John Carpenter's Halloween
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
We open on a suburban house, with a white picket fence. The camera is a first person POV. Through a window we can see a young couple inside, canoodling (for want of a better word). They go upstairs. We go inside. We can hear ourself breathing. We see the young man leaving. Our arm reaches out in front of us, picks up a mask and puts it on. We pick up a knife. We go upstairs, and into the bedroom of the girl, who is brushing her hair. She screams our nmame - Michael - when she sees us. And then we start to hack her with the knife, over and over again. We hear a car approaching. We hurry downstairs, and out of the house, still holding the knife. An older couple approach us. Cut to an external shot. We were six years old, and we have just killed our sister. We were Michael Myers.
Sorry for the melodramatic intro, but it's the only way I could think of conveying the opening of this film. It's still incredibly powerful, and the steadicam POV stuff remains effective even when you've seen it ripped off a million times a la Friday the 13th.
You probably know the story. 6-year old Myers kills his sister on Halloween, then escapes from a mental asylum 15 years later, returns to his home town and continues where he left off, pursued by Dr Loomis (wonderfully overacted by Donald Pleasance) He still targets sexually active teens, but his main target is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the first film it's not really clear why, except she is the first person he sees after returning to Haddonfield.
Anyway, after much stalking and less killing (strikingly low body count, really), Myers gets his, and does the obligatory coming-back-to-life thing. This is still done better than in most other horror films since - no make-you-jump ending this, where the killer simply leaps back into life, but a slow rise in the background. It's all the more chilling for its lack of fanfare.
I won't spoil the ending for you if you haven't seen it, but suffice to say that as there are 6 more Halloween films, he lives to stalk another day.
What I'd really like to talk about is the rest of the franchise, as it has to be THE most confused (and confusing) horror franchise EVER. Halloween 2 is fair enough. Not as good as the first, but adequate. It takes place immediately after the first one, and we discover that Laurie Strode is actually Myers's sister, adopted by the Strodes after the death of her parents. It ends with Loomis blowing himself and Myers up.
Halloween 3:Season of the Witch isn't really a sequel at all. It's a really duff move made under the Halloween banner which looks like it was made for TV and concerns an evil toymaker who wants to return Halloween to its original meaning by manufacturing masks with bits of Stonehenge in them which turn the people wearing them into a big pile of snakes and cockroaches when they watch a particular TV advert. notable only for said advert, which combines the original Halloween theme with the tune from 'London Bridge Is Falling Down' to create something so darned catchy that it's evil enough in its own right.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is more like it. Myers is in a coma after the explosion at the end of 2. That is until he's moved to a less secure hospital and his doctors mention a niece back in Haddonfield (Laurie Strode has died in a car accident, and this is her daughter). Upon which he snaps out of it, pulls himself together and all hell breaks loose again. If anything, this film is probably slightly better than the second one, has a couple of really nice touches and a belting final sequence which recalls the opening of the first film to great effect.
It's at this point that the films begin to lose the plot. Halloweens 5 (The revenge of MM) and 6 (The curse of MM) get bogged down in trying to explain where Michael gets his invulnerablity from. It's all to do with Runes and Druids and a cult called Thom and a mysterious chap in black and it sucks harder than a baby goat. When you know WHY something is, it just isn't scary anymore. I was happy with Michael being a psychopath who wanted to murder the rest of his family for no reason. Give him a personality, or let him do anything else except kill (he eats, and fathers a child, for example), and he's no longer as enigmatic. they also miss a great opportunity to pick up on the great shock ending of the fourth film, content for little Jamie to simply be psychically connected to her uncle somehow. I know there are some people out there who like this whole storyline thing, but they're the people who think that Friday the 13th is actually a good movie, as opposed to a stupid Halloween rip-off with amusing gore make-up and a half-decent shock ending (don't get me started).
So it's no wonder that when time came for Halloween - Twenty Years On (or H20, as it became known), and they got Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise her role of Laurie Strode (not dead, but in witness protection), writer Kevin Williamson (Scream etc) decided to dispense with everything that had happened since the end of the 2nd film. Shame, cos 4 is OK, but I suppose it all got too complicated and not scary. The first 2 films, along with H20, form a kind of Laurie Strode trilogy. Laurie is now an alcoholic teacher who sees Myers everywhere she goes, and her first encounter with him in this film is brilliant, as she blinks and blinks to get rid of the vision that is advancing towards her. There's even a point where we nearly see some sibling bonding (before she cuts his head off with an axe). Unlike any of the previous films, this one has a half-decent budget and good production values. It's slicker, and although it suffers a little from post-Scream clever-cleverness (to be expected from Williamson, I suppose), it's got a far better script than any of the other sequels.
