This was not the first slasher. That argument starts sounding like what was the first punk record very quickly. Nevertheless, it's worth nodding to a few formative titles. Peeping Tom had a serial killer using an unusual weapon tied to his mental state. Psycho swapped parents for its killer's drive but kept it deadly. Black Christmas had the killer make crazy phone calls to terrorise young students before doing them in by a variety of ghastly means. And then John Carpenter, at the dawn of a career that had already produced a smartly funny sci-fi and keen update on a western siege at an outer suburban cop shop, thought this up. Originally titled The Babysitter murders because the '70s, Halloween had significant traits that were used in the decade to come and beyond it like moulded parts.
In a decade busily attempting to remake The Exorcist as horror moved to the better budgeted mainstream, plain old murder might have seemed passe as the feature of a movie. Carpenter and writing partner Debra Hill had to think small budget and spare means and found a series of killings by a perp without apparent motive of the kind of people who would be paying to see the movie. They hung it on a popular holiday, already rich in macabre iconography, made the bad guy look like a deranged, overgrown trick or treater like the charges under the care of the babysitting teens so there seemed to be no escape from him. That's why he just walks.
Why should he run? He's the boogeyman, he can take his time. Not only that, sometimes he doesn't move at all. There he is in the distance, his white and featureless mask glowing in the autumn afternoon. Standing firm among sheets flapping on a clothesline; there one glance, gone the next. Even when he drives it's slow, the pace of assurance. In the screenplay he bears the name Michael Myers but in directions and descriptions he is known as The Shape. The Shape, expressionless, form without substance, a ghost with a kitchen knife, strolling through your neighbourhood. Later imitators tried a tweak here and there but everything just came back to the mask and the silence.
But for this to work you need victims to care about. The kids might seem bratty but at least one of them really does see the boogeyman through the loungeroom window and isn't believed when we know he's telling the truth. We've already seen him bullied at school. We've even seen him saved from them by The Shape with what feels like affinity. When the shot through Myers' car windows following little Tommy turns the corner with the boy as the creepy theme music plays, it's hard to tell if the boogeyman is feeling protecting or menacing.
We are not allowed to forget Michael's power, craft or violence because Dr Loomis reminds us of it in almost every scene he's in, railing against the man in language less like a psychiatrist than a holy rolling witch burning preacher. Donald Pleasance, one-man lynch mob, who carries a revolver in the patient-retrieval mission he is one, leaks his fear and awe: when seeing a mauled corpse of a dog he murmurs, "he got hungry". In a well turned moment he begins casually describing Myers as a patient which finishes with, "he had the blackest eyes ... the devil's eyes". This would stick out as histrionic bombast in a demonic possession movie but Loomis is not a priest and Michael is not Pazuzu, the fact that the profession has been driven to these terms gives us pause. Pleasance's crisp nasal transatlantic keeps us wary of The Shape that quietly appears through rear windows and the shade of the footpath trees.
And then it is the girls we care about. Whether it's the wisecracking sarcasm of Annie or the goofy Linda with her constant interjection, "totally", we are soon to view them as victims and, for all the venereal larking of their talk and the fragile triviality of their concerns we get to know them just well enough for us to want them to emerge safely from a night that rasps with blades and tightens like garottes.
Finally, it's Laurie. Laurie Strode is the bookish virgin with the sensible attitude. She's so good at school that she can give an articulate answer to a literary question in class just after she's seen the creepy car across the road stop where it shouldn't. The sassy duo of Annie and Linda tease her but it's gentle, the sense that they value her company deeply for her stability and gravity is strong. Debra Hill's teen dialogue is a hit, here, letting this kind of information through the perky, quirky cascade. Laurie with her autumnal brown shades and low-styled hair carries her own power even if she doesn't know it yet. Between the three of them, she is the only one who can see Michael in his overalls and white mask, standing out among the lawns and hedges of the tree lined neighbourhoods. She saw the car while in class, the distant figure on the footpath and then among the sheets of the clothesline, there then not there, but witnessed. Their bond is clear and sealed.
This theme of a bond between final girl and killer became a frequent resort in the genre that this film started. It's own sequel did this and was taken by parts of every franchise that followed. Mostly, it's a quasi supernatural element to cast in among the scares and occasionally it's there to bump the tension by suggesting links along moral lines. In Halloween it is a kind of presage of the confrontation to come, the spectre of the worst thing that could happen and the desperate real-time scramble for courage in the dark.
