HALLOWEEN (1978)

DIRECTED by John Carpenter

SCREENPLAY by John Carpenter & Debra Hill

STARRING  - Donald Pleasance as Dr. Sam Loomis,  Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode,  Nick Castle as Michael Myers ( Tony Morgan as Michael Myers unmasked, Will Sandin as Michael Myers aged 6),  PJ Soles as Lynda Van Der Klok,  Nancy Loomis as Annie Brackett,  Charles Cyphers as Sheriff Leigh Brackett,  Kyle Richards as Lindsey Wallace,  Brian Andrews as Tommy Doyle,  John Michael Graham as Bob Simms,  Nancy Stephens as Marion Chambers,  Sandy Johnson as Judith Myers.

PLOT - Halloween night 1963 in the town of Haddonfield, six year old Michael Myers brutally stabs to death his teenage sister Judith for no apparent reason. The police are called and the boy is committed to Smiths Grove Sanitarium for the criminally insane.

October 30th 1978 - A power outage at Smiths Grove causes chaos and in the process a now adult Michael escapes. The insane killer heads back to his old home town, killing as he goes. In hot pursuit is Michael's psychiatrist - Dr Sam Loomis. He has been warning the authorities at the sanitarium for years that Michael is too dangerous to ever be released and now his greatest fears are being proven to be true.

Michael becomes fixated upon a young Haddonfield girl, Laurie Strode and her friends. He begins to stalk them, waiting for his moment to strike. That moment comes on Halloween night. A Halloween night that becomes filled with death and horror. The Halloween night that Michael comes home...

DIALOUGE  - Loomis - "I met this six year old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and...the blackest eyes...the Devil's eyes."

PERFORMANCES  - This film saw the first appearance of three of the most iconic characters in horror film history - Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) the ultimate "final girl". Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) and the psychotic masked killer Michael Myers. 

To Loomis first I think as he is the film's main hero, albeit an unconventional one. The great Donald Pleasance here plays one of his signature roles. Loomis is seen to be a crusty old academic who himself appears to be on the verge of a mental breakdown as he doggedly pursues the escaped killer. The reason for this is because he feels personally responsible for Michael's escape (even though its down to a freak occurance and is not his fault). 

You get the impression that Loomis feels responsible because he failed to rehabilitate Michael and as a result this failure has haunted him for years. Loomis knows the hell that has been unleashed upon the small sleepy town and he knows that multiple deaths will follow as a result. This guilt pushes Loomis into desperation and he acts increasingly erratically as a result, to the point that local police begin to doubt him. We know he's right though.

Pleasance plays Loomis with a huge amount of dignity and conviction and also gets to deliver some of the best, most chilling monologues ever put to film. Who can listen to him recite "the Devil's eyes" speech and not get the chills ?

Equally good is Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode. Laurie is a bookish, consientious high school student. She's not a party girl like her vapid friends Lynda and Annie, she's down to Earth - a little shy and self conscious. In other words, exactly the type of girl that usually manages to not get killed in these types of movies. The thing is - Laurie as she appears here is from a time before the "virtuous" final girl became a cliche of the genre. Laurie is to all intents and purposes the original. The real deal. The final girl that started it all, all the many that followed (however good) are just pale imitations.

Laurie is not just a shrinking violet though, she has hidden depths of strength and resourcefulness. It is this that manages to keep her and the two small children she's babysitting alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive in the form of a gun toting Dr. Loomis.

Both Pleasance and Curtis would go on to reprise thier roles in numerous sequals to this film, sometimes to diminishing returns, othertimes hitting new heights depending on the merits of the sequal they happened to be appearing in at the time. Both roles ensured both actors a permanent place in the horror hall of fame.

We also have to mention the main man himself - Michael Myers. The unstoppable (and seemingly indestructible) human killing machine. Here he's played mainly by Nick Castle who makes Michael into a shadowy predator. A hunter who lurks in the shadows, initially stalking his intended victims from afar before moving in for the kill when the time is right. 

