Filmic Frighteners - Halloween 1978 (18)

It's Halloween. Everyone's entitled to one good scare.

I first watched Halloween as a teenager on a little portable television in my room late at night. To this day it remains one of my most memorable horror-viewing experiences. Here was a really exquisite kind of fear - Hitchcockian tension supercharged with slasher-movie adrenalin, all beautifully framed by John Carpenter's lens. Not that I was thinking about it in those terms back then - I was just staring at the screen, scared witless.

I watched it again last night (first time in over a decade), in preparation for my viewing of the newly released Halloween 2018. My viewing companion, I should say, found much of it pretty laughable. This was due to the clunkiness of some performances, the occasional absence of plot logic and the dumbass behaviour of the teens about to be slaughtered. While not the first slasher film to hit cinemas in the '70s, Halloween certainly became the template - so crammed was it with tropes that have been recycled many times since. That includes the TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) factor, e.g. when a characters walks undefended into the house from which she heard the screaming, rather than - you know - lying low and calling the police.

I take all my movie-buddy's points - Halloween has dated somewhat, due to all the post-modern fun poked at the genre (not least by the Scream franchise). And yet it unarguably a classic. I love it as much as ever I did, and not, I might add, with some irony-tinged sense of nostalgia. The film still conjures up a genuine sense of fear every time I watch it and I now can tell you precisely why. Let me go into blokey list-mode to do so...

1. The Central Premise. It's simple and it's effective. A little kid - Michael Myers - kills his older sister on Halloween night, presumably because she's just had sex with her boyfriend and he doesn't much like the idea. He's sweet-faced with a chillingly blank stare. Exactly fifteen years later Michael escapes from the psychiatric institution where he's been incarcerated and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield to reenact his murderous onslaught - with interest. What is living behind his eyes, insists his psychiatrist (a near-demented Donald Pleasence) is 'purely and simply evil'. Simplistic stuff for sure, but it provides the Halloween 'Boogeyman' with a real drivenness, bordering on the demonic. 

2. The Look. Michael swaps his institutional uniform for overalls (taken from a mechanic who really won't be needing them anymore) and dons the most creepy-ass Halloween mask in cinema history. The overalls give him a functional air - he's going on one very workmanlike killing spree after all - and the mask (an actual William Shatner mask with the eye-sockets cut out) is expressionless and terrifying.

3. The Creepy Holiday Setting. With an original working title of 'The Babysitter Murders', the story ended up being grounded in all the fun seasonal trappings of October 31st, starting with the grinning jack-o-lantern of the opening credits. Classic '50s horror movies play on TV screens throughout the film, while local little'uns go trick-or-treating, a neat contrast with the genuinely sinister events playing out.

4. The Budget. Halloween was made independently and has a grainy quality far from the gloss of other more recent slashers. The absence of polish makes it feel more real, whatever dopey decisions the targeted teens make. Everything about Haddonfield is dowdy and ordinary - a believably mundane setting for some insane events.

5. The Camera. Low-budget films depend on each shot getting it right and boy does Cameron get it right here. Low-angles provide buildings with a tangible sense of menace, long-shots give away just enough detail to unsettle. And point-of-view tracking shots instil real panic, like when our heroine approaches the house where all her friends have been murdered. Every time I watch that scene I remember how I felt the first time - willing her not to go in. The script may have its deficiencies, but the actual telling of the story is sublime. 

6. Widescreen. Carpenter used the perfect screen ratio for the film. Why is it so effective? Because widescreen leaves lots of scope for danger to lurk around the edges of the frame - and this is a film all about what's lurking in the dark.

7. Shadow. Speaking of dark, this is a movie that uses light and shadow to superbly scary effect. Sometimes it's just damn beautiful side-by-side with terrifying. The first time I watched, I had a sense that I didn't need to worry too much while it was still day, but felt steadily more on edge as night closed in. Then once darkness fell, Michael blended. His overalls provided camouflage, but then that mask (see 2) would loom out of the murky recesses (see 6) and the effect was truly chilling.

8. Stuff Not Happening. There are a lot of moments in the movie when 'stuff', i.e. the next killer attack, resolutely fails to occur. Using a commendable degree of patience it makes you wait, ratcheting up the tension to near-intolerable levels. Nor does it rely on jump-scares (it uses them sparingly at best), allowing some moments of dread to play out before your eyes with a dreadful calm. It's a terrific lesson for film-makers - that stuff not happening can have as powerful an effect on the audience as when it does.

9. Scream Queen. Jamie-Lee Curtis is likeable Laurie Strode - cerebral A-student who dutifully babysits her kiddie charges while her friends are fooling around with their boyfriends. She cuts loose with her lungs in the story's latter stages, when the night goes very wrong for her - and contrasts others' ropey acting with one very convincing portrayal of fear, shock and trauma. Along with her more dubious choices she does demonstrate some decent survival instincts, however, hence being around for the 2018 sequel. 

10. Music. Carpenter created the score and revolutionised his own movie in the process. It's not just the opening credits theme with its general sense of foreboding, it's also the slower mounting-sense-of-dread theme as characters edge towards their doom, and the eerie little synth motif when Michael is stalking around a house, and the staccato piano accompanied by a rapid high-pitched discordant ching-ching-ching when peril is imminent. Chills me to - the - bone every time I hear it. A wonderfully stripped-down, fiendishly effective score and some of the best horror music ever written. 

There. I hadn't aimed at ten, but they came to me easily and I could probably add a few more. The film has its moments of daftness for sure (I didn't even mention how the younger cast members are way too old to pass as teenagers), but in my book all that's good about it renders those aspects not worth mentioning. Treat yourself. Hollow out a pumpkin, carve a malevolent face into it, illuminate it from within using a fat candle and sit back to watch John Carpenter's masterpiece all over again. Happy Halloween, 1978-style.

Ed's Verdict: 9/10. It's bona fide horror genius.