Halloween Retrospective: Halloween (1978)

Halloween Retrospective | #1 | Halloween (1978)

If you’ve been following me for over a year, you’ll remember that last year for the month of October I did a series of retrospectives on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. I want to start a new tradition out of this, where every year I take a look at a different long running horror franchise and go over every film in their respective series. This year, I’ve decided to go with the seminal Halloween franchise.

John Carpenter's original 1978 Halloween is a stone cold classic, and one of the greatest horror films of all time. Revisiting it now, it can be tempting to write it off as overly-simplistic, but this would be doing the film a grave disservice. Everything that Halloween did has been done time and time again since, but when it came out it was revolutionary, and even now it still has a special something that its many, many successors lack.

The 1970’s were a fascinating decade for horror; it lacked the overall tendency towards trends that other decades since (the 1980’s and 2000’s especially) have gravitated towards, but instead it was a decade full of strong, creative output from filmmakers focused on creating atmospheric, impressionistic works, many of which still resonate to this very day. Halloween is among the most accessible of these classics; it has very little complexity or thematic depth to it, instead opting for a very minimalist approach that it winds up completely knocking out of the park. The franchise was initially conceived as an anthology series of sinister and macabre stories taking place on Halloween night, and as the title suggests, this film is all about that titular night; no more, no less.

Everything about Halloween is restrained – not tastefully so – little about this film is tasteful - but intelligently. John Carpenter's iconic score is a slow, haunting series of synth notes, and the story is about as basic as you can get; serial killer Michael Myers escapes from maximum security prison to return to his hometown where he stalks a seemingly random girl (legendarily played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and starts to kill off her friends one by one, slowly luring her into a deadly game of cat and mouse. The kills lack the theatrics and practical effects of later slasher films, instead opting for simple off screen stabbings that leave most of the gore up to the imagination. The cinematography is simple but nonetheless clever, utilizing unique and unnerving tracking shots from the point of view of Myers himself.

The film captures the unique atmosphere of Halloween perfectly. It brings me back to the holidays I spent as a kid, in a way. Halloween night is dark and spooky, but it’s all fun and playful; you know you might get scared, but the whole night is for scares, and it’s all just fun and games… until, as Halloween proposes, suddenly it isn’t anymore. There’s that small part in every kid’s mind that wonders if they might not be in actual danger, and this film is direct validation to that anxiety reflex; the boogeyman is real, and he’s coming for you.

Said boogeyman is, of course, Michael Myers; one of the Big Three slasher villains (alongside Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees) and one of the most instantly recognizable villains in horror history. But in the original incarnation, his name was only incidental; he was originally credited only as “The Shape.” That’s because he’s not really a person so much as he is a force of pure evil; animated by dark desires. He’s not mindless, not at all; every move he makes feels calculated. But his inner thoughts and motivations seem inaccessible to the ordinary human mind, and that’s in a way what makes him so frightening. There is some ableism in the way Myers is treated, particularly in how his psychiatrist is used as the vehicle to reveal that he isn’t really a “man” so much as a monster. This is worth pointing out and is an intrinsic part of the legacy of this film – and the horror genre as a whole, really. Still, there is more to what makes this film scary than a simple case of weaponized mental illness.

Many of the formative films of the slasher subgenre played with the idea of voyeurism, and I feel that Halloween does this as well, playing with these ideas through its form. Through its point of view tracking shots it puts us directly into the body of Michael Myers, watching through his eyes as he stalks his prey. In a sense, the audience is indicted by this; as witnesses who do nothing we are co-conspirators to Myers’ killing spree. We could turn the film off, and the bloodshed would end. But we are drawn forward, be it by a morbid desire to know how this ends or a sick desire for violence. I don’t know to what extent this is intentional, but it really adds another layer of dread that most later slasher films lack. It gives meaning to the copious shots of female nudity in certain scenes; the camera isn’t just showing us flesh to exploit it, but it’s also equating the fetishization of female bodies with that of violence against them. Perhaps I’m digging too deep, and perhaps this is just a sleazy slasher film, but it’s the feeling I get time and time again as I watch this film.

This review may feel a little aimless, and that’s because it’s sort of difficult to say anything about the original Halloween that hasn’t already been said. It’s an absolute classic and one of the greatest horror films of all time. Sure there’s some corny moments and rickety acting here and there, but it makes up for this with its slow, intentional pace, thick, impeccable atmosphere and brilliant, minimalistic score and scares. Its carved its name into the annals of not just horror history, but film history, and as long as the medium sticks around, there it will stay. If you somehow haven’t watched this yet and you’re at all interested in horror, you owe it to yourself to check it out.