John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is a seminal low-budget slasher that spawns an ever-growing horror franchise, 40 years after its genesis, as the genre’s spooky ropes become proverbial, it is inexorable that its gripping and scary quotients are considerably blunted for new audience. But since it is such a money-spinner, one of the most successful independent movie ever, so that it obtains a Teflon shield owing to its capitalist high-water mark.
One of its most innovative esthetics is the perverse use of subjective POV, prominently in the prologue, when a cold-blooded murder is seamlessly edited from the unseen executor’s chilling viewpoint on a Halloween night, with a shocking reveal that the perpetrator is a six-year-old “bad seed”.
15 years later, another Halloween day, after escaping from the sanatorium he has been incarcerated ever since, the said “bad seed” Michael Myers (Castle) is back in the sleepy town Haddonfield, Illinois, and his new target is a bookish high school girl Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her two more world-savvy friends Lynda (Soles) and Annie (Kyes), the ensuing suspense is conjured up by rote, and Carpenter archly teases us when and how Myers’ unwitting victims will meet their makers, and knowingly refrains from producing a gory fest, blood is rarely shed, and everything looks more sinister under the Stygian lighting and Panavision expansion, in a forlorn suburbia, all Carpenter needs is two houses across each other and a thickset, silent man wearing a white mask to give audience the creeps we are craving for.
The usual trappings of the genre, like gratuitous nudity, misogynist whiff, teenager lust and angst, are all prescribed in right dosage, plus the moral yardstick, Laurie is the final girl mostly because she is not sexed up like her two ill-fated friends, yet amidst the ludicrousness of screaming, panicking and stabbing, it is rather bathetic she doesn’t emerge eventually as the savior herself (she has to leave the sharp knife beside a seemingly unconscious Myers not once but twice, turns her back to him and weep instead), it is a man who comes to her rescue in the person of Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasence), Myers’ psychiatrist, ok, baby steps, a heroine’s self-making would run through the entire franchise for our scream queen Ms. Curtis, sinking her teeth in her very first movie.
As yours truly sees it, HALLOWEEN’s undimmed renown is more rooted in that it is a de facto exemplar of shoestring filmmaking that hits the jackpot, than its artistic value or cinematic flourishes, it is a no-frills, bantamweight horror/thriller, an archetypal adrenaline generator, and more than anything, bequeaths its unsettling, plonking theme strains to the posterity, invoking the eternal haunting of a creepy, preposterously bulletproof bogeyman.
referential entries: Carpenter’s THE THING (1982, 7.3/10); Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960, 9.2/10).
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