Halloween (1978)
One element that I've always felt was the main strength of "Halloween" is the way that it is, at heart, a monster movie. This distinguishes it from other slashers like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Black Christmas".
While, Leatherface in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a nightmarish figure, in the end he's just a weird guy who likes to wear other people's faces. The (horrendous) Plantinum Dunes remake of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" tried to change this somewhat and it just didn't feel like a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" movie to me as a result. The more recent "Texas Chainsaw" reinstated Leatherface's inner vulnerability (even if that movie wasn't any good either).
But it is only when we get to the series more closely following Carpenter's approach to the genre that we get the real 'monsters'. The lumbering Jason from the "Friday the 13th" sequels and Freddy from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series. (See my reviews for both those series here.) Watching them run around causing havoc is not really so far removed from Dracula or even Godzilla. A central inhuman villain with a supernatural side to them where we are excited by their pattern of attack and keen to figure out their potential weaknesses.
Where "Halloween" really holds its own however is the down-to-earth plausibility (initially). The setting doesn't feel odd or quirky. The only thing strange about the picture is the villain, the monster, who seems to go beyond what we think should be possible.
We begin the film with a first-person perspective of the killer, but then it is revealed that the culprit is a fairly young child and a pretty normal-looking one. We want to know what led him to become a killer, but no explanation is provided and, from what we can tell, no explanation exists. This is a normal child who, for some unfathomable reason, has decided to kill.
This sort of scenario is not unknown and it's unsurprising that when we jump forward to the main movie we discover the our killer, Michael Myers, has been in regular meetings with a psychiatrist called Dr. Loomis. What is more surprising is that, having seen this child stay pretty much silent for around 15 years in a secure facility, Dr. Loomis has decided that Myers is evil. It's an unusual diagnosis and in this, Halloween is following the framework of Dracula. Dr. Loomis is our Dr. Van Helsing here. Van Helsing was a doctor who insisted on belief in the occult. Loomis is a psychiatrist who insists on belief in pure evil. This does not mean that Van Helsing is a bad doctor and it does not mean that Loomis is a bad psychiatrist. It simply means that they are aware of unusual exceptions to the norm. But naturally in real life we would berate them for their unconventional views. It just so happens that within the fictional worlds they inhabit, it turns out that they are right.
Naturally Mike Myers, all grown up, gets out and on the loose. He shouldn't be able to drive since he's never practiced. He shouldn't be able to overpower people in struggles because he's been confined mostly to a cell for years. He should not be able to single-handedly move a gravestone. But Myers is more than just a man on the loose. He is evil. And there's nothing gratuitous about the kills he performs. It's often just one quick stab and it's over.
Speaking of "one quick stab and it's over", can I just quickly talk about the sex in this movie? Why does everyone take such a ridiculously short time having sex. This is supposed to be the movie that inspired the "if you have sex, you die" rule for slasher movies, but in opening scene I barely had any idea that anyone ever had sex at all. Mike Myers' sister takes her boyfriend upstairs and he barely has time even to get undressed and re-dressed before he's back downstairs saying goodbye and goodnight. If it were not for the sister being randomly still undressed and staring into a mirror upstairs I don't think there would be any clue at all what had been going on up there. In another sex scene too, one moment it looks like they are just making out and the next minute it's like, "What, you just had sex? And you've finished already?" Ah, whatever.
Anyway, overall I have to admit I find "Halloween" a little on the dull side. I must say I think it makes "Scream" rather unnecessary, since it already has a number of points where it is spoofing its own genre and, to my mind, much better than anything done in "Scream". (The notable example being the subverted 'weird noises down the phone' scene.) The acting is kind of awful, but the writing is worse. It's off-putting how much older the actresses look than the ages they are supposed to be portraying (with one of them being 29, a full 11 years older than they are supposed to be). But as a monster movie, "Halloween" has some very effective moments and an underlying sense of fun (which every horror movie needs).
B-