Halloween
Dir. John Carpenter
Fifteen years after brutally murdering his sister on Halloween night, mentally deranged Michael Myers escapes from the psychiatric hospital where he was incarcerated. With his psychiatrist hot on his heels, Myers makes his way back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, with the express intention of committing more murders. On Halloween night he sets his sights on several teenaged babysitters, stalking and slaying them one by one…
After being impressed by Assault on Precinct 13, producer Irwin Yablans approached director John Carpenter with an idea for a low-budget horror film about a maniac who stalks babysitters. Tentatively titled The Babysitter Murders, the project appealed to Carpenter, who along with producer Debra Hill scripted the story. After it was suggested they set the story during the course of one night, Carpenter and Hill decided upon Halloween, with its rich history and spooky connotations.
With a measly budget of $300,000 and a tight shooting schedule of 21 days, the newly-titled Halloween began filming in various locations in California (standing in for Illinois).
In one of the many deliberate nods to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Carpenter cast actress Jamie Lee Curtis, as he thought it would be fun and interesting to menace the off-screen real-life daughter of the original slasher film victim; Janet Leigh, whose death in the shower of a creepy motel back in 1960 signalled the arrival of the slasher film. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were approached to play Dr Loomis but the part eventually went to Donald Pleasence.
Furthering the surprisingly coy and reflexive sense of humour the film boasts, several characters are named after characters from Psycho and they watch The Thing From Another World on TV – a movie about a sanctuary coming under attack from a seemingly unstoppable killer (and a film Carpenter was eying up to remake later in his career).
The stylistic techniques and plot elements of Halloween were pretty groundbreaking at the time - and while the film can’t lay claim to actually initialising them (it owes a dept to and borrows from earlier titles such as Psycho, Peeping Tom, Black Christmas, Deep Red and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), it still utilised them in an original way and laid out the blueprint for later slashers, solidifying the subgenre’s conventions.
• A masked/unidentified killer with connections to a past event or misdeed
• A group of teens in an isolated location
• Phones/cars that have a nasty habit of not working when they’re needed most
• Ineffective police/authority/adult figures
• Drug/alcohol use
• Characters having premarital sex
• Characters’ splitting up to look for other characters/investigate strange noises, usually in creepy woods or in dark basements.
• The use of knives or other sharp implements as murder weapons – killers in slashers prefer the thrill of the chase and the intimacy afforded by killing victims up close and personal with a knife.
• There is almost always one young woman (the ‘final girl’), usually the one who doesn't have sex or indulge in drugs/alcohol, who is left standing after her friends have been bumped-off by the killer. She must use her resourcefulness to escape and stop the killer.
• The way is always left open for a sequel, should your slasher movie be successful.
With back to basics plotting and structure, Carpenter ensures maximum tension is extracted from his deceptively minimalist approach and manages to create moments of nail-biting tension, suggestive chills and an unnervingly creepy atmosphere punctuated with shrill jump-moments throughout. POV camerawork a la Black Christmas and Deep Red implicate us as viewers in the onscreen violence and align our vision with that of the killer’s. The opening scene is shot completely from the unseen killer’s perspective. Carpenter makes expert use of the still quite fledgling Steadicam, and we seem to float, wraith-like through an empty house on Halloween night, up the stairs to stab a young woman to death. While appearing to happen all in one take, there are actually three discreet cuts in this sequence. The camera also pulls back from the reveal of the killer as a young boy as though shocked with what it has seen.
Much of the film follows the teenaged girls as they go about their daily routines, completely oblivious to the danger they are in. Tension mounts and is punctuated at regular intervals with well timed jump moments. Establishing the sheltered, routine-led, mundane lives of the main characters as they plan their evening, telephone each other and watch old horror films on TV, helps the audience to identify with them. The three young women are relatable, likable and ordinary, and the dynamics of their friendship bring humour and relief from the ever quietly mounting tension. Their friendship and likeableness ensure the shocking fates they encounter have an incredible impact on the viewer. The cosy and homely spaces they inhabit throughout the film perfectly convey their sheltered lives. When these havens are invaded by Myers, the effect is chilling to the core: once secure and safe homes become threatening, with danger potentially lurking in every shadow, behind every piece of comfortable furniture.
Halloween is a fairly bloodless film – there is a distinct lack of graphic violence and gore, as Carpenter prefers to illicit chills and suspense rather than utilise gross-out special effects. Many of the slashers that would come in the wake of Halloween (including its own sequels) opted to go all out with gore and blood, instead of slow-burning tension and unease. The onscreen violence is pared down and comes in short sharp shocks until the climax when Laurie is pitted against Myers. Most of the creepiness and moments of spine-tingling dread comes of course from the frequent glimpses of Myers, AKA The Shape. There is something unbelievably chilling about that blank, moon-white face slowly emerging, phantom-like from the darkness, and hovering just out of the sightline of the oblivious characters.
Making wonderful use of his widescreen frame, Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey utilise the foreground and periphery of the screen to create tension and atmosphere. The presence of The Shape, indeed even the mere threat of his presence, is enough to render any previously cosy domestic space or autumnal leafy suburb, a now creepy, dangerous place, saturated with menace. Carpenter’s expert use of widescreen and his placing of The Shape just on the periphery of many shots - lurking in the shadows and corners of the screen - is more than enough to generate unease, the threat of violence and set hearts pounding… Indeed even when he appears to Laurie (Curtis) in broad daylight, his presence obviously doesn't belong in cosy suburbia - his eerie menace juxtaposed with familiar settings, and in broad daylight, is positively haunting. It isn’t what The Shape does in these shots that make proceedings so creepy, but what he doesn’t do. Anything. He just stands there.
Although it was accused of misogyny, various critics such as Carol J Clover have argued that Halloween, with its strong and resourceful final girl Laurie Strode, actually presented an eventually empowered young woman. While Laurie still depends on Dr Loomis to come to her rescue, she puts up a damn good fight and holds her own until he does. His attempts to stop Myers are arguably more ineffective than Laurie’s. Much has also been made of Halloween’s seemingly conservative morality, and the ‘sex equals death’ mantra it appears to exhibit would feature in pretty much every slasher movie that came afterwards. Carpenter denies deliberately creating this conservative morality and insists Halloween is not a morality play. Interestingly he once stated that it wasn’t Laurie’s virginity or purity that helped her survive, but her pent up frustration. The weapons she uses to defend herself against Myers’ attacks are everyday household items – items linked with domesticity and possessing distinct connotations of ‘homemaking’: a knitting needle, a coat-hanger and a kitchen knife.
One of Carpenter’s stipulations for directing the film was that he could score it too. His typically minimalist score is one of horror’s most recognisable and chilling signature pieces. It lurks somewhere between Psycho’s frenzied and shrill jabbing and Jaws’ ominous rumbling.
Halloween still stands the test of time and remains a thoroughly unsettling, suspenseful and haunting film to this day – ensuring its rightful status as a classic of the genre. Like all good horror films, it makes the viewer feel unsafe in their very own home.
