Halloween (1978)

There is not much point in trying to add yet another review of a film that is now regarded quite correctly as nothing short of being a masterpiece, not only as a horror film but also as a work of cinema of the finest quality and execution.  I can only share my personal experience when we watched this film on its first run in London at the then Odeon Chelsea on Punk-infested trendy King’s Road.  Those were the days when multiplexes were just about to sprout like a nasty rash all over the world. However, the Odeon on King’s Road was still a great single-screen cinema with a capacity of 700 and every seat was taken as a pre-cell phone audience took just moments to start having their nerves shredded and jangled like seldom before. 

There was a huge thrill to experience an audience that was utterly captivated to pin-drop silence and ultimately pulverised by the unrelenting tension that Carpenter layers on one upon the other until finally, at long last, the mayhem is set free.  Carpenter, aided by his own magnificent score, goes on to crank up the tension to the point that an audience of 700 was squirming as one in their seats, and every single one of us held our breath along with Laurie Strode as Michael prowled behind the closet door.  Sadly, it was the kind of experience that doesn’t occur other than at film festivals, where audiences primarily respect the films enough to turn their cell phones off and get involved to the extent that the whole audience behaves like one.  Halloween is a film that could take its audience by the scruff of the neck and not let go till the grisly end. 

Despite many considering Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Black Christmas by Bob Clark to be precursors, and they certainly have a point, stylistically and for sheer mastery of execution, Halloween stands up high on its own pedestal, finally recognised as the best and the classiest of all the slasher films from the late ’70s and early 80s.    Then there was a flood of imitators, but sadly, they started to get the plot wrong and continued in a downward direction with increasing rapidity.  The first hugely successful rip-off was Friday the 13^th, which went on to score huge box office numbers but was a different style of slasher film, even if the premise had already become a template.  The POV camera was the most mimicked element of the movie, but the music and the little masterful techniques were attempted to be replicated by a bunch of hacks trying to make a fast buck. Still, they started to get the “emphasis” wrong. Studios started to shape slasher films that were less about creating an atmosphere or tension than Carpenter’s Halloween.  The next slasher to hit the bullseye had already paved the way for the creative, gory death done by the masterful special effects and gore genius Tom Savini as its main attraction, rather than concentrating on the sense of dread that Halloween invoked.  In Friday the 13^th, you have a film that is a sequence of increasingly elaborate (as much as the censors could take in those days) scenarios where the shock factor is the gore and the suggested brutality.  There is a clear shift away from creating tension to creating shock value. Halloween avoided the Grand Guignol style of Savini’s gore, which gained more and more attention and success in the wake of the success of Friday the 13th, which spawned imitators that all went for emphasis on the elaborate gory kill rather than creating fear.  Slasher movies lost the plot almost immediately after Halloween, with gore being considered the scare factor, which it never really was.  Films like the shamelessly derivative He Knows You’re Alone not only borrowed the camera style and attempted to steal the same stalking, scary scenario, but even went as far as reworking the soundtrack to the point where it’s almost a parody of the Halloween score. 

Countless slasher films arrived with increasingly elaborate death scenes and more and more scope for Tom Savini to show his mastery.   There was a shift away from creating tension to designing a set of sequences with instant shock value instead.   

Jaws had people screaming at mere shadows in swimming pools; however ridiculous it sounds, it happened.  Halloween had people hesitating to turn corners lined with hedges and bushes; the lurking figure of Michael Myers was enough to evoke utter dread without one drop of blood or any gore and special effects master to rely on. 

Halloween created its tension through the masterful direction of its director and the superb script, which gave life to the characters, rendering them as people you liked and cared for.  Not some shapely teenager to show off some flesh before having their flesh taken apart in horrific style, as quickly became the norm for almost all the following slasher films. 

