Halloween (1978)

Directed by John Carpenter

Viewed on Shudder

 

Just watch the movie. I know it’s good. You know it’s good. Surely everyone has to know about how great the original is, even if they’re not aware of the cultural and historical significance of it. Halloween wasn’t the first slasher movie, as Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out a few years earlier, but it did serve to solidify many of the tropes that would appear in slasher films for years to come. Things like masked killers stalking young women at home or using a kitchen knife as a murder implement would emerge as common traits for newer slashers. I can’t say with confidence that Halloween was the FIRST to do those things, but the film’s financial success and popularity certainly helped to popularize these things amongst filmmakers who were influenced by Halloween, whether to create an original idea that borrowed elements of the film or just to create ripoffs, of which there were many. I could go on all day talking about how influential this movie is, but instead let’s examine what it was that made Halloween so successful and see if it still holds up today!

What is really interesting about Halloween is that the part of the movie that so many imitators tried to copy, the story of a killer stalking and murdering young women at their homes, is one of the weaker parts of the movie. It’s not at all bad, it’s just that what makes Halloween so great isn’t in its plotlines, but in other aspects of filmmaking that I don’t often discuss as much as I should. We’ll get to those strengths in a moment, but let’s go over the plot briefly. In 1963, a young woman is murdered in her home and the killer, a young boy, is sent to a mental institution. Almost fifteen years to the day later, he breaks out of the institution and returns to his hometown, being pursued by his doctor. After he returns to Haddonfield, he begins to murder young people on Halloween night while his doctor attempts to stop him. That is a really basic plot, but it works incredibly well for this film because the real stars of this movie are the music and the cinematography, and more complex storylines or characters may have distracted from this. What the plot does do exceedingly well though, is get across the major themes of the movie quickly and convincingly, setting up the basic plot as being a bit smarter than it seems at first glance.

These themes are worked into the dialogue early on and in a pretty clever way, which is that while being driven to the institution by a nurse, Dr. Loomis explains to her what he plans to do regarding the upcoming court hearing of Michael, the child who committed the previously mentioned murder. Loomis in no uncertain terms explains that Michael, who he refers to as ‘it,’ is a being of inexplicable evil and that there is no chance of ever treating his condition. An initial reaction that many, including myself when I first saw the scene, might have would be to dismiss such hyperbole as being unfitting for a medical professional, but that ties into another theme that I will get to momentarily. What is truly frightening about this creature, who is referred to as The Shape in the credits and will be referred to by me as that for the rest of this review, is that its nature quickly proves Loomis correct.

Once the two drive up to the institution they quickly realize that something isn’t right when they see people in hospital gowns wandering around outside. Loomis goes to investigate, but The Shape acts quickly, stealing the car and driving away. This may raise some questions like, how could The Shape know how to drive a car after being institutionalized for fifteen years? That’s a good question, and it is answered indirectly a bit later in the movie, when Laurie is in class learning about different interpretations of fate and how it applies to real life. Specifically they discuss the idea that fate is not a concept that applies only to religion, but to all aspects of life, and that is where the two themes meet. In this world, evil is a palpable force, not a concept or something born out of disagreements of philosophy, and in that same sense it is guided by the forces of fate. How did The Shape know how to drive that car and get to Haddonfield? The answer is: because it had to. In order to get the wheels of fate turning, The Shape had to know how to drive that car and had to know how to get where it was going. I suspect this would seem corny to general audiences today, but The Shape existing as this instrument of the evils of the world is something that I find really unsettling. There’s nothing ever explicitly supernatural that happens, but The Shape’s actions feel guided and calculated, breaking into a hardware store to get supplies, murdering a man on the highway to get more unassuming clothes, etc. All of these actions involved an obscene precision that follows through to all the murders The Shape commits.

But these concepts alone don’t make the movie tense or frightening, the two factors that do that are the score and the cinematography. Explaining how the score enhances the tense atmosphere of Halloween seems almost pointless, just go look up the theme for the original Halloween and listen to it. If that isn’t the most innately terrifying music in existence then I don’t know what would be scarier. This isn’t the only good piece, there are many great pieces of music in the film and they all work so well when they’re integrated with the brilliant cinematography. I’m admittedly not very good at explaining how or why music is good, but I’m going to try and be a bit more descriptive about how the film is shot.

Every shot in this movie is tense. That may be a slight exaggeration, but the atmosphere created by the combination of score and the framing of scenes is oppressive and uniform, following all the innocent folk of Haddonfield as they go about their daily lives. Part of this atmosphere comes from the misdirection of the opening sequence, where a few teens are hanging out in a house on Halloween night. This is shot with a voyeuristic edge, the shot starting from outside the house but looking in to see the actions of the people inside the house, eventually it is revealed that this was a point of view shot of young Michael Myers. This is a brilliant opening because it establishes that these kinds of shots could be from the POV of The Shape. The movie is absolutely jam-packed with shots like this, and many of these shots feature The Shape standing in the background or wandering around, just observing the things going on around town. These small details make it feel like at all times the main characters are being watched, that there is an outside force of pure evil ready at any moment to act, but it’s unclear what this force is waiting for or even hopes to accomplish.

