who seem to see no end to riding this series out. Honestly, it’s a little hard to argue with their strategy considering the movies have brought in about ten times as much as they have cost, even if the series has had serious diminished returns in terms of quality.

Then there’s always that first film. I went back and watched the first film again, and the perspective really helps you appreciate what a masterpiece Carpenter created. It’s incredible that with a budget of $300,000, one known star, and a mask of William Shatner, Carpenter was able to create an extraordinary piece of suspense and horror. The movie set a standard in the genre that has not been reach since and probably won’t be ever again.


Halloween Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance. Directed by John Carpenter.

I know I’ve said before, but there used to be a time when John Carpenter was a god. Whether they were box office successes or not, the director had a stretch in the late 70’s into the late 80’s that included Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. These films are extremely entertaining, featuring top-notch suspense, comedy and action. Even low budget fair such as They Live has terrific underlying themes, which is more than a lot of the genre can say.

The reason Carpenter got the opportunity to have this success was because of Halloween. The movie came out of nowhere, with no major studio backing or even distributing it, to become the most successful independent film of all time. Looking at the film again, the movie works on such a simple level, but does so to a degree that the film’s appeal is undeniable.

The film’s opening moments give us one of Carpente’s major themes; voyeurism. Borrowing heavily from Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, we see the perspective of our killer. The newly invented Steady-Cam is used to create a brilliant sequence as the killer relentlessly watches as a couple makes out on a couch and then goes upstairs. The killer moves to the interior of the house and mercilessly slaughters the young woman, only to then reveal that the killer was a child the entire time.

This sequence is brilliant, as the point of view of the camera instantly gives us a feeling of complicity in this act. We’re watching as this boy murders his sister, and yet we’re powerless to stop it. But by making us a part of the act, Carpenter crosses a line that had destroyed Michael Powell’s career. Peeping Tom was considered obscene upon its release, and yet here Halloween’s audiences were instantly drawn in.

What you may not notice is that though your mind is shocked by the death of the young girl (Sandy Johnson), there is very little violence shown. In a homage to Psycho, the knife used is never shown to actually penetrate the skin. The camera pans over, showing the knife wildly going down. The women’s body falls to the floor in blood (the most that is actually shown in the movie). All the mood that the movie needs to put us on edge is given to us in these amazing few shots, and the movie is only five minutes in.

Fifteen years later, Michael Myers (Nick Castle) returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. Though he’s known as Michael Myers, Carpente’s script always refers to Michael simply as “The Shape”. This is a terrific way of describing the character. He’s simply a stalking presence, doing nothing but appearing from time to time, and then disappearing as soon as you look away. When he does walk, Myers moves smoothly, with no emotion showing at all, which is probably scarier than any outwardly “crazy” person ever would be.

Carpente’s voyeur motif plays into this as well, as for much of the film we simply wait for Michael to strike. He picks his next victim and stalks them patiently, often times while people just simply aren’t paying attention. Carpenter brilliantly weaves Michael in and out of frame, barely making him a presence at all, just enough to put you off kilter.

He finally picks his victim, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), due to her resemblance to his own sister. He watches her out of the window of her school, then later from the backyard of her home. These earlier scenes are breadcrumbs from Carpenter leading you straight into the boogeyman’s oven. The tension is elevated further when Michael’s web gets wider, watching Laurie’s friends as they prance around in their underwear.

*****Sidenote****** I did want to bring up that women in these films have about 99% chance of mortality if they decide to not wear pants. Of the three women that die in this first film, all are pants-less when they are slain. The trend mightily continues throughout sequels 2, 4, 5, and 6 as quite often even women that made it through the last entry are caught by Myers literally with their pants down. Now, I’m sure you can say, “Well duh Robert, Michael always gets these girls after they’ve had sexual relations!” That’s not necessarily true. Quite often these girls simply don’t have pants on. They’ve either spilled butter on themselves, or they’re getting dressed after a morning shower. Some even decide to go out of the house without wearing pants, like it’s perfectly normal. Don’t these kids have even a little modesty in front of their neighbors? Perhaps Carpenter and the others were saying something about Michael catching these women literally and figuratively naked, or maybe they just like seeing these women in their underwear. It’s a tough call. *******End of Sidenote*******

Now typically, this genre is filled with characters that are mere fodder for the killer in question. Carpenter instead gives us people we actually care about. The first one we meet is Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance). On the H25, the movie’s 25th Anniversary DVD, Carpenter talks about how Psycho was the first film to take Horror out of the Victorian setting, like you would see in Dracula. What Carpenter does is take the suburban motif from Psycho, but bring his own Van Helsing to the cast with Loomis.

Oddly enough, the part originally was offered to another Van Helsing, Peter Cushing, as well as the man who was usually his Dracula, Christopher Lee. Both turned the role down. This ended up for the best, as Pleasance adds weight and legitimacy to this series. A seasoned actor such as Pleasance is a godsend to a film like Halloween, as Loomis’ gloomy lines seem to not be so ridiculous when a great actor is spouting them.

Carpenter loved feeding those lines to Pleasance too. Seemingly everything that pleasance says in the film is rather gloomy. Lines such as,

“This isn’t a man.”

“He’s gone from here! The evil is gone!”

“I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes… the *devil’s* eyes! I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… *evil*! “

and then finally…

“I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall – looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now you can either ignore it, or you can help me to stop it. “
Something tells me Loomis was never fun at parties, but if Pleasance was playing him, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

For the movie’s most important role, Laurie Strode, Carpenter couldn’t have found anyone better than first timer Jamie Lee Curtis. Curtis is the picture of innocence in this film, and really in great contrast to every other character in this movie. She is smart and resourceful, unlike her dimwitted friends who end up getting knocked off. She’s also the responsible caretaker of two small children that she has to protect as Michael goes on his rampage.

What is surprising is that the rambunctious teenagers that are slain are also very likable. Each is rather funny and charismatic, with little character traits that let them stand out. This also started another trend where the “Comic Relief” characters were killed off in these pictures. And when they are cut down, Carpenter again stresses suspense over gore, with this first film in the series containing more nudity, but way less gore than any other movie in the series. Carpenter puts the images in your mind instead of onscreen, which makes them much scarier.

For the final showdown with Loomis, Laurie and Michael, Carpenter edits together a ferocious encounter. Building and building with shorter and shorter takes, the director tightens the suspense further and further. Laurie keeps barely escaping attack after attack until Loomis blows the monster away; only to see him disappear once more. According to Carpenter, the final montage of open frames doesn’t show where Michael could be; it shows where he was and that he was everywhere. Just one last taste of terror before the final credits rolled.


Carpenter ended up opening the flood gates to the entire Slasher genre with this film, but no film was ever able to eclipse Halloween for sheer quality. The film stands as one of the greatest Horror films of all time and will keep growing in popularity with time. So if you’re looking for an honest-to-god good film this October, go with Halloween, because “we’re all entitled to one good scare”, but we don’t have to watch crap to get to it.

Picture Credits: hysteria-lives.co.uk, beyond-Hollywood.com, impawards.com, scaryhorrormovies.com

Robert Sutton feels the most at home when he's watching some movie scumbag getting blown up, punched in the face, or kung fu'd to death, especially in that order. He's a founding writer for the movies section of Insidepulse.com, featured in his weekly column R0BTRAIN's Badass Cinema as well as a frequent reviewer of DVDs and Blu-rays. Also, he's a proud Sony fanboy, loves everything Star Wars and Superman related and hopes to someday be taken seriously by his friends and family.