Like all successful films Halloween has been dragged out into a long-running franchise which, as time has gone on, has increasingly distanced itself from what made the original so compelling and desirable to replicate. A real low-budget affair, it was made for $325,000 and pulled in some $47,000,000. We’re currently on Halloween 8 (Halloween Resurrection-a bland, listless fusion of bad slasher movie and Blair Witch-style techno driven thriller), and though Jamie Lee Curtis decision to bow out may finally have killed off her onscreen nemesis for good, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are further attempts to wring more money out of the Michael Myers story. It would be a tragedy if people’s only experience of the Halloween story was in watching the final few movies because the 1978 original is a seminal work which inspired the genre for the next decade or so and its originality and quality are beyond dispute.
The plot itself is quite formulaic-a child goes berserk one Halloween night and kills his sister, is locked away in a mental hospital, manages to escape a decade or so later and goes back on the rampage. With a nod to movies like The Thing (which appears on the TV screens in Haddonfield) Carpenter successfully reasoned that less is often more and so we are rarely given a clear view of Michael Myers. This ratchets up the tension amazingly and serves to transform him from a simple killer to an abstract concept of omnipresent evil (as Dr. Loomis observes, “Death has come to your town sheriff”). We know that he is stalking Laurie (Lee Curtis) and will very soon try and kill her, but the subtle camerawork and full and effective use of the widescreen frame means that the climax is still something of a shock and nonetheless terrifying. With one of the most effective scores ever written for a film we are never allowed to feel comfortable, even if most of the killing is reserved for the last third of the film.
Donald Pleasance (as Myers’s doctor cum zookeeper) and Jamie Lee Curtis (his sister and prey) effectively interact with the chilling environment constructed for them, and Pleasance’s steady revelation of his patient’s background add to the aura of fear (and also tragedy) surrounding the force that’s about to strike Haddonfield. Though we first encounter Myers as a small boy he is quickly stripped of any humanity and instead comes to be seen as a figure of unfathomable evil. This may seem trite now but Halloween was the first of the slasher films (a term I think we should use carefully in relation to this film) to frame itself in this way, and without doubt the most effective when compared to others, e.g. Friday the 13th’s Jason.
Michael Myers should have been allowed to retire after his first outing. Though Halloween II is the least worst of the spin-offs (and was actually written at the same time as the original with the intention of releasing the first two movies as single, contiguous whole) even it falls a little way into the trap of being a conventional slasher movie. The original is an innovative and unique experiment in the psychology of terror and stunningly effective and simple cinematography, and its legacy is plain to see in many subsequent horror films.