In addition to “devil” movies, another type of horror movie I tend not to be fond of are slasher movies. Part of the reason is they tend to go for excessive gore, and while I don’t mind violence in movies, I do mind what I think is gratuitous violence, or violence where it seems as if the sole purpose of the filmmaker showing you this violence is to invite you as a viewer to get off on it. Just as bad for me is the fact many of the victims in the slasher movies I’ve seen are girls or women, and even worse, many of the victims are killed after they’ve had sex, sending a message girls and women shouldn’t have sex, or enjoy it, and if they do, that they deserve to die, which is reactionary, to say the least. Having said that, I must admit one of my favorite horror movies is a slasher movie, John Carpenter’s original version of Halloween, about the night he came home.
“He” is Michael Myers, whom we first see as a little boy (played by Will Sandin) stabbing his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) on Halloween night in 1963 in Haddonfield, Illinois. Subsequently, Myers is committed to a sanitarium run by Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance). However, Dr. Loomis is unable to get through to him, and becomes convinced Myers is a sociopath. On top of that, Myers escapes before Dr. Loomis can take him to appear before a judge, and returns to Haddonfield. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a high school student who is stuck babysitting while her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis, now Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (PJ Soles) are planning nights with their boyfriends, is only vaguely aware of the menace that’s come to town until it’s almost too late.
As with other Carpenter movies, Myers (the actor we see when the mask is taken off is Tony Moran, though Nick Castle plays him when he’s wearing the mask) is pretty much an unstoppable, and more importantly, an unknowable force. Much of the movie is simply Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey shooting from Myers’ point-of-view, or, alternately, showing him just off in the distance, watching Laurie, which adds to the creepiness. Also helping with the suspense is the music Carpenter himself composed for the film; much like Bernard Herrmann’s score for the original version of PSYCHO (more on that film’s influence here below), it only uses a few notes, but they’re very well. Carpenter made this as less bloody and more creepy than most slasher films, which is another reason I like this. As for the fact the people killed here are either killed after sex (Judith, Lynda and her boyfriend) or when planning to have sex (Annie), Carpenter and Debra Hill (who co-wrote the film with Carpenter and also served as one of the producers) admitted they never intended for the movie to portray sex in a reactionary way, and that the victims in this movie were killed because they weren’t paying attention to what was going on around them, while Laurie survived because she was. Also, we’re left to intuit how disturbed Myers is when it comes to sex.
Carpenter often wore his influences on his sleeve, and Halloween is no exception; the sheriff is named Leigh Brackett, after the screenwriter who often worked with Carpenter’s favorite director, Howard Hawks (including his favorite Hawks film, Rio Bravo) – the kids Laurie babysit even watch Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (which Carpenter would remake in 1982) on TV – while Dr. Loomis is named after the character of Marion Crane’s boyfriend in Psycho, and while Carpenter was originally unsure of casting Curtis, once he found out Curtis was the daughter of Janet Leigh, who of course played Marion Crane, he signed her on. Curtis had never appeared in a movie before this (she had done some guest spots on a few TV shows, and had appeared in the TV series version of Operation Petticoat, from a movie starring her father Tony Curtis), but you wouldn’t know it from the assurance in which she holds the film together. She’s able to convince you of how smart Laurie is, as well as how resourceful she is, and able to take care of the children under her charge. And Pleasance is appropriately authoritative as Dr. Loomis (though I would have liked to have seen what Christopher Lee, who was offered the role and turned it down, would have done). As with Psycho, there have been a lot of ripoffs of Halloween, including the many sequels and remakes, but the original still stands as a great horror movie.
