Halloween

“You can’t kill the boogeyman.” Very striking how there’s a melancholy, borderline sad undertone to those gentle piano keys that rush into so many of the musical cues that lie within Halloween. It’s an anthem that signifies your fate, or rather your doom. The thing that brings your time here to a close is a quiet one, one you never see around a corner or hidden away in some crook in the far end of a room until it has you by the throat. John Carpenter is world renowned for his eccentricities and his love for character actors and for genre thrills, but I don’t think he gets praised enough for his patience as a storyteller. So much of Halloween is a waiting game, like watching a shark circle the red water. It’s less of a slasher film and more of a home invasion one, as it’s all about this one masked figure slinking in out of the Autumn cold and destroying a few young girls’ worlds on what was supposed to be a Halloween night like any other. That’s maybe the most impressive and most crucial part about The Shape in comparison to his contemporaries like Jason or Freddy: he’s so much more methodical, the bulk of his initial film follows him boxing these people in long before he ever even touched them. The best and most purely frightening version of Michael Myers is still the simplest: a horribly demented, nonverbal young man who rushes back to his hometown to hurt people. Carpenter’s remarkably focused here, on details. It gives Halloween this dreamlike aura: from the shots where if you blink, you’ll miss that white face peering out from a corner or from a window that’s not quite in focus of the camera lens to the programatic attention he gives to Michael’s victims last moments. Bob’s death in particular is still chilling as you watch what was moments ago a living, breathing human body become an empty husk. Written about it before, writing about it again, Halloween is a staple of the season. The type of movie that so vividly and fully evokes the feeling you crave from the setting it presents. It may not be my personal favorite John Carpenter film, and I don’t even think it’s his most wholeheartedly frightening, but there is a ghostlike quality to the movie and to its central villain that always makes it just spine tingling enough, even upon countless rewatches. Among the gorgeous photography by Dean Cundey, the excellent score and direction from Carpenter, the strong and sturdy performances from Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee, the thing that stuck with me upon this latest rewatch is just how fixated Halloween is with the concept of impermanence. October bleeds into November, one more Halloween night that you can’t have back. Just like the song ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ in Annie’s car says, you’re here but now you’re gone. The Shape has the capability to vanish in as much as a blink of an eye. The horrific part is that it could take you with it before you could even know it was there.