Halloween (Film Review)

1978 Compass International Pictures/Falcon International Productions
Directed by: John Carpenter; Written by: John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, P.J. Soles, and Nancy Loomis
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 91 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 10/10

Six year-old Michael Myers' sister is supposed to be babysitting him, but instead, he's left alone, while she's in the adjoining bedroom, having sex with her boyfriend. Maybe this happens to Michael all the time. When the boyfriend leaves, Michael grabs a butcher knife, visits the room of his still undressed sister, and stabs her to death. Cut to Halloween, 15 years later. A teenaged, nurturing Laurie Strode is helping a boy just as young as Myers was cross the street, as they discuss the fun things they will do while she babysits him that night. Yes, there's a psychological bucketful in the juxtaposition of mother figures in that first transition, and there are many more as the chaste Laurie's horny, sex-having friends are picked off one by one by a white-masked, now enormous Myers, who's just broken out of an insane asylum. Much has been made of Halloween's psycho-sexual issues, and the way they have influenced many horror films since. 1996's subversive horror film, Scream, breaks down and mocks these tropes one by one. Who cares. Laure Strode outlives her friends because the film establishes early on that she is smarter and more resourceful than they are. Myers' victims, male and female, show little defense against Myers but to scream or honk a horn. Strode is folding clothing hooks into daggers.
Halloween has become the archetypal slasher horror film for numerous reasons. Director, John Carpenter, brings his trademarked oppressive atmosphere, turning a suburban street into a prison of light and shadows, providing numerous corners, foreground and background tableaux, for Myers to creep through. Carpenter also provides the film's menacing score, based around an iconic, stabbing, synthesized piano line. The minimalist script by Carpenter and Debra Hill leaves a framework to be filled with lingering, patient dread, with just enough details to build a creepy, Myers-haunted world for the characters to inhabit. Most of the details are given through natural exposition by Myer's manhunting psychiatrist, played by Donald Pleasance, the only well-known name in the cast when the film was released. However, it is Jamie Lee Curtis' debut performance as Laurie Strode that carries Halloween into horror film perfection and legend. As Strode, Curtis manages to appear vulnerable, intelligent, and tough. She is just as believable, and frankly, heartbreaking, in a scene where she reacts in sheer terror and grief at the discovery of her dead friends, as she is in a scene where she is desperately, yet fiercely trying to stab Myers with his own knife. Her natural ability to be both convincingly assertive and mothering to her charges should also not be overlooked--Curtis is a force of nature. Then there's the iconic figure of Myers himself, looming over every frame, even when he is nowhere to be found. It may be happenstance that the filmmakers came up with such a terrifying creature design, but the way that Carpenter masterfully places him into shot after shot is not.
Yes, there's plenty of post-modern critical fodder to feed upon in Halloween, whether Carpenter intended it or not. It is all superseded by the fact that, as a film about a looming, seemingly impossible dark shadow stalking unsuspecting carriers of the light, Halloween has never been topped.