The Shape doesn’t even really start killing until the third act, and when the kills happen they are quick and efficient, brutal but not over the top. It’s weird to talk about the acting for a character who never speaks and whose face you almost never see, but what really cements the power of The Shape as a villain is its reactions to when it kills. Whenever it kills someone it spends a few moments to look upon the body, usually while breathing heavily, as if it doesn’t know what it is looking at, like it’s trying to find something by examining the bodies. It is a very small part of the movie, but this bit really stuck out in my mind as what makes The Shape a unique slasher, and what gives the Halloween movies their flavor.

Other parts of the film hold up pretty well over time. The dialogue can be a little weak, but it’s mainly there to establish normalcy that can be shattered at any moment by the sudden intrusion of an outside evil. Jamie Lee Curtis is very good as Laurie Strode, it is easy to see how this was a breakout role for her. The only parts of the movie I would say don’t hold up as much would be some of the acting is a bit wooden, especially from one or two of Laurie’s friends but that isn’t a huge dent in an otherwise great film. Other than those things though, everything is pretty good, even the child actors, who usually are not great in movies like these, perform very naturally and are believable in their roles.

More than anything else I really admire the simplicity of this movie. How such a simple concept was taken and molded into a finely crafted horror masterpiece. Every aspect of filmmaking is kicked into overdrive to make sure that the final product shined. It’s great to see a movie that relied more on its theming and cinematography to create atmosphere and horror and while this isn’t my personal favorite slasher movie, it is definitely one of the best made slasher films, or horror films for that matter. As I said at the beginning of this review, we all know the movie is great and deserves to be watched, but it’s fun to break down exactly why movies like this work so well and have such lasting cultural impact. Definitely recommended.

 

Halloween (2018)

Directed by David Gordon Green

Viewed in Theatre

 

Please note that this is not a full review but only a First Thoughts of sorts. While I did watch the movie I saw it in theatre for a Thursday night advance screening. The atmosphere of this screening was…less than ideal. Of course you had the usual crew, people who were already in the back couple rows of the theatre when I got there early, which usually means they’re going to be loud jackasses and/or accompanied by loud children. Both were true for my screening! Also the audience clapped whenever they saw something they recognized from the Halloween franchise. Some fun moments were ruined by audience applause drowning out dialogue and music. I do plan on giving a full review but that will be a bit off because I am getting a digital copy of it when it becomes available, and I’m not sure when that will be. So I’ll do something a bit more detailed, then but for now I’ll just share my initial reaction.

On first viewing this is really a mixed bag. It seems like Blumhouse wasn’t sure exactly what to do with this reboot, whether they should change it dramatically or try to make it exactly like the original, and that’s obvious from a very meta discussion that a couple characters have at the beginning of the movie. The discussion was about how The Shape killing five or so people on its Halloween rampage wouldn’t be considered a big deal now with everything we’re aware of in the world. This seems like a discussion lifted directly from the writing room when they were trying to figure out where to go with this movie. In concept, I like the discussion but the dialogue is a bit wonky.

One thing I really didn’t like is that the movie starts with two “investigative journalists,” whose entire characters consist of giving exposition about what happened in the previous movie and what Laurie Strode has been doing since then. It felt really awkward and unnecessary, and I wish this had been handled a little smarter or shown a bit more instead of just telling us things.

This movie is stuffed to the gills with references to the original, the opening credits, certain shots, some short scenes are almost verbatim. Usually I was okay with that, especially when it served a purpose by comparing and contrasting how Laurie Strode has changed between Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018). Speaking of Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis is great and I was pretty happy whenever she was on screen. Laurie is the most interesting character here and I wish she was in more of the movie. Laurie becoming more and more like The Shape was one of the most interesting concepts of the movie, but I don’t think they followed through with it as much as they could have. The new side characters are…a mixed bag. Laurie’s family is okay but I never really loved them. Their most interesting part of the movie was to serve as kind of a reversal of something that happened in Halloween (1978) where Laurie dismisses the fears of a child who sees The Shape, he refers to it as “The Boogeyman”, but now Laurie’s family dismisses her concerns about their safety. It feels frustrating but intentionally so when this happens. On the flip side, the comic relief dad feels really out of place and weird.

The thing that annoyed me the most about the movie is that Halloween (1978) had a super unique shooting style and way of showing The Shape stalking and watching before anything would happen. This is completely abandoned in favor of a more modern approach to how horror is shot. I don’t blame them for going a different route, but it feels like a misstep for me. Now it feels like you’re watching a movie, and not like you’re seeing through the eyes of a psychopath. But the music is still really good.

Overall, I’m torn about this movie. There are things I enjoyed about it, but there are an almost even measure of things that I didn’t care for. I would have probably like this more if I were watching it alone, and it feels like I should factor that in to how much I enjoyed it. I would give Halloween (2018) a mild recommendation, don’t see it opening weekend though, because you might go into a theatre like mine, where everyone clapped when they saw something they recognized.