HALLOWEEN (1978)

With 1978’s Halloween currently in theaters (the film returned to cinemas on September 27th via CineLife Entertainment/Trancas International Films/Compass International Pictures), we’re continuing at HalloweenMovies.com our celebration of the John Carpenter classic via a series of essays on the subject.

Culled from the 2018 best-selling book My Favorite Horror Movie, which features 48 essays by horror creators on the films which shaped them (from our own Editor-in-Chief Sean Decker to Contracted star Matt Mercer and beyond), they serve to explore just why 40 years later, The Shape still terrifies.

In our final essay from the book, horror luminary Michael Gingold digs deep into Haddonfield.

HALLOWEEN
by
MICHAEL GINGOLD

All through my preteen years, I couldn’t handle horror films. I was that kid who was freaked out by scary  stuff. Forget watching through my fingers; I would actually stand while viewing genre flicks on TV, just in case they got to be too much and I had to run from the room. I was a big fan of Godzilla and similar monster movies, but the harder-core stuff—even the ones that were rated PG—was too intimidating. I did want to see Jaws when it first hit theaters just because I was so into sharks at the time, though the “May be too intense for younger children” note on the ads forestalled that possibility.

Things began to change around the time I turned twelve. I went to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers with my family and made it through unscathed (though today, I’m stunned it got away with a PG rating). Through the following spring and summer, I began getting curious about horror, and seeing a few of the R-rated examples—like Phantasm and Alien—along with Jaws, finally. They all had the desired effect, and I hid my eyes during Phantasm’s silver sphere scene and Alien’s chest-burster. Still, I began not only getting comfortable with being frightened by film, but enjoying the sensation—the natural high it created. My intrigue was fueled by a cover story in Newsweek called “Hollywood’s Scary Summer,” and the emergence of a new magazine called Fangoria (which featured my old friend Godzilla on the front of its first issue). And later in 1979, I saw the movie that made me love being scared.

I was vaguely familiar with John Carpenter’s Halloween, having seen a television ad or two when it first opened in October 1978. At that time, a newspaper-workers’ strike had shut down The New York Times, the paper in our household, so I didn’t read much about the movie then; in fact, I read more about it during a family vacation to England in the summer of ’79, when it had opened in the UK to lots of positive attention. Back then, however, before the video market took over, popular movies were rereleased all the time within a year or so of their initial openings, and so it was with Halloween, which returned to theaters in October ’79. That’s when I first saw it, and I didn’t know what hit me.

Never mind the now-classic opening single-take shot from young Michael Myers’ point of view; the damn music frightened me before the film proper even started. Carpenter’s simple but chilling 5/4-time theme had my hackles raised within the first minute, and the movie had me in its grip from then on. I don’t recall if I screamed out loud, but my grandmother, who took me to the movie (my parents just weren’t into the horror stuff), was genuinely concerned afterward at how frightened I had been.

She needn’t have worried. I had indeed been scared half to death by Halloween, more than by anything I’d ever watched before, and yet I had found it exhilarating. It was a huge change in the way I experienced movies. A year before, I had barely been able to take a made-for-TV schlocker like Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell; now, a movie that was originally advertised with the tagline “When were you last scared out of your wits by a movie?” had completely lived up to that promise—and I enjoyed the hell out of it. (The reissue ads, conversely, were stocked with laudatory quotes from critics. Contrary to popular belief, Halloween attracted a number of positive reviews from the start; one of my favorite excerpts—I can’t recall the source now—was “It’ll scare the seeds out of your pumpkin.”)

Part of the reason Halloween was so effective was that it literally got me where I lived. I grew up in exactly the kind of suburban town where Michael comes home to do his dirty work, and what makes the scenes between his prologue slaying of his sister and his All Hallows’ Eve rampage work so well is how ordinary, and thus relatable, they are. There’s nothing special about Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie and her friends, nor are they the hopped-up sex and party monsters of so many subsequent slasher films; they’re just typical teenage girls with typical teenage concerns. Producer and co-scripter Debra Hill reportedly wrote most of the heroines’ dialogue, and demonstrated a remarkable skill at capturing the tone and tenor with which young women conversed—not to mention that Lynda’s (P.J. Soles) favorite expression “totally” anticipated Frank and Moon Zappa’s hit song “Valley Girl” by four years.

