Why "Halloween" 1978 is a classic?
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Compared to the contemporary slasher films ( with blood and guts displayed viscerally ) and even compared to John Carpenter's other horror classic The Thing, 1978's film Halloween is rather un-scary in comparison. Yes, it is a slasher, where a lot of teenagers die. Yes it has a lot of disturbing ideas and a lot of rather good cinematic tension. But it is weak in the blood department. Which begs the question: What's so special about this movie? ↩ Reply
The taken out of my ass cinema theory bullshit is incoming. ↩ Reply
After the death of Sharon Tate in 1969, the 70s films introduced the audience to a new kind of villain. A serial killer. A psychopath killer. Not somebody who kills for the cash in the your pocket. Somebody who kills because he likes it. Obviously the psycho killer was on screen before. The famous Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho was released in 1960. But the 70s saw an explosion of such films. From Steven Spielberg's Duel, through the Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, to John Carpenter's Halloween and then many other crappy imitation of it. ↩ Reply
It seems like the idea alone was foreign enough and scary enough, at the time, that people didn't need the film to have gory violence to be scary like that. Duel has no on-screen violence. Yet it is fucking nerve-racking. Dirty Harry has regular police brutality violence, not the kind of blood-porn modern horror films tend to show. Halloween does have scenes of people being stabbed to death. But the film isn't trying to show stab-wounds or rivers of blood to get the point across. The pretense of Michael Mayers ( the killer in the film ) is strong enough on its own. ↩ Reply
What is interesting is that while technically being Independent ( with a very tiny budget ) the film pulls off some great things. First of all, the sense of imagery that Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey have in this film is very on point. The film looks very good despite having no money. The compositions are amazing. I really like the way certain things are framed in the film. Like the car of the psychologist character as he talks on a pay-phone outside. Really good stuff. ↩ Reply
Carpenter uses cinema more than dialogue to communicate things in the film, making it very cinematically rich. He often will cut to a POV of the character, to let you know where everything is in relation to each other. And to build tension. In the directing department the film is stupidly well-done. Brian De Palma even steals the opening shot ( of the killer's POV ) for his film Blow Out. Now you can argue whether De Palma is better at "cinema" than Carpenter. I would suggest that the opening shot of Blow Out is a bit more fun. But there it is not trying to be serious, but rather is trying to be a kind of sort of parody of the shot in Halloween. Hell Eli Roth parodied it too in his Thanksgiving movie. ↩ Reply
But Carpenter doesn't stop there. He isn't just writer and director of the film. No... He is also trying to de-throne John William's score for Spielberg's Jaws, by doing a hell of a horror theme, himself, in this film. If you have never heard the masterpiece, which is the musical score for the film Halloween I will ask you to go and watch the Steve Terreberry cover of it. The stupid video he did ( parodying the film ) and the Steve's guitar solo section hits even harder right after watching the film. ↩ Reply
Carpenter did everything he could to the best of his abilities in this movie to make the best possible movie he could make, with the budget that the had. The budget didn't allow for much makeup effects. So they didn't go for ultra-gory film like the thing he did later with The Thing. ↩ Reply
Speaking of The Thing. In 1976 when Universal Pictures already wanted to re-make The Thing, using the original novella Who Goes There? rather than the 1951 The Thing from Another World as the source material, Carpenter was approached to make the movie. But they decided against that, since Carpenter was an independent filmmaker that didn't do anything specifically amazing up to that point. But after Halloween ( an the money it made ) Universal reconsidered him. Yet I think Carpenter knew he makes Halloween to get The Thing. At some point during the movie, the characters turn on the TV and what are they watching? That's right... The Thing from Another World. ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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