So, like I said, a confusing franchise. But like I said, the first film still stands up to scrutiny today against any classic horror movie (and not just of the slasher/stalker variety), and its influence can bee seen in every horror movis made since, and the last installment just about redeems what had become a ridiculous (and unsuccessful, I guess) money-making exercise. Word is that they're making another sequel. I hope to God not, or this could get even more complicated.
Sorry for the melodramatic intro, but it's the only way I could think of conveying the opening of this film. It's still incredibly powerful, and the steadicam POV stuff remains effective even when you've seen it ripped off a million times a la Friday the 13th.
You probably know the story. 6-year old Myers kills his sister on Halloween, then escapes from a mental asylum 15 years later, returns to his home town and continues where he left off, pursued by Dr Loomis (wonderfully overacted by Donald Pleasance) He still targets sexually active teens, but his main target is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the first film it's not really clear why, except she is the first person he sees after returning to Haddonfield.
Anyway, after much stalking and less killing (strikingly low body count, really), Myers gets his, and does the obligatory coming-back-to-life thing. This is still done better than in most other horror films since - no make-you-jump ending this, where the killer simply leaps back into life, but a slow rise in the background. It's all the more chilling for its lack of fanfare.
I won't spoil the ending for you if you haven't seen it, but suffice to say that as there are 6 more Halloween films, he lives to stalk another day.
What I'd really like to talk about is the rest of the franchise, as it has to be THE most confused (and confusing) horror franchise EVER. Halloween 2 is fair enough. Not as good as the first, but adequate. It takes place immediately after the first one, and we discover that Laurie Strode is actually Myers's sister, adopted by the Strodes after the death of her parents. It ends with Loomis blowing himself and Myers up.
Halloween 3:Season of the Witch isn't really a sequel at all. It's a really duff move made under the Halloween banner which looks like it was made for TV and concerns an evil toymaker who wants to return Halloween to its original meaning by manufacturing masks with bits of Stonehenge in them which turn the people wearing them into a big pile of snakes and cockroaches when they watch a particular TV advert. notable only for said advert, which combines the original Halloween theme with the tune from 'London Bridge Is Falling Down' to create something so darned catchy that it's evil enough in its own right.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is more like it. Myers is in a coma after the explosion at the end of 2. That is until he's moved to a less secure hospital and his doctors mention a niece back in Haddonfield (Laurie Strode has died in a car accident, and this is her daughter). Upon which he snaps out of it, pulls himself together and all hell breaks loose again. If anything, this film is probably slightly better than the second one, has a couple of really nice touches and a belting final sequence which recalls the opening of the first film to great effect.
It's at this point that the films begin to lose the plot. Halloweens 5 (The revenge of MM) and 6 (The curse of MM) get bogged down in trying to explain where Michael gets his invulnerablity from. It's all to do with Runes and Druids and a cult called Thom and a mysterious chap in black and it sucks harder than a baby goat. When you know WHY something is, it just isn't scary anymore. I was happy with Michael being a psychopath who wanted to murder the rest of his family for no reason. Give him a personality, or let him do anything else except kill (he eats, and fathers a child, for example), and he's no longer as enigmatic. they also miss a great opportunity to pick up on the great shock ending of the fourth film, content for little Jamie to simply be psychically connected to her uncle somehow. I know there are some people out there who like this whole storyline thing, but they're the people who think that Friday the 13th is actually a good movie, as opposed to a stupid Halloween rip-off with amusing gore make-up and a half-decent shock ending (don't get me started).
So it's no wonder that when time came for Halloween - Twenty Years On (or H20, as it became known), and they got Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise her role of Laurie Strode (not dead, but in witness protection), writer Kevin Williamson (Scream etc) decided to dispense with everything that had happened since the end of the 2nd film. Shame, cos 4 is OK, but I suppose it all got too complicated and not scary. The first 2 films, along with H20, form a kind of Laurie Strode trilogy. Laurie is now an alcoholic teacher who sees Myers everywhere she goes, and her first encounter with him in this film is brilliant, as she blinks and blinks to get rid of the vision that is advancing towards her. There's even a point where we nearly see some sibling bonding (before she cuts his head off with an axe). Unlike any of the previous films, this one has a half-decent budget and good production values. It's slicker, and although it suffers a little from post-Scream clever-cleverness (to be expected from Williamson, I suppose), it's got a far better script than any of the other sequels.
So, like I said, a confusing franchise. But like I said, the first film still stands up to scrutiny today against any classic horror movie (and not just of the slasher/stalker variety), and its influence can bee seen in every horror movis made since, and the last installment just about redeems what had become a ridiculous (and unsuccessful, I guess) money-making exercise. Word is that they're making another sequel. I hope to God not, or this could get even more complicated.
