John Carpenter's Halloween

Yesterday I returned to this blog.  Yesterday I made an entry about returning to this blog.  Yesterday I made an entry to say that I was doing a month long horror marathon.  Yesterday I said that today I would put up an entry about John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Today I began that entry talking about yesterday.

Do you want a plot synopsis?  I’ll give you a basic plot synopsis.  A man breaks out of a mental institution, dresses up like janitor William Shatner, stalks some teenagers, makes them scream bloody murder...all while Donald Pleasance chases after him.  That sounds about right.

I do not know where to start so I’m going to do a cannonball into my love for this film by first stating that I am a fan of horror and a fan of John Carpenter.  The majority of all of the Carpenter films that I’ve seen have a feeling, an aesthetic, that pleases me.  The aesthetic gets me into the movie.  Assault on Precinct Thirteen, Christine, Ghosts of Mars, Vampires...they way he gets certain things to look in each film understands me perfectly.

There are two exceptional aspects to the original Halloween film.  The first part of this combination is the score.  This is what many people remember the most about Halloween, aside from “the shape”, also known as Michael Myers.  It is difficult to describe any sort of music through text.  Hearing it is the only way to fully understand and experience what I would be trying to and failing to describe.  The score builds throughout each scene and ultimately the movie helping to signify the terror that is being experienced by the main characters.  This is what a score should be able to do and what many horror films are somehow incapable of doing.  Halloween was nearly pitch perfect with the music.

The other characteristic of the film that helped to raise it above many of its contemporaries was the camerawork.  John Carpenter was not afraid to have the camera not move.  You look at many films which come out today and you get camera movement and quick cutting all over the place.  In Halloween, the camera will sit still for ten seconds as Michael Myers slowly comes out of the darkness behind Laurie Strode, the main character of the film.  Why do I find this to aid the film in any way?  The impact of cutting a shot into three or four different shots is much different than the impact of a motionless camera.  If the camera were moving you would focus a little bit more on the movement as opposed to the tense situation unfolding before your eyes.

Donald Pleasance is pretty awesome in Halloween, right?  Yeah.  That’s all.  I just Chris Farley Showed that one.

There’s one plot point I want to bring up solely as a thought. I, personally, believe that this plot point helps to make the first Halloween more terrifying than any of the sequels or the two remakes.  In the non-television version of the first film, there is no mention of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers being brother and sister.  None at all.  If it were a standalone film, which it was when it was first created, Myers was stalking some random girl and her friends, preying on them.  This is much more sinister than going after a family member and it allows you to place yourself in the main character’s predicament.  If he is going after victims at random, he could be going after you.

If I am correct in my assumption, Halloween was one of the first true slasher films.  It helped to kickstart the craze that lasted right through the eighties in series such as Friday the 13^th, Sleepaway Camp, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, and basically any other “something is picking of people one by one” films.  This is all my assumption here though.  It might bite me on the ass in people commenting.  The biggest difference between Halloween and these other series?  Blood.  Halloween had almost no blood or gore.  There was one scene where you see dead bodies and blood.  I believe that is it.  For a film about a serial killer maniac, this one does a good job of providing a tense and scary atmosphere with only a minimal amount of blood.  I need to give props to everyone working on the film for that one.

There is one glaring downside to Halloween, in my own personal opinion.  I’m not sure if she’s a bad actor or if I’m the only person irritated by her, but the friend of Laurie’s who doesn’t have sex...I don’t know the actress’s name, I think it’s Nancy Loomis...anyway, I think she was kind of terrible in the movie.  Whenever I saw her on screen her acting pissed me off.  The phone scene?  Terrible.  I don’t know how to describe it other than that.  I think it might be my problem though.

All in all, I had a great experience watching Halloween again.  It is a movie that, if I wasn’t mostly desensitized emotionally when it comes to watching stuff, would have scared me.  The music, camera work, and majority of the acting helps to build a world much like our own where terrible things such as a serial killer on the loose could happen in our back yard.  I’m excited for what the rest of the series has in store, mostly through revisits.  It shall be interesting.