Halloween (1978)

Movie: Halloween (1978), directed by John Carpenter

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.58 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:08:22 (recovery run)

 

I know, I know—how cliché to watch Halloween on Halloween. But here’s the thing: I was short on time because I needed to get my Pandemic Trick-or-Treat Station of (non-)Doom set up outside, and since that included dealing with freezing temperatures and the four inches of snow we’d gotten the day before, I really wanted to get my run out of the way early and couldn’t spend my usual indecisive hour cruising the streaming services looking for just the right movie. Besides, it had been a while since I’d seen the original, and it deserves to be revisited. So, Halloween on Halloween it is.

 

Since there’s almost no chance that anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet (heck, there’s almost no chance that anyone’s reading this at all!), we’ll speed-run the summary: a six-year-old kid named Michael Myers stabs his post-coital teenage sister to death for no apparent reason, spends 15 years catatonic in a psychiatric facility, and then breaks out to steal a William Shatner mask and kill a bunch of babysitters in his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. His pistol-packin’ psychiatrist Dr. Loomis tries to warn the local police, oblivious to the fact that Cassandra-like portentous ramblings about Myers being the Ultimate Evil Ever Unleashed might be a bit of a buzzkill and therefore of limited success. Meanwhile, when all her babysitter friends wind up getting the pointy end of a butcher knife in their various soft bits, it’s up to booksmart-and-dateless Laurie Strode to protect the little kids from the unstoppable bogeyman.

 

I’m not sure there’s anything good left to say about Halloween that hasn’t been said before. It’s got everything you’d want in a horror movie, with the possible and notable exception of excessive gore (which it absolutely doesn’t need). The script is solid—okay, I admit that the characterization is a little thin and some of the dialogue is iffy, but on balance, the characters are believable and their motivations are sound. And that’s why where the script really shines is the plot. So often in horror, people do things for no reason other than the story demands it, or make choices that seem totally counter to their personalities or interests. In Halloween, the story moves forward because everybody does things that make sense for them in the moment—Annie makes popcorn, she spills butter on her clothes, she goes to the laundry room to wash them, she gets locked inside, etc. etc.—and it’s weird how rare that seems to be in the genre.

 

Anyway, in no particular order and off the top of my pointy little head, here’s a further list of stuff I adore about Halloween: Jamie Lee Curtis AND P.J. Soles (I mean COME ON); one of the most effective musical scores ever; Michael’s head tilt while he appreciates a corpse; the establishment of the trope that the nerd girl survives; Donald Pleasence as a psychiatrist who’s somehow diagnosed Michael as being pure evil even though the patient has never said a word in 15 years; jump scares that actually work; that shot when Michael suddenly sits up in the background after having been “stabbed to death”; the way Michael is just walking around Haddonfield out in the open because no one knows enough to be scared of him yet; the way that the little kids are always right about the bogeyman.

 

My big gripe is that Halloween was so good, the makers had to shelve their original vision of the franchise, which was to be different unrelated Halloween-themed horror stories in each installment. The first story was too successful, though, and so Halloween II was instead a direct sequel with the same characters. That’s why Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a totally standalone installment with no Haddonfield, Michael Myers, etc.—they’d gone back to their original plan, only to find that, true to form, Michael Myers refused to die; fans revolted, and every Halloween film since then has been Michael, Michael, Michael. (As for me personally, while I acknowledge it’s not the best in the series, Halloween III is the one I most enjoy watching. I hereby await the mob of angry villagers with torches and Frankenstein rakes.)

 

If it’s been some time since you made that first stop in Haddonfield, do yourself a favor and take another look, because I don’t know how much was sheer genius and how much was pure dumb luck, but the makers really captured lightning in a bottle on this one. It’s not the first slasher out there, but it’s one of the best, and in it you’ll see the seeds of plenty that have come along since.

 

Oh, and Happy Halloween!