Published via Ecency

(source:tmdb.org)

A very long time ago, Radiotelevision Belgrade, then still part of the Yugoslav television network JRT, aired a cycle of five horror films. Of those five, four were directly or indirectly based on classic works of horror literature and featured iconic characters: Dracula, Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The television editors, however, saved the best for last. The fifth film, the only one to feature an original monster, was Halloween, a 1978 film directed by John Carpenter, known as one of the most successful and influential films of all time and nowadays recognised as one of the best films in the history of the genre.

The film begins with a prologue set on Halloween night 1963 in the small town of Haddonsfield, Illinois, and shows how a 15-year-old babysitter, Judith Myers, is stabbed to death by a masked killer later revealed to be her 6-year-old brother Michael. The child killer spends the next fifteen years in a psychiatric institution until escaping shortly before Halloween night 1978. Dr Loomis (played by Donald Pleasence), the psychiatrist who was unsuccessfully treating Michael, is convinced that his patient will return to his hometown in order to kill again. While he tries to track him down and stop him, three female high school students in Haddonsfield – Annie Brackett (played by Nancy Kyes), Lynda Van der Klok (played by P. J. Soles) and Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) – are preparing to spend the next Halloween night, unaware that they are being stalked by a determined masked killer.

Even those viewers who care little about the horror genre are going to be impressed by the filmmaking skills employed by John Carpenter in Halloween. Faced with a low budget, he showed great ingenuity, but also great discipline and care about every dollar spent. The film is tightly edited into 90 minutes, and almost every shot and every scene is painstakingly shot, staged and directed. Carpenter makes another important contribution with his memorable musical score, which, despite being monotonous on its own, adds a lot to the atmosphere of dread. Despite Halloween being a clear example of a 'slasher film', the body count is limited and the violence is less explicit in comparison with later films of the same subgenre. Carpenter has obviously taken lessons from Hitchcock and he creates a feeling of fear and unease through suspense rather than shocks; there are many examples of that in scenes when Myers' victims share the same shot with Myers unaware of his presence.

The acting is good, although not perfect. The best member of the cast is Donald Pleasence, a character actor who obviously enjoyed the role so different from the villains he had played before. He does a much better job than Jamie Lee Curtis who is, nevertheless, good enough in her role as a modest, naive girl who at the end convincingly transforms into a formidable female warrior able to, at least when it matters the most, give Myers a run for his money. Curtis is in many ways one of the persons most responsible for creating the popular genre trope of the Final Girl, as well as genre stereotypes in which young characters involved in sex, drugs and similar 'problematic' behaviour get punished by becoming killers' victims. Halloween, however, benefits most from the character of Myers despite that character being the most mysterious; he doesn't say a word, for the most part wears an iconic mask, his feelings and his motives remain a mystery while he goes on his merciless campaign of murder. It is his irrationality which makes him frighteningly evil, and irrationality in general is a source of fear, especially at the end when his character doesn't succumb to injuries that would have killed and stopped any normal human, thus becoming a supernatural and near-mythical figure.

All those qualities were recognised by influential critics, most notably Roger Ebert, who otherwise had little love for slasher films. Even more importantly, Halloween was accepted as something new and refreshing by audiences, helping Carpenter to have his first major commercial hit and become one of the most important auteurs of 1980s Hollywood. Sadly, its success spawned many uninspired imitations that would later be mercilessly parodied by Wes Craven's Scream, and, even more sadly, numerous sequels and remakes, none of which came close to the quality of the original.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)