Halloween (1978)

Some movies thoroughly embody the genre they’re in. For most of them, that’s because they’re going for that genre in the first place, as it’s the niche they wish to hit. However, there’s also a select few that are the genesis of their genre, a cultural boiling point from which all others descend.

In the realm of slashers, there’s a few movies that can generally be pointed to - Texas Chain Saw Massacre (yes, the space is official), Psycho, and Peeping Tom are all contenders for the title of “the original slasher”. Despite all of those movies being stellar in their own ways, however, I think most people would point to Haddonfield’s white-masked murderer as the first. If nothing else, it was the first to absolutely blow the lid off the genre and become truly successful in its own right.

Made in 1978 and marking Jamie Lee Curtis’ introductory appearance, Halloween is an important movie in the horror portfolio. It would go on to spawn its own lengthy franchise with thirteen movies, as well as unfathomable amounts of copycats. You like Jason? Freddy? Ghostface? Thank Michael.

What’s funny in retrospect is that director John Carpenter didn’t even really care about Michael. Some would argue he still doesn’t. Halloween, at its inception, was intended to be an anthology series, with every movie being its own disconnected story. These stories might have had their own spin-offs, but the true core of the series was more akin to something like what Trick ‘r’ Treat’s plot tackles. As such, there’s an oddball in the series - Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which I’m sure I’ll cover some other day. Just know that there’s neither hide nor hair of Michael in it, unless you count a bizarre TV cameo of Halloween. Like, the movie. In Halloween 3.

Regardless, there’s not much I can spoil about Michael Myer’s first killing spree, other than the shocking revelation that it’s almost entirely bloodless. You’d think that every drop of fake blood was cut from the cast’s checks, there’s so little blood. Given the series’ reputation, a reputation it most certainly would come to earn, watching this first film was quite the surprise to me.

Full disclosure - as a kid, I couldn’t watch horror. I saw The Strangers once with a group of middle school friends, and I went to see Sinister while I was in high school, but overall, my horror experience has been severely lacking. I’ve always handled digital horror better, with FEAR being a major breakthrough for me. All of that to say, only this year did I start buying horror movies, starting with the slasher genre. Halloween, however, easily won me over.

Something that I love from this movie is the menace that surrounds the ever-present Shape. His presence on screen immediately causes you to tense, as you wonder what he’ll do. It also hovers quite a lot on the absence of the Shape, with empty halls and doorways keeping you guessing on when he’ll actually show up. In fact, one of the most iconic scenes from the movie runs with this, fooling the human eye into doubting itself as he lurks in a closet just behind Laurie Strode.

A brightened version of one of cinema’s most iconic shots

Such masterful camerawork is something that I find myself geeking out about pretty often. Cinematography is a hell of an art, and the ways in which camera movement, positioning, and focus all affect the feel of a shot are nothing short of amazing. With this single scene, Halloween cements itself in history as one of the most powerful horror movies of all time.

There’s plenty to love, of course. Michael’s effortless sit-up behind Laurie is another iconic scene, and the myriad ways that Michael kills his victims in his first outing would later go on to inspire one of the slasher genre’s most important facets, creative kills. Even with nearly no blood and not much nudity, Halloween fully codifies a genre that Leatherface planted the seed for four whole years prior.

As a closing note, I find it funny that Carpenter and then-lover Debra Hill accidentally sewed in another part of slashers’ tapestry - purity. As the tale goes, John and Debra were trying to think of ways that they could distract all of Laurie’s friends so that they could be easily killed off. Being that they were teenagers, the easy choice was things like drinking and sex. This wasn’t a morality play in any way, it simply was the easiest writing device they could use to start knocking off characters.

It’s funny to think that 18 years later, as a group of teenagers huddled around a TV to watch this very movie, that Randy Meeks would go on to lay down the rules of how to survive a horror movie. At the top of the list?

“You can never have sex.”