Halloween

Halloween
by John Carpenter

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Movie Reviews of Halloween

Movie Review: If not the best horror film, certainly the most frightening
Summary: 5 Stars

Basically _Halloween_ rethought and refitted what was then a stale genre, horror, (the genre is stale again now, mainly because it's lived off _Halloween_'s innovations for over 20 years).

Some of _Halloween_'s innovatiuons are easily recognised. One is the now-compulsory scene in which the heroine (or occasionally the hero) has dispatched the killer and leans back panting, exhausted but finally safe... Now we know, whenever we see a scene like that, that the killer is bound to sit up suddenly from the floor, the bath, the grave, etc, and have one last attempt to kill the Last Girl Alive before being defeated again, even more desperately.

These days just the sight of the heroine starting to relax is enough to put us on our guard. But when John Carpenter brought back the apparently mortally wounded Michael Myers at the end of _Halloween_ it was new, something genuinely unexpected and shocking.

Other Carpenter improvements to the genre include the newly relentless pacing. He made things happen faster, streamlining the shock delivery mechanism so that the audience has less time to relax between shocks. Watch an older horror movie and you'll see the difference; even schlock directors like William Castle take their time, excruciatingly slow compared to the faster tempo set by Carpenter. Carpenter also subverted the rhythm by which horror films deliver their shocks. Before Carpenter the experienced horror audience knew that after each scare you could be guaranteed 10 to 15 minutes of exposition and tease, with no futher surprises. Horror punches were well apart and well telegraphed. Carpenter changed that; not only was the action faster, but the scare peaks came at random and largely unpredictable moments. The audience quickly learned that there was no time in which it could relax.

Other features of this film, such as the use of movement at the edges of the frame are brilliantly well done, but there Carpenter is borrowing and adapting rather than innovating. The power of Carpenter's soundtrack is another notable feature of this film, but that is also less groundbreaking; the immediate models are Mike Oldfield's music for _The Exorcist_, and in a different sense Bernard Herrman's superb _Psycho_ score.

Some of Carpenter's other innovations are less positive. The film didn't exactly do much to increase sympathetic understanding of former psychiatric patients, but maybe we can live with that. But the vengeful and puritanical subtext in which those characters who have sex get killed, while virgins survive, is one of the slasher genre's less attractive features, and it is something that is largely taken from this film's template.

On the other hand Carpenter also pioneers the phenomenon of the Last Girl, in which evil is defeated not by the boyfriend, as in most teen horror movies made prior to _Halloween_, but by a heroic and resourceful young woman. The "last girl" (in this case a powerful performance by an astonishingly young Jamie Lee Curtis) has become a feminist icon, and a partial counter to the horror genre's general mysogyny. Carptenter also creates several genuinely likeable, ordinary-girl characters; he quite efficiently makes you care what happens to his mostly female cast.

So this is a hugely inventive and original movie, which ironically suffers because it was so influential. People who come to it after seeing its imitations (which means more or less any horror film made after 1979) may miss how radical and fresh this film was. Scenes that are cliches in films like _Scream_, _Last Summer_ and so on, are not cliches in _Halloween_: here they were _new ideas_.

In its own modest way _Halloween_ is a classic, the _Ivan the Terrible_ of horror films. It's certainly the most genuinely scary horror film I know. One reason for its scariness, compared to the usual run of horror films, is that its monster is both credibly part of everyday life and genuinely frightening. I can't raise a real shiver over a supernatural creature like a vampire, ghost or devil. Suspension of disbelief is seldom really complete; I can't take them seriously enough to be scared by them.

But an unreasonable and unreasoning nutter with a big knife is a different story; dangerous nutters are part of the real world and something genuinely frightening.

The "boogie man", Mike Myers, is a little too good at hiding, at getting from place to place, and finally at surviving being stabbed and then shot to be truly human, but in this first film it is almost always possible to give a naturalist explanation for his activities. The increasing emphasis on Myers' supernatural powers in later films may be one reason why none of the sequels are remotely as scary as this film.

Logic collapses in the later films. And the hack (no pun intended) sequel directors make up for their lack of invention and tension by pouring out gallons of the raspberry cordial instead. Frankly, not one of the sequels is worth your time, let alone your money.)

But the original is a fine, extremely well-crafted film. Other horror films, such as James Whale's _Bride of Frankenstein_, may be better films _as films_, but no other horror film is so effective _as horror_. This film is ruthlessly and effectively terrifying.

Cheers!

Laon

Summary of Halloween