Once we’ve gotten to know our central trio, along with young Tommy (Brian Andrews), whose dread of Halloween and “the boogeyman” helps amplify our own, Carpenter tightens the screws with merciless precision, demonstrating a remarkable handle on composition, framing and pacing. Even as I was caught up in Laurie and co.’s escalating fright, Halloween was the first time I was aware that a movie was directed, and I was able to admire Carpenter’s craft at the same time it was holding me in a death grip.

I became an instant Carpenter fan, eagerly anticipating each new film from the director (I didn’t have to wait long; The Fog debuted only five months later). I reviewed Halloween for my junior-high-school newspaper; one of the first pieces of criticism I ever wrote. I attempted to teach myself Carpenter’s Halloween theme on the family piano, and almost mastered it. I read Curtis Richards’ novelization and was puzzled by why the author felt it necessary to throw in the distracting backstory about Samhain (if only I knew…).

And when Halloween II opened in 1981, three friends and I went on Halloween night. This was back before sequels and franchise pictures had taken over the movie scene the way they have now. We weren’t dutifully catching the latest entry in an established series, we were getting more Halloween! The entire audience was primed for it, and we all responded with screams and laughs at the right places, shouted advice to Jamie Lee Curtis and “Shut up!” when that dumb cop says something stupid during the climactic action. Some consider Halloween II unworthy of its predecessor, but I’ll probably never be able to judge it objectively, because seeing it that first time was one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life. Part of the thrill was that we all went in costume, figuring the disguises would help our 14 and 15-year-old selves get into this R-rated movie without a parent or adult guardian, and we were right; seeing it unchaperoned was part of the excitement.

In the years since, I’ve seen hundreds (thousands?) of horror films, but none will ever hold the place in my heart that Halloween does. Halloween was the movie that crept into my psyche and unlocked that area where the fascination with the dark, scary and unknown resides. It transformed me from a casual fan of fright cinema to a passionate follower of the genre – just at the right time, when horror had its explosion of popularity in the very late ’70s and early ’80s. It was the film that I held all subsequent scare films up against. And it led me to a career in the horror field, fulfilling the dream that Halloween first inspired. One of my proudest achievements is the 8,000-word-plus history of the cinematic Michael Myers saga that I wrote for the booklet accompanying Shout! Factory and Anchor Bay’s Halloween: The Complete Collection deluxe Blu-ray boxed set. (On the other hand, when I took a gig scripting a very-low-budget movie called Halloween Night, my attempt to honor Carpenter’s legacy was completely stymied by the execution.)

I’ve seen Halloween countless times since that first viewing back in ’79, and while it doesn’t frighten me now like it did back then, I am still in thrall to what a relentlessly well-crafted film it is. To me, it’s one of those perfect movies, one that doesn’t have a wasted moment, in which all the elements click together perfectly. From the performances to the music to Dean Cundey’s mobile cinematography, which draws us right into the action (though it does not, as commonly thought, take Michael’s point of view at any point after his childhood prologue), every part of Halloween works in concert toward one goal: To terrify you, to leave you shaking when it’s over, yet to make you feel elated rather than worn down. Halloween did that to my 12-year-old self better than any other movie has since, and that’s why it remains my favorite horror movie.

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Check out the new trailer for the re-release of 1978’s Halloween below, and for theatre and ticketing info, please visit www.CineLifeEntertainment.com

TAKEN FROM THE BOOK
MY FAVORITE HORROR MOVIE
© 2018 CHRISTIAN ACKERMAN/BLACK VORTEX CINEMA
MYFAVORITEHORRORMOVIE.COM

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Trancas International Films or any other agency, organization, employer or company.