Halloween (1978) Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Charles Cyphers, P.J.Soles, Nancy Kyes, Mickey Yablans, Brian Andrews, Kyle Richards, John Michael Graham, Arthur Malet, Tony Moran, Sandy Johnson, Nick Castle, Barry Bernardi, Darla Rae, George O'Hanlon Jr.
Directed by John Carpenter.
Running Time: 91 minutes
Rating: R (Violence, Coarse Language, Nudity and Sexuality)
"You can't kill the Boogeyman!"
Insane murderer Michael Myers' escapes a sanitarium in Smith's Grove, Illinois where he has been confined for fifteen years and heads back to his nearby hometown of Haddonfield. He knifed his babysitter there when he was only six years old and hasn't said a word since.
Psychiatrist Dr.Loomis (Pleasance) follows Myers, a violentally psychotic patient whom he normally keeps hopped up on enough thorazine to make an elephant dizzy, in hopes of stopping him. The local police who have never been particularly helpful in slasher movies are of little consequence here too.
That is not to say that Myers, though soft spoken in the extreme, is a particularly easy to subdue criminal. His internal rage is so powerful and focused that it has rendered him almost superhuman. Stab him, plunge a knitting needle into his neck, hit him with five bullets, watch him fall out of a second story window and he just pops right back up again after enough time has elapsed for you to right him off as dead. Lay him down to bleed awhile and he'll rise to kill again.
You can't kill that which is repressed is the message if one is looking for deeper meaning. If one is searching for a more down to earth reason look at it this way: if the monster died that would hinder the ability to launch lucrative sequels. Yet as we've seen in other horror series like Elm Street and Friday 13th even killing the monster off doesn't mean he will stay dead if money can talk a sequel out of the owners of the franchise.
All-American girl next door Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her friends are babysitting on Halloween night in Haddonfield just in time for when Myers arrives and goes on his bloody rampage. What little we know about Myers suggests that he doesn't like babysitters and particularly those that fool around. What little we know about Myers suggests that he DOES like to express his disapproval via the use of a big kitchen knife.
What is captured here is the immaculate moment of coming of age, awakening sense of self and the unlimited possibilities presented. It is juxtaposed with the possibility of a horrific end. The collective trauma in the American subconscious of an event like Pearl Harbour or the first Kennedy assassination or 9-11 is the real life manifestation of the deep seeded foreboding that slasher films tap into mostly by accident if at all.
People in North American society are privileged for a lot of reasons though those that live here may not always act like they know it. There is always the sense that something out there could disrupt things in ways we haven't thought of and cannot readily comprehend.
Motives are of secondary importance in this genre anyway. Absence of ones based in discernible logic are of primary importance. We fear what we don't understand. It is a fear that is repressed and here it is compressed in to the motion picture in a 90 minute or so narrative. Don't overthink it.
While it is generally acknowledged that having sex often leads to death for kids in these movies, this adds a wrinkle; a character who sings horribly out of tune gets butchered quickly thereafter. Michael Myers is not an overly enthusiastic critic of music or good taste. The production team is merely playing to the crowd.
As for the ghastly murders which occur after sex acts between characters don't overthink those either. The nudity and sex is put in these initially for the same voyeuristic reason that they are put in any exploitation movie. If nothing happened afterward we would ask ourselves what it is doing in a horror film and ajudge it to have disrupted the flow. Therefore something has to happen to get us back on track and it has to mesh with the rest of the movie.
That is a prime example of how the slasher film genre has evolved over the years. The nudity and sex eventually became choreographed and timed to get an audience aroused sufficiently wherein the couple of grisly murders which usually closely follow are enough to get the heart pumping that much faster. One can ascribe misogynistic motives to this as many have.
The dialogue in this, particularly that written for the Dr.Loomis character isn't that bad but the actual narrative quite frankly is pretty forgettable up until the chilling climax amidst other lowgrade aspects of the production. Technically superior even for a film with ten times its budget the shooting script still had its flaws.
The differences between a traditional North American slasher film and an Italian (Giallo) one are in the blood spatters and reaction shots. In Giallos blood is like paint and clothing, walls and flooring are like canvas. In a film like this one gore happens but it happens offscreen or is just mimed. What blood stains there are after the murders in this are no bigger than ketchup stains. American movie audiences used to like their violence and gore to be neat and brief as is depicted here. The recent torture porn trend flies in the face of that.
But aside from that this is one of the clearest and most easily definable exemplars of practicality meeting opportunism in film production. The producers of this series must have (and should have) thought themselves incredibly lucky. Indeed they may have privately lauded themselves as geniuses. They could live without the critical acclaim even though they got some for this one.
Here they had a lucrative series with seemingly unlimited possibilities for sequels. The title font and much of the original John Carpenter soundtrack could be repackaged along with the backstory, the mask and even a suggested release date (see title). Any clown in the right mask can play Michael Myers in the series of movies which followed the original.
Most of the action takes place in an isolated smalltown setting. It maximises tensions and forces the characters to confront the monster or be destroyed by him. Plus it is cheap to shoot exteriors in areas like that which I assure the reader/viewer is no small factor. It is also not that expensive to rent out or simulate on a Hollywood soundstage compared with most Hollywood features.
Respective characters could just be killed off including stars like Ms.Curtis or Mr.Pleasance. That is not to say that neither of those actors in this popular horror series ever reprised their roles. Pleasance returned for no less than four of the sequels. Some others were in each of the first two with a number being shown in flashback in the sequels to follow.
This is what a film production can be when it is geared toward meeting a smaller budget. It often removes the urge to overthink or overspend. The emphasis falls upon the shoulders of the fundamentals like story and character development and film itself as a medium.
The low-budget ($320,000) original Halloween which launched Jamie Lee Curtis career as the scream queen of the late 1970s and early 1980s featured numerous performers of inestimable notoriety within the horror film milieu.
It served as merely another horror film credit among the many in the storied career of P.J.Soles, a legend to horror/slasher film fans, whom had already appeared in classics of the genre like Bloodbath and Carrie. Donald Pleasance had a long track record in horror as well dating back to the very early 1960s.
Notes:
Grossed $47 million in its first year of release with an estimated production cost of $320,000. Few in Hollywood bother to question any of the calls made here because of how spectacularly well this production performed as an investment.
The working title for this film was "The Babysitter Murders".