Halloween (1978)

“I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall. Looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off.” – Dr. Sam Loomis

Imagine this.

It’s February 1981. Way before the internet. Way before I bought my first VHS recorder to start my lifelong obsession with collecting films – that was still eighteen months away. I’m at home, and there’s a film about to be shown after the 10:00 news. All I immediately know about this film is that I’ve seen a still from the movie in an issue of Starburst, showing a girl, presumably dead, laid out on a bed, with her gravestone leaning against the headboard. But hey, it’s a horror movie so I’m going to watch it. That movie was Halloween. And it would lead 20-year-old me down the path of slasher movies by introducing me to a whole new sub-genre of horror. And it does this with a ridiculously small amount of blood shown on screen, which just goes to prove there’s more to horror than gore and graphic injury detail. This is a perfect example of understated horror, breaking new ground for its time and relying more on a strong directorial style rather than the loud startle beloved these days by less creative directors.

Halloween was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was a low budget film, which was common for horror movies up to (and past) this point. But the shocks and menace it delivered with its simple storyline were something on a whole new scale. It immediately became my all-time favourite horror movie, breaking new ground by defying the usual horror tropes. It’s fair to say, though that the sheer glut of slasher films that followed it, many of which I covered during the spring and summer of this year have made the genre into a cliché. But this is the film that started it – unless you count Hitchcock’s Psycho which really began the trend back in 1960.

For me, the unease began as soon as the tiles did, with director John Carpenter’s nerve jarring theme music as the camera closes in on a carved Halloween pumpkin, and we find ourselves in the smallish town of Haddonfield, Illinois on the evening of Halloween 1963. We’re out in the suburbs as a young couple are watched entering a house and go upstairs. This is a point of view shot. We’re there, watching them. We enter the house through the kitchen stopping to put on a clown mask and pick up a large kitchen knife from a drawer. We watch from a darkened front room as the young man leaves – and we go upstairs. The girl is semi dressed, and combing her hair at her dressing table as we quietly approach and we start slashing at her with the knife. Mercilessly, we hack. Then, we leave. We go downstairs and out through the front door, as we’re approached by a man and a woman and our mask is removed. Cut to a shot that reveals the killer to be a child, who has just butchered his older sister and has been stopped outside, still clutching the bloodstained knife, by his parents.

I’ve taken a while to describe this scene in detail because it’s so outstandingly good and effective and the payoff is just exquisite. We haven’t just witnessed a murder, as you do in just about any horror movie – we’re complicit. It was OUR point of view. We were there. We did it! And the payoff of this not being a masked adult, murdering young girls – but a kid of around six, slaying his own sister while wearing a cute trick or treat clown costume? When I saw this for the first time, it was just chill after chill after chill. Okay my many (and I mean MANY) repeated screenings of Halloween have of course dampened the chills by sheer familiarity, but my admiration of the sheer directorial skill in the handling of this sequence has never dampened.

In the next scene, it’s October 30th 1978 and on a stormy night, Doctor Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and his nurse, Marion Chambers are on their way to the Smiths Grove Sanatorium where the kid has been incarcerated all these years. Saying nothing. Barely moving. The kid, now adult Michael Myers is due to attend a hearing that might see him released. Loomis wants to prevent this, seeing Myers as pure evil. But he’s too late, the inmates are outside, wandering in the rain and Myers uses the doctor and nurse’s car to escape. Like a timer has suddenly woken him up – he’s heading back to Haddonfield to finish what he started.

October 31st and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a high school student on her way to school. Dropping some keys at the deserted old Myers house for her realtor father on her way to school, she’s unaware that she’s being watched by Michael Myers. Who then follows her around for the rest of the day. It’s incredible how many scenes he’s there in the background without you realising unless you watch the film like a crazily obsessed person (yeah, guilty).

Local lawman Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) dismisses Loomis’ crazy notions that Myers is on his way back – if he isn’t already there. His daughter Nancy (Nancy Loomis) is a friend of Laurie’s and they’ll be babysitting in adjacent houses that evening. Another of their friends is the ditzy cheerleader Linda (P.J. Soles) who’ll be along during the evening in a non-babysitting capacity.

Loomis is searching for any sign of Myers, so he visits the cemetery to see if there are any clues at Myers’ sister’s grave. The graveyard attendant tells him this story;

“Yeah, you know every town has something like this happen... I remember over in Russellville, old Charlie Bowles, about fifteen years ago... One night, he finished dinner, and he excused himself from the table. He went out to the garage, and got himself a hacksaw. Then he went back into the house, kissed his wife and his two children goodbye, and then he proceeded to...”

