Halloween

John Carpenter, USA, 1978, 91 mins

Sixteen years ago six-year-old Michael Myers killed his sister and her boyfriend while they were making out. Since then this force of "pure evil" has been incarcerated in a top security asylum. But now he's escaped. He's coming home to the sleepy little town of Haddonfield to terrify and murder a fresh crop of teenagers.

I have to admit that I was a late convert to the Halloween cult. Every time I tried to watch it on TV I would get bored and wonder what all the fuss was about. Then I saw it in the cinema. I can truly say that sitting in the dark, with an appreciative audience, and watching the drama unfold on the big, wide screen was a revelatory experience. Halloween is one of those films that really benefits from being shown in the cinema.

One of the most profitable and influential films ever, Halloween has now spawned two generations of imitators, from Scream and company in the late 1990s. Although one would have to acknowledge that Halloween itself rips off its seasonal title and its subjective killers eye view shots from the earlier Black Christmas (1975), in every other way it defines the paradigm for the modern slasher film. Scream has, of course, made almost all these rules explicit - the puritanical messages of "have sex and you die", "drink and you die" and "do drugs and you die" along with the more general "don't go in the house", "don't answer the phone" etc. - but a knowledge of these doesn't stop Halloween from being a great roller-coaster ride of a movie; perfect entertainment for the night of October 31st in any year.

Review by Keith H. Brown
Taken from EUFS Programe Autumn 1999