Classic Chat: Halloween (1978)
John Carpenter’s argument that babysitters deserve hazard pay is still the supreme slasher.
Babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) contemplating asking for a raise in John Carpenter’s Halloween.
What’s Halloween About?
On Halloween Night, six-year-old Michael Myers goes to the kitchen, grabs a butcher knife, and calmly walks upstairs to murder his big sister Judith. No one can explain the massacre, no one knows what to do with Michael, who shows no remorse. So, they lock him away.
Fifteen years later, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is rushing to the mental hospital to escort Michael to a court hearing. He wants to make sure Michael never gets out of the institution. But he’s too late. Michael has escaped and is heading back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois.
On Halloween, Dr. Loomis arrives in Haddonfield to find a dismissive sheriff and a town not prepared for Michael Myers.
Meanwhile, teen Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is preparing for a night of babysitting with her friends. It should be a boring night, but she keeps glimpsing a weird guy in a mask throughout the day. Is she being paranoid? Or is her quiet night of pumpkin carving about to go very wrong?
Why is Halloween a Classic?
While a story about babysitters stalked by a menacing killer doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary on its surface, Halloween managed to not only set the standard for just about every slasher film that followed it but also remains a stone-cold classic. The movie is a perfect example of low-budget filmmaking at its best — finding creative and artistic solutions to budgetary restrictions.
Director John Carpenter had to reduce the size and scope of his original script. Halloween was originally to take place over several nights with more varied locations. When Carpenter saw his budget, he and co-writer Debra Hill (who got to play Michael Myers in a few shots!) streamlined the script, making the lion’s share of the action take place over one night. Carpenter and Hill also worked to their strengths as they crafted the shooting script, with Hill writing the dialogue for the teenage girls while Carpenter focused on Loomis’ speeches.
Director of photography Dean Cundey was also challenged with a restricted lighting budget. To get around it, he used low lighting to his advantage. Halloween uses dark frames to keep the audience guessing. Entering a scene is like squinting into a dark room, slowly your eyes (and Cundey’s lights) adjust, allowing you to perceive more.
While Black Christmas and Peeping Tom pioneered the killer POV shot, Halloween has one of the most famous examples of the technique, and one that has inspired countless films that came after. The opening of Halloween is a long POV sequence. Cundey and Carpenter make the sequence look like one continuous shot — see if you can spot the cut, it’s trickier than you think — as Michael stalks through his first kill. Though the sequence feels familiar to a modern audience, it was groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, however, no matter how many times the sequence has been recreated Carpenter’s original is still creepy as hell.
And Carpenter was focused on creepy rather than bombastic carnage in Halloween. After going through a censorship nightmare with the release of Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter chose to pull back on the gore. While there’s plenty of death in Halloween, the actual blood and guts are fairly restrained. To build tension without building the ire of censors, Carpenter sought inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s tension-building tactics. He draws out the threat of Michael, making the audience wonder where he’ll pop up. Like Hitchcock, he utilizes the foreground of the frames, keeping victims front and center while Michael skirts through backgrounds. This keeps you scanning the frame, looking for Michael, and anticipating him lurking in every dark corner.
Carpenter also took some direct inspiration from Psycho. Doctor Sam Loomis shares his name with Marion’s lover in Psycho. And Marion herself shows up in the form of Loomis’ nurse. Then, of course, there is his leading lady, Jamie Lee Curtis, who is the daughter of Psycho star Janet Leigh.
And while Carpenter admired Hitchcock’s Psycho he deviated from the Master of Suspense’s formula when crafting the killer for Halloween.
The reason Michael is so scary is because there is no real reason behind his actions. Michael is evil. He doesn’t feel. He doesn’t even get angry. He just kills. There’s no reason for it because Michael, unlike a sad creature like Norman Bates, isn’t broken — he’s functioning exactly as he’s supposed to. Michael Myers is the personification of evil, which is why Carpenter referred to him as “The Shape” in the script and the credits. You cannot reason with evil. You can’t intimidate it. And most importantly, you can’t kill evil.
So while Laurie can stab Michael, Loomis can shoot him, and Michael can be thrown from a second-floor balcony, at the end of the day he’ll get up and keep going. Evil doesn’t die — certainly not tonight and definitely not in a car crusher (yes, I’m still bitter about that) — the best you can hope for is to escape its pull.
Verdict
A classic from start to finish, there’s no better movie to watch on the 31st of October.