I have ALWAYS wanted to know the end, but the story is cut off when they see that poor Judith Myers’ headstone is missing. But damn…what did old Charlie do? I need to know. Back in the day, again 1981 or 82, I bought the novelisation of the film, and that didn’t finish Charlie’s story either, (damn it).

So as evening descends, Laurie and Nancy are babysitting, Linda and her boyfriend are waiting to use one of the houses the others are at…for other purposes as soon as they can. Nobody but us knows that Myers is lurking in the background. In fact, we don’t realise how many times he’s actually there until he moves which just racks up the tension.

Nancy is the first to go, strangled in her car, from the back seat as she’s headed to see her boyfriend, having just handed off her young charge to good girl Laurie. Meanwhile Linda and her boyfriend go to the now empty house – empty apart from Myers – and become the next victims.

The kids are watching a monster movie marathon consisting of The Thing from Another World (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Crazy coincidence that I was watching this in ’81, as director John Carpenter was working on his remake of The Thing (1982)

Laurie is getting wary of Nancy having been gone for quite some time, and decides to go over to the house, seeing Linda’s boyfriend’s van parked outside. Also, the annoying kid she’s watching keeps mentioning seeing the boogieman outside. And to be honest, Myers’ appearance is un-nerving. Remember, this is pre-Jason and his hockey mask. Myers wears blue overalls and a slightly customised full-head rubber “Captain Kirk” mask from the Don Post “Star Trek” range with the eye holes enlarged and the skin painted a silvery white. It’s amazing how effective it is. Anyhow, Laurie makes the tactical error of entering the house, as all good girls in slasher movies must. BUT – and I emphasise this, this film is where the template was struck, and I had never seen anything like it. Nor had anyone else to this point.

She discovers the bodies. Nancy is laid out on the bed, with Judith Myers’ gravestone, Linda is crumpled up in a wardrobe and her boyfriend is somehow hung upside down. Shock after shock, and to cap it all, Myers suddenly looms into view behind her and attacks. She’s cut, but not fatally wounded. Laurie escapes the house which leads to my all-time favourite scene in a horror film for its sheer subtle power to un-nerve.

A hysterical Laurie runs into the street, screaming and yelling for help but nobody opens their doors to her. Making her way back to the house where the kids are, she frantically knocks the door for the kids to let her in, and we see Myers walking behind her, casually. She’s panic stricken, understandably – he’s so confident that he’s going to kill her, he’s in no hurry. I find that sheer unrelenting homicidal calm to be more frightening than anything else, certainly worse than anything I had seen up to then.

Once inside, Laurie locks the door and takes a breath before realising there’s a window open and Myers lunges at her. She defends herself with a knitting needle and heads upstairs to get the kids out of the house. He’s right there after her, which leads to another memorable scene. After defending herself again, she leaves Myers for dead, and tells the kids to run for help. Behind her we see Myers sit up slowly and turn his head to where she is, as if he has some kind of homing beacon on Laurie. It’s the smallest of gestures but again, conveys so much menace.

The kids run out, screaming and bump into Loomis, who arrives just in time to fire a slew of bullets into Myers as he has Laurie cornered. Staggering backwards, he falls from the first-floor veranda. Loomis looks from above and sees Myers body on the lawn and we collectively heave a sigh of relief.

Laurie asks if Myers was the boogieman, Loomis replies simply; “As a matter of fact, it was” before taking one more look…

… and Myers has gone.

Seriously, he’s been stabbed several times by Laurie, he’s taken seven bullets from Loomis, he’s fallen around 25 feet, now he’s up and walked away! We see various location where he has been during the movie, with the sound of his breathing, muffled by the mask – and the credits roll.

Until that February night in 1981, every horror movie I had seen had the protagonist, be it the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, Werewolf, Mummy, ghosts, Norman Bates whatever – the threat of the piece, either killed off at the end or incarcerated. The story was done, the threat was incapacitated and no longer a threat. Okay, they might (and often did) return in a sequel or two or three – but the audience went home happy and safe. Secure that the story was over.

Myers was still out there! The audience weren’t allowed by John Carpenter to go home happy. He was still out there, somewhere. At liberty to kill.

I had never seen anything like it in a horror film.

Rarely is a horror film this effective on just about every level, made on a shoestring budget with this level of precision and skill. From the location filming to the un-nerving musical score, to Carpenter’s use of a Panaglide camera to ensure smooth, continuous shots from low angles as we enter the house (you’re always more vulnerable, psychologically from a low angle) to the sheer quirkiness of Donald Pleasance to the ordinariness of would-be victim Laurie Strode, everything about it makes this still, 42 years later, my favourite horror film of all time.