Title: Halloween
Rating: 3 Stars
I can’t remember if I saw this in the theaters or not. For sure, I haven’t watched it in decades.
Everyone knows the plot. On Halloween in 1963, a young boy named Michael Myers kills his sister after he sees her with her boyfriend. Fifteen years later, again on Halloween, Myers escapes from the asylum that he has been incarcerated in. He returns back to his home town and fixates on the high school student Laurie Strode. Over the course of the night, as Myers’ psychiatrist desperately tries to hunt him down, Myers murders several people as he relentlessly closes in on her. After several stabbings, it ends when the psychiatrist shoots Myers dead as he plunges over a balcony. Or does he die?
There are certainly horror films that predate this. With the glinting, flashing butcher knife, John Carpenter pretty explicitly pays homage to Psycho. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre certainly had its moments of shock.
Even so, there’s much in Halloween that serves as a template for future horror films.
There’s the masked killer. Being faceless, this is murder at its most impersonal and implacable. Myers seems to be more of a force of nature than a man. In fact, in later sequels, it’s spelled out that Myers is possibly immortal. No matter how thoroughly you kill him, you can’t. No matter how well you hide, he will inevitably find you.
Sex will be punished. Although Carpenter himself, who wrote and directed it, after all, said that there’s no linkage to sex, it’s hard to take that statement at face value. Myers, as a young boy, kills his sister immediately after she has sex with her boyfriend. Later, one of Strode’s friends has sex with her boyfriend as Myers watches. They are both immediately dispatched. He kills with the phallic plunge of a knife, much like Bates’ mother in Psycho.
Here are age inappropriate high schoolers. Much like the later slasher films to come, it centers around high school students. These are young people getting ready to embark upon adulthood, where all kinds of dangers, some of which are mortal, await them. Even so, these actors do not appear to be teenagers. In fact, several of the actors are actually in their late twenties. Even though they are ostensibly high school students, does the fact that the actors portraying them are clearly older somehow ameliorate some of the cultural shock of watching the murders of teenagers?
So, why only three stars? First of all, the characters are at best stock. They are not really fleshed out at all. There are the sex crazed high school students. There is the virginal, smart high school student that will survive. There are a couple of children thrown in just to put them into danger. The sheriff and even the psychiatrist just really aren’t that interesting. This becomes even starker when comparing it to a film like Psycho, in which even minor characters are richly drawn. For better or for worse, having such flat characters set the pattern for future slasher films to come. Faceless killers murder featureless victims.
The last fifteen minutes is legitimately harrowing. The middle hour or so moves along at best ploddingly. It seems to me that there could have been better use of that time.
Finally, and this is not the fault of the film, but seeing it now forty years later, it’s lost a lot of its shock value. The slasher POV shots, the false scares, the implacable killer, the killer that won’t die are all now established tropes. Having seen these things so many times, it’s lost a lot of its power to shock. It doesn’t really have that truly shocking moment, like the root cellar scene in Psycho or Leatherface’s first victim in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These are scenes that, even having seen them many times, still creeps me out.
Still, it’s worth sitting through the middle hour to get to the last fifteen minutes of horror.
dorkenstein 