It is this stealthy aspect to Michael's character that differentiates him from other slasher icons like Jason or Leatherface. Where those killers would just barge in all guns blazing (if they had guns...which they don't) and use sheer brute force to notch up thier kill, Michael seems more cunning and patient. He does use brute force occasionally, but only when the odds are starting to stack up against him and it looks like Laurie may escape him, he far prefers to kill swiftly and silently.

Michael also seems to have a childlike fascination with the aftermath of his kills, note the way he tilts his head quizzically as he stares in rapt silence at the corpse of Bob who he's just pinned to the wall with a kitchen knife. In some ways Michael is still the child he was when he committed his first murder all those years ago.

SFX  - Halloween is not an effects heavy movie. There are a few splashes of blood here and there (although Michael's preferred method of killing seems to be more slanted towards strangulation than anything else in this film).

There's also no need for any monsters or creature effects. Afterall what we're dealing with here is a human monster. A man in a mask, simple but effective...

...and no, he doesn't want to buy any double glazing or solar panels.

A quick word about that mask. It wasn't specially made for the film. It was just a Captain Kirk mask that they bought from a toy store and painted white. The bizzare thing is, William Shatner himself appeared in a horror film of his own a few years prior to Halloween. That film was The Devil's Rain (1975) and at one point Shatner becomes possessed and looks like this...

You can REALLY see the similarly there can't you.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Halloween pretty much establishes the sex = death trope that future teen slasher movies would take the ball and run with.

Baby Michael murders his naked sister shortly after she's had sex with her boyfriend (VERY shortly - from the couple going upstairs, having sex and Judith's boyfriend getting dressed and leaving the house, roughly about three minutes pass. I wouldn't have been looking quite so pleased with myself if I'd have been the boyfriend).

Michael later murders a truck driver off camera and steals his truck and boiler suit, quite how a man who has been locked up in a mental institution since the age of six knows how to drive a pickup truck is never mentioned but there you go. Also, the driver probably wasn't having sex when Michael got him (maybe he'd pulled over into a lay-by with a porn mag or something)...

Michael then kills Annie (who was just on her way to meet her boyfriend for a quick seeing to). He hides in the back of her car and strangles her before slashing her throat...

Finally, He murders Bob shortly after hes had sex with Lynda. Stabbing him in the chest so hard that he's pinned to the kitchen door...

Michael then steals Bob's sheet ghost Halloween disguise and glasses and tries to unnerve a post coitus Lynda before brutally strangling her to death with the flex of a telephone...

I love Michael in that sheet ghost disguise, it's almost as iconic as the Shatner mask and boiler suit.

Michael doesn't really kill that many people compared to later films in the series where he always seems to wipe out pretty much half the town of Haddonfield.

 After that he goes after Laurie who gives him a run for his money in the maiming stakes. Laurie stabs Michael with a knife and jabs him in the eye with a coat hanger. However she makes the classic mistake of overpowering him and knocking him out and then NOT finishing him off or making sure he's dead (why do people ALWAYS do this in films ? If someone was trying to murder me and I'd knocked them out, I'd get thier knife and make sure they had more holes in them than a slice of Swiss cheese. There's no way they'd be getting up again to have another go).

This leaves Loomis to finish the job by shooting Michael six times at point blank range and blasting him through a window and off a balcony. He still survives though and slinks off to lick his wounds and return in the sequal.

RATING  - Halloween deserves its classic status. The acting, direction, soundtrack, mood and atmosphere are all top notch. It's suspenseful without being too overplayed and has a perfect autumnal Halloween atmosphere.

5 Jack O Lanterns out of 5. If you've not seen it, watch it this Halloween and educate yourself in the basics of slasher movie history. 

POSTER/VHS/DVD ART -

The above poster is a bizzare offering from Guyana, which looks like its been drawn by a disturbed child.

Even weirder is this poster (also from Guyana) which sees Michael Myers take up a sniper rifle and attempt to shoot down a helicopter. Someone must have drugged his Halloween sweets that year.