HALLOWEEN (1978)

Every one must know the plot to it, but if not, here it is:  Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night, Michael Myers escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown, chased by his psychiatrist (Donald Loomis).  Becoming fixated on teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her group of girlfriends, Myers stalks them and then, on Halloween night, hunts and kills them.  Soon, Laurie is on her own against an unstoppable killer....

I don't quite know where to start praising this film.  I guess one of the things that impresses the most about it is, like Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter's other masterpiece, the utter and complete nihilism of the movie.  Screw what Halloween II goes on to say; Laurie ends up targeted by Myers because she runs an errand for her real estate broker dad and goes and puts the key under the mat of the old Myers house.  Inside, Michael sees, and then fixates on, her and the young boy with her.  In Carpenter's universe, being in the wrong place at the wrong time will have serious repercussions on your life, whether you're doing a good deed or not.

On this bedrock of believable nihilism, Carpenter's able to construct various vague constructs about the nature of predator and victim that, like the messages buried in fairy tales, seem both convincing and dream-like.   Michael Myers is an abstract version of evil, with a pale blank mask for a face and a gray jumpsuit for clothes.  He is less a psycho than a force of nature, which helps makes all of Donald Pleasance's speeches about Michael Myers being inhuman and the devil completely convincing (Pleasance's brilliant performance certainly helps), even though Myers really doesn't do anything particularly supernatural until near the end of the movie.  And all sorts of things are suggested by his attraction to Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie, who's resilent survivor abilities somehow ties in to her virginity.  You can make a case for Myers being an incarnation of Curtis's frustrated sexuality and sexual fear (not a particularly good one, mind you, but you can, and I think that I read an article a couple years back where Carpenter did).  In fact, one of Halloween's great strengths is that it functions on that evocative but vague level known as myth, where endless number of theories about "what it means" can be generated but never quite seems able to encompass the whole.

Notice that I wrote "One of Halloween's great strengths"; the other great strengths of the movie are the performances and the writing.  Having watched other Carpenter movies, it becomes obvious that the believable conversations and situations that happen to Laurie and her friends as they make their way through the day and into Halloween night are pretty atypical for Carpenter.  Carpenter writes okay B-movie dialogue and can satirize it brilliantly when he needs to, but it's Debra Hill's writing of Laurie and her friends that really helps ratchet Halloween up to the next level.  It catches the teasing way the girlfriends react to each other and their boyfriends, and the awkwardnesses that each feels and is trying to cover up in various ways which Jamie Lee Curtis's performance, above all, brings out.  With a wonderful mix of self-conscious embarrassed head-shakes and goofily unselfconscious gawkiness, Curtis gives one of the best performances of teenagerhood ever (particularly striking in being in a movie that is not about teenagerhood).

Also worth noting is Pleasance's exquisite performance as psychiatrist Sam Loomis.  Not exuding the sweaty pop-eyed panic I expected after seeing him in Escape From New York, Pleasance plays Loomis with a wonderful air of high-strung bemusement, the psychiatric professional embarrassed at his own irrational convictions about his patient.  He has a bit more a hurdle, since it's clearly Carpenter's b-movie talk he has to make his way through, but he does a great job.  In fact, the performances of Halloween are all terrific, running from Charles Cipher as Sherriff Leigh Brackett (who apparently went on to write the Empire Strikes Back as therapy) to Nancy Kyes as Brackett's daughter to Nick Castle as The Shape, who walks, pauses, and shifts weight with a wonderfully chilling natural grace and power.

Finally, of course, I have to mention Halloween's score which is a minimalist masterpiece.  Carpenter cobbled together a short batch of minimally effective pieces along with an eerily propulsive main theme.  The minimal composition of the pieces feels not amateurish but actually obsessive, and their endless repetition through the movie helps lends to the air of obsession and dreamy fixation that helps the movie give its almost unduplicated air of nightmarishness.

I could go on and on, particularly about the brilliance with which Carpenter unsettles with the early daylight scenes of Myers stalking his prey, but I've gone on enough as it is. In any event, it would be almost 20 years before The Blair Witch Project would be able to do anything close to as effective a job of so much with so little, but I would be surprised if Blair Witch manages to found a genre, as this one did.  A triumph of ingenuity, intelligence and form, Halloween will outlive all the other movies of 1978, and probably most of the movies of the century besides.

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All material on these pages is © 1999 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.