I imagine that I will be watching a lot of horror this month, so I figured I would start spooky season off right by revisiting Halloween (1978).
This is one of the first horror movies I can remember watching. The image of Michael Myers effortlessly lifting Bob (John Micheal Graham) into the air, pinning him to the wall with a knife, and then just standing there, examining his work, is seared into my brain for life. The rest of the kills are comparatively low-key in this first installment, with Michael resorting to strangulation more often than his iconic oversized knife. Regardless of the method, Myers is one of the few slasher antagonists who I genuinely find creepy, even frightening.
The movie opens with a long POV shot from Michael's perspective (although the POV is situated much higher than where 6 year old Mikey's actual eyeballs should be) as he covertly observes his sister canoodling with her boyfriend. The boyfriend leaves, discarding a halloween mask on the floor as he does so, which Michael retrieves as he slowly, inexorably approaches his nude sister in her room, knife in hand. The murder is quick, and not that flashy, but the first-person POV and the reveal that the killer is this tiny little blonde-headed boy still make for an effective shock.
Fifteen Years pass, and we are introduced to Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), Michael Myers' psychiatrist during his long incarceration. Loomis does not fuck around. He spends the entire runtime telling anyone who will listen that Michael is pure, inhuman evil, even referring to him as 'it' until asked to do otherwise. It's almost hilarious how little this film does to establish Loomis as an actual doctor who cares about his patients. He's completely right in this case, but I like to imagine him strolling the halls of the asylum, hunting down evil like a modern day Van Helsing of the infirm, blowing away any patients who get a little jumpy with his concealed revolver. In all seriousness though, Pleasance is great, and the speeches he gives throughout the film are an irreplaceable component of this film's perfect formula.
Our true protagonist however, is Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first role on screen. Laurie is a bookish teenager, just trying to navigate high-school, the homecoming dance, and her two friends, who are the worst people alive. Lynda (PJ Soles) is an obnoxious mean-girl type, and Annie (Nancy Kyes) is oversexed to the point of child endangerment. Laurie, by contrast, comes off as chaste and moral without making her a completely sexless figure. She pines for boys, and seeks a more lively social life, but she's also serious about her studies, and committed to being a good babysitter, unlike the other two who took the jobs just to have someone else' house to get laid in. I'm not sure if this is the absolute origin of the trope, but certainly nearly all subsequent slashers ran with the virginal Final Girl outliving her more promiscuous friends, with sexual frustration even being the explicit motivation behind several of the iconic baddies.
The plot kicks off with Michael Myers making his escape from the mental hospital where he is held, on the eve of some kind of parole hearing. I distinctly remember wondering 'How does he know how to drive?' for years after seeing this for the first time, and I was pleasantly surprised to note that there is actually a line of dialogue lampshading this later on in the film.
Michael returns to Haddonfield Illinois, the sleepy midwestern town (depicted quite convincingly by a California suburb strewn with fake leaves) where he killed his sister all those years before. He catches a glimpse of Laurie as she drops off a key to the old Myers' house for her dad, a realtor. It's not clear why Laurie becomes the object of his fixation. When I was a kid I though that she was also Michael's sister somehow, and that he was back to finish the job, but no, she's just the first person he sees while we're seeing from his POV. Regardless of his motivation, he begins a campaign of stalking, following Laurie around town in his stolen car, silently staring, and disappearing as soon as she blinks.
Michael also seems interested in Tommy, the little boy that Laurie babysits, watching him for a while after he is bullied by other children, whom Michael completely ignores. In this installement at least (my memory is hazy on the larger franchise) Michael never actually targets children, despite this one lingering shot of him observing Tommy. My impression is that Michael recognizes something of himself in Tommy. Maybe Michael was bullied at a young age too? In any case, the ambiguity of his intentions all throughout are a big driver of the tension. Michael never speaks. He doesn't explain his motivations, or curse in frustration as his victim slips away. He's an enigma, and that's a big part of his draw.
The real action begins once the sun has set and All-Hallows-Eve has begun in earnest. Michael tails Laurie and Annie to their babysitting gigs, watching silently all the while. Annie and her charge, Lindsey, don't seem to get along nearly as well as Laurie and Tommy, and Annie eventually pawns Lindsey off to Laurie so she can go get laid. This will be her final mistake. Later, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob show up to the now-empty house where Annie had been, and proceed to shag and toss beer cans all over the place, until Michael decides he's seen enough and mounts Bob to the pantry doors. Lynda meets her end at the hands of a telephone cord, while Laurie listens on, thinking it's a prank call.
Disturbed by the glimpses of unusual activity that she's been getting all day, Laurie decides to go investigate, and hopefully find her friends. She does, but arranged in a macabre display including the stolen gravestone of Judith Myers, Michael's first victim. This is the first indication that we get that Michael has anything at all going on upstairs beyond a drive to kill. He is clearly doing something that makes sense to his permanently warped six-year-old psychology, but is utterly incomprehensible to Laurie, Loomis, or anyone else.
The climax is fantastic, with stunts, and fake-outs, and a great split-second reveal of Michael's face (portrayed by Tony Moran. The Shape, as Myers is referred to in the script, is played by the incredible Nick Castle, who also portrayed the Beach Ball alien in Carpenter's Dark Star) that drives home how little there is underneath the mask. Loomis is right, there isn't really a person in there, the mask is who Michael is, and when that mask is dislodged momentarily, Michael doesn't know how to react. The film ends with Loomis blowing Michael away with his revolver, after Myers has already been stabbed in the eye and the chest (at one point, after Laurie believes she has killed Myers with his own knife, he does the slow sit-up thing that The Undertaker always did in the ring, and I just now understood where he got it from. It's an incredible shot.). There is the barest moment of respite, and then, horribly, Michael is just gone. The nightmare isn't over, even if the film is.
Jamie-Lee Curtis does an absolutely outstanding job in her first role, and this movie would be worth remembering just for her. The fact that it also gave us one of the most memorable Horror villains of all time, who is still being depicted in new films to this day, is a credit to John Carpenter. His script, his score, and his direction come together to create something that isn't quite an exploitation film (despite wearing the trappings proudly) and isn't quite a traditional slasher (because this is the film that inspired the genre-codifiers like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street) but is instead a brutally effective tale of terror that I am always happy to revisit.
Halloween rates 5/5 stars. There are places where the finished product could have used more polish, but there is no denying how effective this is as a horror film, or how important it became to the genre. If you've never seen it, this is as good a time as any!