Halloween Review
Halloween is a 1978 slasher written and directed by John Carpenter. The film had a huge influence on the horror genre, becoming the archetypal blueprint for the slasher for many years to come.
Story
Michael Myers, a mentally disturbed man, has been kept inside an asylum since he killed his sister when he was six years old. Now, he's escaped and has set his sights on Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), a random teenager looking after two children on Halloween night.
If this movie sounds like a million other slashers you've seen, that's because this is the one that started them all. I bring this up, because I'm not knocking the story down any points precisely for this reason. I mean, the entire thing is predictable from start to finish. If you've seen Nightmare On Elm Street, It Follows or even just Cabin in the Woods, you know exactly how this is going to go. However, again, this is the film that gave birth to literally every trope you've seen in the serial killer horror genre, which unfortunately means that it's the baby daddy of all the problems that came with it.
The characters are pretty stock horror characters: nerd, slut, virgin etc. and that's literally all the dimension they get. This, again, is a problem I have with pretty much all slasher movies. How am I supposed to care what happens to these people if I know nothing about them? The most disappointing character is Michael Myers himself. There's a lot of mystery to him, which is good, but there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense. For example, I like how at first we don't know why he killed his sister, but then that just becomes a plot point that's never explained. In fact, the whole reason why Myers is killing in the first place is a big, unexplained elephant in the room with a giant question mark on it. His psychiatrist (who also isn't much of a character, just a plot device) explains that Myers has no more emotions and completely devoid of feelings. If that's the case, why does he have the impulse to kill people? If he doesn't get anything out of it what's the point? Wouldn't he just be spending the rest of his life staring into the corner of a room or something?
The screenplay is really cruddy. The expositional dialogue is terribly written and put in weird spots of the story. The fluff dialogue, where the characters are just supposed to be talking like normal human beings, also doesn't do its job very well.
With all of this negativity you might be thinking "This guy doesn't like a horror classic? KILL HIM WITH FIRE!" or perhaps "Wow, was there anything this guy liked in the movie?" Well, to respond to your first thought: Please don't. I'd like to finish the semester first. To answer your second question: Yes actually. I rather like the pacing of the film. It's very reminiscent of Jaws (another heavily influential crowd-pleaser). It doesn't show Michael right away and instead lets you imagine how scary he must be by the way people talk about him and as you glimpse him out of the corner of the frame. The pacing is also great in individual scenes, setting up creepy scenarios and then executing them with deliberately slow precision, winding up the tension bit by bit like a jack-in-the-box. However, a lot of the would-be tense moments are hampered somewhat by the "final girl" trope that you know has to be in this movie. You know that she's going to live, so there's no use getting worked up over any scenario in which she could die.
Technical
The reason the tension is good at all is because the film is competently made. However, I wouldn't call the technical aspects spectacular.
I can't tell if the lighting for this film set the standard for horror movies as well or if it was just due to limitation of the available technology, but it once again has the same kind of lighting as a lot of horror films that came in the decade after it. During the day time scenes, the light is always a bland, sunny orange. In the night time scenes, all is blue or black darkness and the light is either Halloween orange or moonlight blue. Once again, I get it: first horror movie to use these tropes, but I can't help but be unimpressed and bored after all the horror films I've seen that do use it, historical context be damned.
The acting is all around pretty awful except for two performances. One is Jamie Lee Curtis who would've been the stand out performance if her character had any personality to speak of. The other is Donald Pleasence, who plays the psychiatrist. Once again, he would've been actually memorable if his character had any personality at all.
The cinematography is a mixed bag. Another annoying trend that I didn't notice was a trend until this movie did it was that the first time you get a look at our lead, the camera is in a wide shot, making us feel literally detached from our main character. I don't understand why horror movies do this. If you're trying to make us hope she won't die it's not gonna help to make her feel as unidentifiable as possible. There are also a lot of shots where you feel they either didn't try with the composition or the composition is so obvious you know exactly where Myers will pop up. However, there are some good points in the cinematography's favor. Some of the shots are really well thought out, like when a car pulls up to the Myers home. Now, you could just have the camera capture them in the front seat just pulling up to the house and do a cut to following them going to the front door. Instead, they get a shot of the front of the car, that has the word "Sheriff" on it, showing us who's visiting the house. Then, as they get out of the car, the camera rises above the car and we get a wide shot that shows us the actors moving towards the door.
Most of the time the sound editing is good and even effective. There were a few jump scares that actually got to me and I attribute that entirely to just how loud they were. However, sometimes you can tell when they switched to using the audio for a completely different take and it's really distracting.
The one undeniably cool thing about the technical side of the film is the music, especially the film's theme. It's creepy and calculating, but also has energy and a sense of something like fun. The rest of the score is also responsible for why a lot of the tension works so well, as it rises in intensity and volume leading up to the scares.
Summary: While I can't say that Halloween doesn't hold up I can't say that I liked it either. It's still got some good scares and Michael Myers will never not be iconic as a slasher, but the technical problems, story issues and the fact that I've been exposed to so many jokes about every single one of the tropes it uses made it impossible for me to actually have fun with it. On the whole, I wouldn't recommend this one to somebody who hasn't seen it. With so many other, better horror movies out there, this one just isn't worth spending 90 mins on.
