Halloween

“Laurie, dear. He wants to talk to you. He wants to take you out tonight.**” Inhumanly patient. Although it’s not the easiest thing to do because he’s been the mascot of a four decade spanning horror franchise longer than he was ever just a guy in a white mask, anymore I find myself far more interested in Michael Myers as his original intention: another one of John Carpenter’s avatars of evil. Really, it’s quite easy to view Michael as the Master’s prototype for such an idea. There is a very psychosexual, scandalous nature to how the Shape operates and moves throughout this original film that really becomes lost to everything that came after. When you’re neck deep into this first one and it’s so clean and precise and tightly structured in its ghostly simplicity, one almost has to guffaw when you remember they were introducing a death cult and incest babies by the sixth one. Don’t misunderstand me, there are a few other Halloween films that I love (namely the ugly, gory broken heart that is Rob Zombie’s second film) but none of them really evoke whatever John Carpenter was tapping into here. I’m not sure it’s really peeling back the skin and exposing the gruesome heart of America like something as ugly and giddily cruel as Texas Chain Saw but the two films are similarly fatalistic and doomed feeling. Laurie is a lot like Sally in that neither of them really win against their tormentor as much as they just survive. Carpenter lends Laurie this air of tragedy, though, precisely because she is so unambiguously good. There’s a real sweetness at the epicenter of Jamie Lee’s performance that always charms the hell out of me. All of the intercutting between Laurie’s friends behaving selfishly and carelessly while she earnestly strives to give the kids she’s babysitting a fun Halloween evening gives a lot of fleshed out character work and depth to a film that isn’t exactly a bench mark for fine screen acting. But it doesn’t have to be. Carpenter really hammers down the idea of an unfeeling, unwavering evil that doesn’t care about you and will snuff you out simply because it laid eyes upon you. There is something perverse and blatantly devious about Michael as a character in this one and he feels the most human here despite Carpenter’s clear attempts to never really give you an answer to the depths behind his black eyes. I’ve seen this film a hundred times and I’m still noticing Michael in the backdrop of certain frames for the very first time. Always forget how much of him “stalking” Laurie is really just him hiding in plain sight. Her friends don’t know he’s there, but she does. And that’s all that matters. The shot of him standing in her backyard, in the laundry curtains, in broad daylight, always startles me even if I know it’s coming. Putting myself in the shoes of somebody back in ‘78, I have to imagine that mask is genuinely kind of petrifying if you have no idea about the William Shatner origins of it all. Cundey shoots this thing to an almost mythical degree. If it doesn’t necessarily evoke the candy colored orange hues of the holiday, it certainly evokes that windy, crunching, haunted autumnal glow. All the stuff at night is just staggering to behold. It’s interesting to me how all of the slashers to come after this one learned every single wrong lesson (though a great deal of them are near and dear to my heart) they could have possibly taken from this. There’s a genuine elegance and sophistication to this one that lends it a disciplined edge. There is always the temptation to scoff a little at Halloween and push it further down whatever Carpenter tier list you might have for yourself simply because you might get a little tired of hearing about it. And I still remain firm that it’s not his actual masterpiece. But it is, sort of inevitably, his major cultural achievement. Considering how early it emerged in his journey, the level of control and mastery over his craft he was already displaying is staggering. And to think he was just a hired gun who had been tasked to cobble together a cheap little horror movie about a guy stalking and killing babysitters. When you stop and watch Donald Pleasance’s quiet, broken speech about a boy with the eyes of the devil, I’d say he over delivered on the assignment and then some. Seasonal classic. The only film to watch on this most ghoulish of nights. Happy Halloween. 🎃 “Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.”