The one film that did manage to create a sense of similar unease and tension came decades after Halloween in the form of the hugely loved or hugely hated Haute Tension from Alexandre Aja of France.  This twisted little masterpiece of slasher movie making merged the two elements of gore, shock value and tension quite beautifully and left the viewer reeling, primarily out of sheer nail-biting tension and superb style.  Some slightly dodgy but very nasty gore and a sublimely atmospheric music score somehow gelled together to create a similar adrenaline rush of dread and unrelenting tension similar to what John Carpenter achieved with Halloween.  All the other zillion slasher films, some successful, some not all borrowed shamelessly from the Halloween template but piled on the gore effects, which became tedious and repetitive very, very soon and thus slasher movies started to get familiar and stale at a very rapid pace (think Happy Birthday to Me) and soon turned into parodies of themselves as the style and manner and the template had been repeated to death until finally realizing this, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson conjured up the savvy Scream which took the slasher movie template and paid homage to it while also taking the mickey out of the whole “establishes slasher movie rules” that had now been cemented because of the thousand imitations that followed Carpenters great film.  Unfortunately, they succeeded in cloning Friday the 13^th far better than Halloween, which remains several classes and cuts above the rest of the slasher pretenders and rightfully so

One recalls the early 80s debate when the discussion would arise,” Did you like Friday the 13^th more or Halloween?” Though there is nothing but love for Friday the 13^th, it really cannot and should not be compared to Halloween, which is in another realm of filmmaking.

Myself and 699 others who viewed the film at the Odeon in Chelsea’s upmarket Kings Road back in 1978 on that night, I suspect many of them will forever remember the experience of collectively being pulverized for 90 minutes relentlessly till the end of the film, and even that comes as a sucker punch, and you left the theatre thinking……………no way, HE is still out there and that he is waiting “behind the bush”.   I never hesitated to walk home, turning corners of hedged and bushy gardens and homes along the way.  Never has a shape or a mask appeared so menacing.  Never has there been a slasher film quite like John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Clearly, I am not alone in the way I feel because two years or so later, when the sequel opened, and I forced a friend to drive me miles to watch it in downtown Boston, I have never encountered an audience that was so wildly excited to watch a movie at any stage in my life.  The anticipation levels were as mine were, but this audience could not hold it in, and the first 30 minutes were the audience just getting to grips with their excitement.  When Carpenter’s signature tune kicks off, the entire cinema was hand-clapping rhythmically to the sound. It was a thrilling and unique experience once again; even if Halloween 2 ultimately wasn’t quite the great film it was following, it had some of the same qualities some of the time, and that was enough to satisfy some of us perfectly well.

There is not just one reason Halloween stands tall and remains to this date the best slasher film ever created, and stylistically and creatively nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece.   It may have lost the ability to shock and surprise, but that’s hardly surprising considering all its techniques and style have been aped a million times, but those who know will know that Halloween was the film that did it first.  Michael Myers is the original slasher, and Halloween remains the one to beat, and thus far, Haute Tension gave it a befitting nod. However, the rest are still trying to get the right balance between creating a real sense of dread, tension and fear, while others sadly are still caught up with just making some shocking gore that doesn’t scare. It just shocks.

 1976’s The Omen could be “blamed” as the film that introduced audiences to the “elaborately staged gore set piece”.  Halloween eschewed that, and yet the imitators found creating gore and shock much easier than creating a body of work that would have an audience chewing off its nails, sitting nervously on the edge of their seats, being pulverised by tension.  That is what Halloween was about, not about cheap gory setups and shock effects.  There can be pages of volumes of discussion about Halloween vs Friday the 13^th and slasher films in general, but can there be any doubt that Halloween stands above, while the others are really rather repetitive?  Perhaps one of the imitators, My Bloody Valentine, has stood the test of time better than some, but even that had more of an emphasis on gore than it did on the stalking fear; it did have atmosphere and some mood and the best killer’s mask since Michael Myers legendary William Shatner mask from the local Walmart. 

Halloween remains the king of all Slasher movies and rightfully so and it is with muted enthusiasm that the latest remake/reworking of the film is about to be released with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her Laurie Strode character and judging by the trailers and some of the reviews from early screenings, this one is attempting to get the dread that came over the town of Haddonfield somewhat in the style of the original and with the film being scored by John Carpenter again and indeed the very same mask used as in the original.  For old die-hard Halloween fans, and there are legions out there, the heart beats just a little quicker in anticipation than it has for any of the other dire sequels that have been churned out over the years, most of them total abominations and an insult to the classic original film.