So tight is the stranglehold which John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ has on our culture that if you watch it for the first time, you will be convinced that you have seen it before, and if you watch it again, it will still seem as relevant as when it first came out in 1978. The daddy of all slasher movies, its formula has been mercilessly preyed upon by countless 1980s slice-and-dice imitations (‘Friday the 13th’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ etc.), fondly dissected by 1990 postmodern spoofs (‘Scream’, ‘Scary Movie’) – and of course its franchise of (largely inferior) sequels shows that that the bogeyman is still very real, with ‘Halloween 9’ due for release next year. Not bad for a film that cost a mere $320,000 to make – which is probably a lot less than the pricetag on the painstaking high definition digital transfer process which makes this new DVD print look and sound so superb.
In Haddonfield, Illinois (a fictional Anytown in the US), on the Halloween of 1963, six year old Michael Myers puts on a mask and stabs his sister to death in their home. In 1978, the adult Myers breaks out of an asylum, and comes home to Haddonfield on Halloween, pursued by his psychiatrist, Dr Loomis. That night, as bookish virgin Laurie Strode babysits while her not so virginal friends Annie and Linda are in the house across the road, heavy-breathing Myers starts his murderous campaign again, and it seems that the only thing coming between him and his selected victims is Dr Loomis – and a rather large knife.
‘Halloween’ laid the groundwork for the future of horror, with its steadicam point-of-view shots, its menacing keyboard riff (composed by Carpenter), its Hitchcockian ratcheting of tension, its jolting shocks (false and real), its naturalistic dialogue, its ominous atmosphere, its resourceful heroine and unstoppable killer. The film made a whole generation of filmgoers terrified of familiar residential streets, cosy domestic interiors, and pre-marital sex.
At the surprisingly bloodless heart of the film are two great performances. Jamie Lee Curtis made her cinematic debut as Laurie Strode in ‘Halloween’, and by transforming what is essentially an exploitation rôle into a believable, strong character, Curtis assured her reign as filmdom’s ‘scream queen’ for years to come. What made this throne her natural inheritance, and lay behind her casting, was that she is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the shower victim in Hitchcock’s proto-slasher ‘Psycho’, and star of ‘A Touch of Evil’ (which ‘Halloween’ evokes in its creepy opening four-minute single-take).
Donald Pleasance, on the other hand, brings a decided nuttiness to Dr Loomis, referring to his patient as ‘it’ or ‘the evil’, and seeming to relish crouching behind a bush in the dark and frightening children. Most boys at some point or other want to kill their sister, but Pleasance conveys the creepy impression that, under his 15-year supervision, it was only natural that Myers’ boyhood transgression would develop into a mature psychopathy.
The original, and one of the best, ‘Halloween’ cuts much deeper than its knife-wielding imitations.