Halloween
The
night HE came home…again!
“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 realised what was
living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply...evil!” – Dr Sam Loomis,
Halloween
The
granddaddy of the Stalk ‘n’ Slash movie, a film that defined a genre, John
Carpenter’s Halloween is still a cut above the pretenders that came after it. Finally back on the big screen in time
for, when else, Halloween, it’s as nerve-jangling as it was back in 1978.
In
1963, in the sleepy suburban town of Haddonfield, Illinois, cute little
six-year-old Michael Myers takes a kitchen knife and slaughters his teenage
sister on Halloween night. 15
years later, Michael escapes from the maximum security psychiatric hospital
where he’s been imprisoned and heads back home to Haddonfield for some trick or
treating, hotly pursued by Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance, cast against type as the
nominal good guy), his psychiatrist, who’s determined to stop him before he
kills again.
Meanwhile,
teenaged, bookish, good girl Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis in a fantastic breakthrough
performance) and her slightly less virginal friends Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (P.J. Soles) have their own plans for
Halloween night. While Laurie
covers both her own and Annie’s babysitting jobs, across the street Annie and
Lynda plan to spend some quality time with their boyfriends in an empty,
parent-free house. But when
Laurie’s charges claim to have seen “the boogeyman” lurking outside and Annie
and Lynda aren’t answering the phone, the suspicious Laurie crosses the street
to investigate the darkened house where evil lurks…
Made
on an ultra-low budget of just $320,000 and shot in just four weeks, John
Carpenter’s Halloween went on to gross $70 million worldwide (that’s the
equivalent of $240 million in today’s money kids) and spawn 35 years of
imitators, making it one of the most profitable and influential independent
movies of all time. It’s a seminal
film, a true cultural landmark, and it also laid the ground rules for the
Slasher movie, a genre it pretty much created; the faceless, indestructible
killer, the restless camera, the stalking POV shots, the absence or (in the
case of the Sheriff) impotence of parental authority, the dangers of immorality
(get naked, get laid or get high and you’re gonna get killed) and, of course,
the concept of the final girl, the strong, indomitable heroine
(usually a virgin who represents purity and innocence) who normally triumphs
over evil. Though it could be
argued that in most of these films it’s their sublimated sexual repression that
saves the heroines, not their purity.
Seriously folks, in virtually every Slasher movie, at some point the
heroine gets hold of the killer’s huge, phallic knife and repeatedly drives it
into his guts. What did you think that was all about?
It’s
also one of the scariest damn films ever made. Screw Rob Zombie and his abortion of a “re-imagining” and
screw all the hacks that have ripped it off, even 35 years down the road, in a
world awash with CGI monsters and smug super-villains like Jigsaw, Halloween will still put you on the
edge of your seat, make you jump out of your skin and scare the crap out of
you. The performances are fantastic with Donald Pleasance suitably unhinged as
a psychiatrist only marginally less crazy than his murderous patient while in
her first screen role, Jamie Lee Curtis perfect as the strong, soft-spoken
babysitter turned Amazon (face it geekboys, without this movie there wouldn’t
have been a Ripley) and P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis are solid and natural as
her doomed friends. The script by
director Carpenter and producer and long-time collaborator Debra Hill is tight and economical, the
cinematography by the now legendary Dean Cundey is lush and mouthwatering, virtually
spoiling Steadicam for everyone who came after and the score by Carpenter is still
deliciously creepy.
A
supremely well-crafted, sleek, stylish, efficient engine of terror made by a visionary
filmmaker at the top of his game (and make no mistake, in the ‘70s and ‘80s,
Carpenter was touched by genius) long before Hollywood cut his balls off, Halloween is as damn near perfect as
horror movies get. Go see it this
weekend - as the Sheriff tells Laurie: “It's Halloween, everyone's entitled to
one good scare.”
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Horror
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 31
minutes
Certificate:
18
Rating:
UK
Release Date:
Friday
26th October
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