One Good Scare: John Carpenter's Halloween

            Halloween. It’s the scariest night of the year. The night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest. It is the night he came home: the boogeyman.

            Halloween (1978) is often called one of the scariest movies ever made. It is credited with begetting an entire subgenre of horror, the slasher film. Its subversive blend of suburban setting, relatable high school kids, and a mythical prior evil is so effective, that it has been done, redone, and done again.

            The film is also renowned for launching the career of Jamie Lee Curtis and making stage veteran Donald Pleasance a household name. It has spawned nine subsequent movies (seven sequels and remake with its sequel). And everyone, whether they have seen the film or not, will recognize the signature white facemask worn by the killer Michael Myers.

            Still, it is a bold statement to call this low-budget masterpiece the greatest horror film of all time. Is it the simplicity of the story? The exactingly deliberate pace of the scares? The chilly minimalism of the score? What makes Halloween such an effective and frightening work of cinema?

            In Spring of 1978, director John Carpenter began principle photography on a film he had co-written with business partner and producer Debra Hill. The shoot was scheduled to last three weeks and boasted a meager budget of just over $300,000. $20,000 of it was spent simply to get known British actor Donald Pleasance for five days. Also on board was the 19-year old daughter of actress Janet Leigh (famous for her role as Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]), Jamie Lee Curtis. It was her first feature film, and her first starring role. Previously, she had only worked on television, appearing in single episodes of both Quincy M. E. (1977) and Columbo (1977) and as a recurring character on the short-lived cult favorite Operation Petticoat (1977). Halloween, however, would make her a star.

            When John Carpenter came up with the concept of a masked killer, stalking teens in Anytown, USA, it was originally titled The Babysitter Murders. But when he pitched the concept to Irwin Yablans of Compass International Pictures, the one change made was a renaming: Halloween. This ambiguous, yet instantly recognizable moniker may be the first and foremost attribute that moved the film from just another grindhouse circuit shocker to a cultural phenomenon.

            October 31^st is a day with innumerable associations. It is a day for ghosts, a night for ghouls. America celebrates the macabre by dressing up in costumes that range from the innocent, to the ghastly, to the racy, to the sinister. Pumpkins are carved into toothy grins, backlit by the warm, gothic glow of flickering candles. Cool winds blow across suburban streets, carrying with them the brown, yellow, orange, and red of dried and crunchy fallen leaves. Television stations run endless marathons of black and white fright flicks. And best of all, friends and neighbors throw parties filled with all manner of activities, from bobbing for apples to haunted houses; while children travel up and down the sidewalks from house to house with the singular goal of a bag so full of candy that it will last until Santa fills their stocking at Christmas.

            When anyone sees the name Halloween, it inevitably conjures up all of the fears, joys, and experiences of that one uniquely spirited night of the year. And honestly, when else could the boogeyman be real?

            If the mythology of the film’s setting perpetuates the intrigue, it still only provides that first impetus to view it. It does not stand on legend alone. For it to be something truly special, it must pull off the most elusive of magic tricks – it must actually be scary.

            A movie that is legitimately frightening does not cease to be so after being viewed once. Very few works in the history of cinema have managed such a feat. Even critically and culturally praised pictures such as Alien (1979) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) have not managed to prolong their effectiveness in this way, even as they stand the test of time as masterful and inspired entertainment. But Halloween, on the other hand, does. Viewed any number of times, it remains just a scary, just as unsettling, just as thrilling as it was thirty-five years ago.

            Perhaps one important reason for this is the distinct lack of certain benchmarks of horror films that are found in nearly every example of the time period: Graphic violence, gratuitous sexuality, explicitly adult language and material. In spite of being held as the progenitor the slasher craze of the early 1980’s (most of which feature an endless parade of blood, gore, sex, and drugs), Halloween shows remarkable restraint. The violence is virtually bloodless, and doesn’t even truly begin until more than halfway through the runtime. The body count is similarly conservative; from beginning to end there are only five souls who meet an unfortunate end. Quite a contrast to the immediate sequel Halloween II (1981) which features a procession of ten victims, all of whom expire in comparatively graphic ways.

            Also, while characters converse about sex the way teenagers often do, there is only one brief moment of the act itself. So brief and unfocused on, in fact, that in light of any dozen of similar scary movies, John Carpenter’s film is tame and practically PG by comparison.

            Additionally, Halloween also bears very few marks of contemporary 70’s pop culture, and therefore finds itself considerably less dated than it’s garishly 80’s counterparts. Case and point: another Jamie Lee Curtis slasher Prom Night (1980), which features enough synth and neon to light up Times Square.

           

            Now to the film itself. Effective horror pictures do not rely solely on the promise of bloodletting and fake-outs to deliver to the audience the adrenaline and goose bumps they’ve come to see. The pay-off is only as great as the build-up and Halloween seems to understand that in a way few films can. For the first fifty minutes of its runtime, the plot stays subdued and ominous. Beyond the ingenious first-person prologue, the action is reined in like a jockey restraining his horse at the starting line.

            Often, the camera is positioned in such a way to stage the audience as voyeurs. Key images are in the background, or seen from a distance. Unlike many horror films where the camera is used to place the audience in the center of the action, cinematographer Dean Cundey uses space to affect the viewer’s perspective, so that at any one instant we are sharing moments with Curtis’ Laurie Strode, Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis, or with the killer Myers.

            This tactic plays beautifully and allows for all manner of subtleties in each frame. At any given second Michael may be glimpsed peaking around a tree, or through a window. Carpenter often pairs these far and away shots with the unsettling sound of the antagonist’s heavy breathing. Yet when the moment affords an opportunity to kill, and we as the audience expect it, it does not arrive. The best friend, Annie Brackett, gets unstuck safely from the laundry room, Michael disappears from behind the hedgerow, Laurie safely delivers the key to the Myers house. The message becomes startlingly clear: these kids do not accidentally stumble into bad luck, Michael Myers is a meticulous planner and chooses very deliberately when he will make his move. And in the audience, we know we are being hunted.

            The last major component, and perhaps the most crucial one, is Carpenter’s minimal and haunting score. Composed of electric piano and few organ lines, a soundtrack has never been so brilliantly spine-tingling. Halloween owes much to Psycho already: the girl-next-door lead, the butcher knife as weapon of choice, the faceless serial killer. But more than anything, the jarring and sparse theme music is at heart the keyboard counterpart to Bernard Hermann’s orchestral stings.

            Alternating dissonance nestled snugly in a minor tonality clue us in that the killer is there, watching, waiting. But more effective than the music itself is its strict placement designed to elevate the senses and make the nerves twitch with unease and trepidation. It is this fine-tuned precision that carries the suspense through the bare first half of the film, and builds the anxiety and anticipation of the audience.

            Even more telling is the fact that, upon viewing an early screening without music during post-production, a 20^th Century Fox executive reportedly said the film “wasn’t scary”, yet immediately changed her mind upon viewing with the score added.

            When Halloween was released on October 25^th, 1978, it garnered no immediate praise. Then, as word of mouth spread about the independent film that was “The scariest movie ever made”, it expanded to theatres across the nation. By the end of its theatrical run, the movie that had a production budget of $300,000 had earned $70,000,000. The evil in your backyard has since become a pop culture phenomenon and does not seem to intend on going away any time soon.

            So this October, turn down the lights, make sure the doors are locked, and curl up on the couch with this boogeyman. Because, after all, it’s Halloween! Everyone is entitled to one good scare!