Halloween

Any holiday on the calendar can be tied to different emotions felt by those who celebrate them. For Christmas it’s all about cheer and love. Thanksgiving is, by its title, all about gratitude. At New Year’s feelings of anxiety as well as feelings of anticipation are felt by people as they consider a brand new year. Then there’s Halloween.
Despite the thrills of all those little kids who long for vast supplies of candy from their neighbors, the general consensus is that Halloween is about fear. This is all very interesting because as many know movies are also involved with the emotions of the people who watch them.
In 1978 an up and coming filmmaker by the name of John Carpenter created a movie that is something of a perfect little combination of the fear involved with horror films, the fear involved with Halloween, and a whole new personification of fear for generations of movie goers to come. This creation of his was, of course, a movie. What did he call it you ask? He considered different names for his $300,000 independent film that would go to become a cornerstone of horror cinema, but in the end there was only one name for his movie; Halloween.
Take a minute to fight back that instinct to roll your eyes and blow this recommendation off. It is no surprise that Halloween is often lumped in with its seven vastly inferior sequels as well as the plethora of horribly ridiculous horror options like the ten Friday the 13th movies and eight Nightmare on Elm Street entries. After all, they all sit on the same stand at the rental store soon to be joined by Saw 1-6 and however many Hostel movies they cook up. The staggering number of other movies is really not important. Halloween did it first. Halloween did it right.
It is known as the godfather of slasher flicks and if you care to check the dates on all those previously mentioned other horror movies the evidence supports the claim. When John Carpenter and his girlfriend of the time Debra Hill created the story of an escaped mental patient who terrorizes a young babysitter with a large butcher knife, they were breaking fairly new ground.
Here’s the real catch though; they still had respect for the audience and for the film they were making. It wasn’t to be some by-the-numbers horror movie with excessive blood and gore. Halloween is a well paced tale of a handful of teens who do their teenage thing on Halloween night totally oblivious to the fact that rarely less than ten steps away they are being silently watched by what is called nothing less than a total personification of evil.
Here I must discuss how a slow and silent man wearing a Captain Spock mask painted white, has become one of the most terrifying villains in all of cinema history. In the sequels that followed the original film he came to be called Michael Myers. This name is never used in the movie.
As a young boy who’s just killed his seventeen-year-old sister on Halloween night, his parents call him Michael. Fifteen years later, when people speak of the house where that killing took place, they refer to it as “The Myers House.” But the haunting man who returns to his home after escaping is referred to in the credits only as “The Shape.”
That’ all he is really. He’s not a man who kills kids; he’s that evil that lurks out there. It’s that evil that is different for every person but can be seen in the bluish white soulless face. It’s that evil that can give full grown adults a chill as they walk down a dark street alone, or lay in bed staring into a dark closet that’s just barely opened.
Judging horror movies and giving them a rating is different than other kinds of movies because horror movies aren’t out for the Best Picture, they’re trying to scare the audience, and the level to which they do this effectively is the level to which they will be praised.
Halloween is a terrifying movie, but its real trick is how it gets the audience. It doesn’t feel too scary; there are not a ton of jumps or obscene shockers. The real fear comes later, when your friends have gone home and you think you’re on to the next thing. It continues to scare you for days after you’ve watched it. Tell yourself it’s an irrational fear, or that there’s no such thing as the Boogeyman, but don’t expect it to work. You watch Halloween and it’s like your six years old again, pulling the blanket over your head and closing your eyes, praying with everything you’ve got that you can fall asleep so you don’t have to imagine that Shape watching you from fifteen feet away. How’s that for some Halloween fear?

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