In 1978, a young B-movie director named John Carpenter set out to make a ruthless, shocking thrill-ride of a film. He succeeded. The resulting film, originally titled The Babysitter Murders was Halloween, the most successful indie production of its time. Launching lead actress Jamie Lee Curtis to stardom, Halloween changed the face of horror forever. Carpenter became a cult legend but never reached this level of brilliance again (though he came close with The Thing).While not the first slasher film ever made (1974’s Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got there first), Halloween set the template for all those to follow, producing seven dispensable sequels, a remake and countless imitators including A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Frankenstein is generally cited as the most important horror movie ever made, but Halloween is a close second - and much, much scarier.The movie begins in 1963. In a stunning POV sequence, we witness the opening through the eyes of six-year-old Michael Myers as he brutally murders his teenage sister before being discovered by his parents. Fifteen years later, the grown-up Michael (credited as The Shape, played by Nick Castle) escapes from the asylum he was placed in and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, where he sets his sights on seventeen-year-old Laurie (Curtis) and her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (PJ Soles), while his psychiatrist, Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance) attempts to track him down before he can kill again. That’s all there is in terms of story, and that’s all that’s needed, with any additional plot points dismissed as distractions from the thrills and removed. Carpenter was never good with long dramatic stories, but what he lacks in complexity he makes up for with masterful execution.Haddonfield itself is as perfect a setting as could possibly be found. It appears to be an average suburban town, but there’s something missing: people. Where is everybody? Why are the streets so empty in the middle of the day. Why does no one respond to Laurie’s screams, which could surely be heard from a mile away? Looking back on the movie, it’s striking how distanced the houses seem from each other. Dean Cundey’s cinematography and Carpenter’s brooding score come together beautifully to create a sense of total isolation, emphasising that the characters’ torments are theirs alone, and nobody can save them but themselves.Perhaps Halloween’s most frightening asset is the complete lack of reason behind Michael’s killings. Describing his former patient to Haddonfield’s dangerously stupid sheriff (Charles Cyphers), Loomis concludes that he is quite simply evil incarnate. “Death has come to your little town”, he states at one point, and the movie seems to have been built around this theme. The fear of death is a driving force behind all horror films, but few have tapped into this fear as efficiently as Carpenter does here. Laurie and her friends are prime examples of ordinary people living out their lives, unaware of the massacre to come. Haddonfield itself, an idyllic suburban town as opposed to the haunted houses and abandoned lodges of other horrors, becomes a metaphor for everyday life, Michael the X-factor ready to end it all at a moment’s notice. The main characters are frequently viewed at a distance with Michael at the edge of the frame, threatening to become its centre, to wipe out everything else.In the closing shots, the supposedly dead Michael vanishes into thin air, and his signature heavy breathing is heard over images of the now desolate places he has visited. Except it is no longer Michael Myers we are hearing. It is the Shape, the boogeyman, Death itself, impossible to pin down physically, lurking on every street corner and inside every house, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Scary stuff indeed.