Story
Michael Myers, a mentally disturbed man, has been kept inside an asylum since he killed his sister when he was six years old. Now, he's escaped and has set his sights on Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), a random teenager looking after two children on Halloween night.
If this movie sounds like a million other slashers you've seen, that's because this is the one that started them all. I bring this up, because I'm not knocking the story down any points precisely for this reason. I mean, the entire thing is predictable from start to finish. If you've seen Nightmare On Elm Street, It Follows or even just Cabin in the Woods, you know exactly how this is going to go. However, again, this is the film that gave birth to literally every trope you've seen in the serial killer horror genre, which unfortunately means that it's the baby daddy of all the problems that came with it.
The characters are pretty stock horror characters: nerd, slut, virgin etc. and that's literally all the dimension they get. This, again, is a problem I have with pretty much all slasher movies. How am I supposed to care what happens to these people if I know nothing about them? The most disappointing character is Michael Myers himself. There's a lot of mystery to him, which is good, but there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense. For example, I like how at first we don't know why he killed his sister, but then that just becomes a plot point that's never explained. In fact, the whole reason why Myers is killing in the first place is a big, unexplained elephant in the room with a giant question mark on it. His psychiatrist (who also isn't much of a character, just a plot device) explains that Myers has no more emotions and completely devoid of feelings. If that's the case, why does he have the impulse to kill people? If he doesn't get anything out of it what's the point? Wouldn't he just be spending the rest of his life staring into the corner of a room or something?
The screenplay is really cruddy. The expositional dialogue is terribly written and put in weird spots of the story. The fluff dialogue, where the characters are just supposed to be talking like normal human beings, also doesn't do its job very well.
With all of this negativity you might be thinking "This guy doesn't like a horror classic? KILL HIM WITH FIRE!" or perhaps "Wow, was there anything this guy liked in the movie?" Well, to respond to your first thought: Please don't. I'd like to finish the semester first. To answer your second question: Yes actually. I rather like the pacing of the film. It's very reminiscent of Jaws (another heavily influential crowd-pleaser). It doesn't show Michael right away and instead lets you imagine how scary he must be by the way people talk about him and as you glimpse him out of the corner of the frame. The pacing is also great in individual scenes, setting up creepy scenarios and then executing them with deliberately slow precision, winding up the tension bit by bit like a jack-in-the-box. However, a lot of the would-be tense moments are hampered somewhat by the "final girl" trope that you know has to be in this movie. You know that she's going to live, so there's no use getting worked up over any scenario in which she could die.
Technical
The reason the tension is good at all is because the film is competently made. However, I wouldn't call the technical aspects spectacular.
I can't tell if the lighting for this film set the standard for horror movies as well or if it was just due to limitation of the available technology, but it once again has the same kind of lighting as a lot of horror films that came in the decade after it. During the day time scenes, the light is always a bland, sunny orange. In the night time scenes, all is blue or black darkness and the light is either Halloween orange or moonlight blue. Once again, I get it: first horror movie to use these tropes, but I can't help but be unimpressed and bored after all the horror films I've seen that do use it, historical context be damned.
The acting is all around pretty awful except for two performances. One is Jamie Lee Curtis who would've been the stand out performance if her character had any personality to speak of. The other is Donald Pleasence, who plays the psychiatrist. Once again, he would've been actually memorable if his character had any personality at all.
The cinematography is a mixed bag. Another annoying trend that I didn't notice was a trend until this movie did it was that the first time you get a look at our lead, the camera is in a wide shot, making us feel literally detached from our main character. I don't understand why horror movies do this. If you're trying to make us hope she won't die it's not gonna help to make her feel as unidentifiable as possible. There are also a lot of shots where you feel they either didn't try with the composition or the composition is so obvious you know exactly where Myers will pop up. However, there are some good points in the cinematography's favor. Some of the shots are really well thought out, like when a car pulls up to the Myers home. Now, you could just have the camera capture them in the front seat just pulling up to the house and do a cut to following them going to the front door. Instead, they get a shot of the front of the car, that has the word "Sheriff" on it, showing us who's visiting the house. Then, as they get out of the car, the camera rises above the car and we get a wide shot that shows us the actors moving towards the door.
Most of the time the sound editing is good and even effective. There were a few jump scares that actually got to me and I attribute that entirely to just how loud they were. However, sometimes you can tell when they switched to using the audio for a completely different take and it's really distracting.
The one undeniably cool thing about the technical side of the film is the music, especially the film's theme. It's creepy and calculating, but also has energy and a sense of something like fun. The rest of the score is also responsible for why a lot of the tension works so well, as it rises in intensity and volume leading up to the scares.
Summary: While I can't say that Halloween doesn't hold up I can't say that I liked it either. It's still got some good scares and Michael Myers will never not be iconic as a slasher, but the technical problems, story issues and the fact that I've been exposed to so many jokes about every single one of the tropes it uses made it impossible for me to actually have fun with it. On the whole, I wouldn't recommend this one to somebody who hasn't seen it. With so many other, better horror movies out there, this one just isn't worth spending 90 mins on.
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