Too often, teen slashers have been dismissed as puritanical for killing off the players of premarital sex. In later sub-genre entries this is unarguably the case (Friday the 13th made it the base motivation for the violence). Of seven kills in the film, only two are sex related (I'm not counting one which is only indrect) and two are animals. But the charge goes deeper than body counts, suggesting that slashers generically punish teen sex. Sometimes, yes, but not here, and actually not in most of them. Separate for the moment, the killer and the film that features the killings. As one of the Faculty of Horror cohosts said perfectly well (but I have to paraphrase): the film is radical, the killer is puritanical.
Back to Laurie, for a moment, her gravity is given life by the debuting daughter of an already famous screen victim of slashing, Jamie Lee Curtis. Just as Janet Leigh's Marion Crane was famously stabbed in a frenzy, JLC's Laurie will be up against a monster who has appeared as a spectre but made the leap into the brutal third dimension to come unstoppably at her. And then it's flight or fight. And think of it: she lets slip her crush in the car with Annie and her barrier in realising it has nothing to do with sexual ethics, it's just shyness. If she could overcome that, according to the death-fuck commentators, she'd be slasher meat. Well, she is anyway so what does that say? On the other hand, Jamie Lee Curtis' iconic and resonant turn as the nebbish who surprises herself with her own action, is tested to the point of annihilation and stands up to it. Halloween is the story of her breakthrough, not someone knocking off horny teens. Jamie Lee Curtis' performance from passive to solid pragmatic pushback cast the mold.
No appreciation for this source point can be signed off without mentioning the music. Carpenter couldn't afford a Hollywood composer and so fell back on to his own resources and wrote and played it himself in partnership with Alan Howarth. That had already happened in Dark Star and more impressively with Assault on Precinct 13 (whose theme was good enough for triphop legend Tricky to lift wholesale). The Halloween theme is set in the uneasy time signature of 5/4. Instead of counting to four and looping it, try adding one to each loop. If you don't add another to normalise it you'll run into trouble in a hurry. Add to that a simple figure that played with the fifth and flattened sixth of a scale while subverting that in the bass and you have something concentrated and intense. And, guess what, it's a real theme, it goes well beyond the credits and accompanies Michael on his escapes, street crawls and lurking throughout the movie. There are other music cues but the continuous use of the dididi dididi didi didi tinkling piano and growling synthesised bass grabs us by the neck and pulls us in. Clearly influenced by Tubular Bells after its use in The Exorcist all but dictated what horror movie music should sound like (try, also, Goblin's scores for Deep Red and Suspiria) Carpenter's music for this film was another notch on its influence weapon.
A recent watch also brought to light something more generational but still significant do do with music. When Annie and Laurie are driving through the streets to their babysitting gigs the song (Don't Fear) the Reaper comes on the radio. From the mid '80s needle drop bonanza to the current day this moment would end with the song exploding from its tinny radio sound into a massive blooming blast taking it from the world of the movie into our own. But here, it's just a song on the radio. If you catch it under the dialogue it feels like a warm wink.
Seeing this at the drive-in in 1979 (Townsville: we didn't always get them on time) I was wowed by the thrill and the immersion (yes, even with those tinny metal speakers) but it's the rewatches since that have impressed this film on me. On tv here, on crumbly old VHS there, through to the one I most recently put on, the incredible 4K with Dolby Vision and Atmos, this lean and mean ninety minutes can be repeated like a favourite album. Many shared viewing experiences through that time I recall one more than any other. A woman I was courting said she wanted to see something scary so I put this on. By the finale's white knuckle tension, she was curled in a ball at the other end of the couch. This is after showing her Suspiria and the Exorcist. Yes, you can look at the incredibly resurrecting murder machine coming back to life from repeated deathblows as cliché but you need to recall that this is where that cliche was just a narrative decision, not a trope. If you let tightly-constructed horror cinema in, relax and let it work, the catharsis of it will exhilarate you. And that's the game of the name.
Viewing notes: as said above, I watched the recent Scream Factory 4K release of Halloween. Dolby Vision image is deep and dynamic. Dolby Atmos audio is immersive. I watched it on Halloween night. An old '70s slasher still compelling? "It was doing very well last night!"
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