Halloween

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Tim Arnold

Nothing less than a horror-film renaissance was spawned with the release of director John Carpenter's Halloween in 1978. Halloween also gave independent film producers something to scream about. With a budget of around $300,000 and no major studio behind them, executive producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad backed the film, which Carpenter co-wrote with Debra Hill (who also served as producer). The film went on to earn an estimated $55 million, siring several not-so-memorable sequels as well as some worthy and unworthy imitators in the early 1980s.

The plot of Halloween is a deceptively simple one. The film begins in the sleepy town of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963. Little six-year-old Michael Myers has just murdered his sister with a butcher knife. Cut to fifteen years later. Michael has reached the age of twenty-one within the walls of a mental hospital, under the care of Dr. Loomis (played with fidgety obsessiveness by Donald Pleasence). Loomis describes Myers as a monster who must never be released or allowed to escape. Of course, he escapes on the day before Halloween and returns to Haddonfield to finish what he started. With Loomis giving chase, Myers (described as "the Shape" in the credits, played by Nick Castle) returns home. Myers' modus operandi is consistent: he goes after high-school girls, including Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first and most recognizable screen role).

With a lean budget and only one star, Carpenter had to depend upon skill and luck to author a film with a tone that is as eerie as it is unprecedented in horror. His musical score is the sparsest imaginable, but the tinkling piano keys above the menacing drone of electronically produced strings and brass set a terrifying mood. Thanks to cinematographer Dean Cundey, Halloween's bright, but somehow claustrophobic daylight exterior shots make even the quiet neighborhoods of Haddonfield seem ominous. The shadowy interiors of Haddonfield's houses only half reveal the terror within them, making that threat seem even greater.

By locating the threat within a mundane, middle-class suburb, Halloween creates the giddy unease of an urban legend. The chants of trick-or-treat rhymes at the beginning of the film, the sexual precocity of the teenaged characters, the babysitting nightmare, the legendary murder fifteen years before--all recall the themes of urban legends, evoking similar campfire-ghost-story responses without exploiting them as mere plot devices. Carpenter's greatest innovation, as well as his most copied, is the use of the point of view of the monster/stalker. Audiences used to the syntax of horror films--the empty dark space over the heroine's shoulder, the fake-terror-relief-then-real-terror economy in classic horror films by William Castle and Roger Corman--were introduced to a new phenomenon. By offering the point of view of the Monster, audience instincts for fight or flight were frustrated and tension in the audience soared. Finally, the monster himself: created by production designer Tommy Lee Wallace simply by painting a two-dollar William Shatner mask white, this false face became the most uncanny of monsters, a blank slate that could hold infinite horrors in the imagination of the audience.

In 1978, audiences consisted mainly of kids the same age as the teenagers being murdered and mutilated in the film. These audiences responded enthusiastically to the psychosexual themes in Halloween. Like the many imitators and their sequels that followed--Friday the Thirteenth, Prom Night, etc.--Halloween consisted of teenagers being maimed and slaughtered before, during, or after intercourse. Sex precedes death in these films. Coitus became the foreplay for the climax(es) of the film, the murders of promiscuous (and mainly female) teenagers. Despite the apparent Puritanism and sexism of Halloween and its cousins, California-Berkeley Professor Carol Clover finds an almost feminist formula in them. Clover points out that it is, after all, Laurie Strode who survives Halloween: "The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise and scream again. ... She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). But in either case, from 1974 on, the survivor has been female."