Halloween (1978)

By Martin Davis

November 2023

I had only watched ‘Halloween’ once previously and that was when it was released in UK cinemas in January of 1979. My recollection is that of being somewhat underwhelmed by a pretty average horror movie and I’d never felt the desire to see it again or any of its many sequels with the exception of ‘Halloween H20’ (1998) which I recall watching in the late 90s for some reason but can remember literally nothing about.

So after nearly four and a half decades I decided to revisit John Carpenter’s much revered slasher flick to see if maybe I’d misjudged it. This is a film after all that began one of Hollywood’s longest running franchises.

It all starts off promisingly enough with a flashback to 1963 which shows six-year-old Michael Myers brutally murdering his teenage sister. Fast forward fifteen years and psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and Nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) are on their way to the sanitarium where Myers is incarcerated to escort him to a court hearing. Upon arrival Myers and various inmates have managed to get out of the building and are wandering around aimlessly. Myers manages to steal their car and escape and Loomis is convinced he is heading towards his hometown of Haddonfield intent on a killing spree. Which of course he is.

Once the stalking and slaughtering begins, we lurch from one implausible scene to another until, not with a bang but a whimper, we reach the faintly ridiculous conclusion. The paper-thin plot would almost be tolerable if there were any palpable sense of tension or threat. Myers is about as menacing as Kermit the Frog. He lumbers around so slowly it’s puzzling that he manages to remain on the loose for so long, until you realise that inexplicably he has conveniently developed the power to vanish into thin air at will. The acting is mostly woeful with the exception of Pleasence who grows increasingly agitated at the loss of his number one psycho and his inability to capture him and Jamie Lee Curtis as Myers priority prey, who at least has some depth to her character.

On the positive side there’s some fine cinematography and Carpenter’s score is effective, even if it does owe a debt to the ‘Tubular Bells’ track used as the main theme for ‘The Exorcist’ (1973). Often credited with reinvigorating the horror genre and leading to whole slew of slasher film imitations throughout the late 70s and 80s (some good, some bad, most very bad), the high regard for ‘Halloween’ remains a mystery to me.

Bob Clark’s far superior and genuinely unsettling ‘Black Christmas’ (1974) did all this to much better effect previously. It’s hard to believe that this movie is from the same director who two years earlier gave us the tight and efficient low-budget thriller ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (1974) and would go on to direct the horror masterpiece ‘The Thing’ (1982). This one just left me cold but not in the way intended.