Halloween (1978) Directed by John Carpenter. Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, P.J. Soles, and Nancy Loomis.
We’re doing a bit of a side quest this week. Halloween (1978) is not a sci fi movie by any measure—it has no speculative elements at all—but I don’t think anybody will mind.
Horror has been popular in film since the very beginning. Many of the earliest feature-length movies were adaptations of classic literature like Dracula, Frankenstein, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Moody Gothics, literary adaptations, and creature features dominated horror cinema prior to World War II, but afterward the genre began to branch out. The atomic era brought along a bunch of sci fi-themed horror, such as The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Fly (1958). And, just as significantly, there was a growing fascination with the psychological thriller.
Horror has always been interested in probing human psychology, and the post-war era provided ample fodder for exploring the darkest corners of the human mind, those corners filled with paranoia, anxiety, and a sharp awareness of the human capacity for cruelty and violence. The horror films of the late ’50s and early ’60s plucked these dark psychological themes out of the realm of the Gothic and supernatural and brought them home, into the mundane lives and formerly safe living rooms of ordinary people.
And into their motel showers, of course.
Alfred Hitchcock had been making thrillers about fucked-up people for decades by 1960, but they were mostly considered and marketed as mysteries or crime films. When Hitchcock wanted to make Psycho (1960), Paramount balked, considering it too violent, too vulgar, and too risky a change in direction for him. Psycho is based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name, which is very loosely inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, whose discovery and arrest were nationwide news in 1957. The gruesome story of a grave-robbing killer who had been living undetected in a small, quiet community was captivating and terrifying, largely because it gave Americans a new kind of monster to fear.
Psycho seized on that fear—the fear of the mild-mannered murderous neighbor, the fear of the very human monster hiding in plain sight—and set the stage for a whole new subgenre of horror movie: the slasher. Psycho and its imitators, the British film Peeping Tom (1960), early ’60s Italian giallo films, violent West German crime films, grindhouse and exploitation films—all of these influences mixed together in a big, bloody pot to expand the horror genre.
In the United States, the more explicit and violent strains of horror had to wait for the Hays Code to fade away; the code was weak all through the ’60s and by 1968 it was abandoned entirely. American moviemakers responded with a flurry of high-profile horror films. The most significant of these was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which was an instant, unexpected, runaway success all across America. The Exorcist was also, indirectly, inspired by real life, as it is based on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name, which was inspired by real-life news reports of a supposed exorcism in 1949.
There is some complicated cultural overlap between horror movies inspired by real crimes and horror movies inspired by reports of supernatural events. “Based on a true story” covers a lot of ground in horror—but it has always been an audience draw, whether mundane or supernatural. In any event, the influence The Exorcist had on how horror movies were marketed, released, and assessed by critics is a topic for an entirely different article, so let’s just say it was a huge freaking deal and leave it at that.
Another surprise horror success followed the next year in the form of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which is also based very loosely on the crimes of Ed Gein and was marketed as such. That same year, Bob Clark’s Canadian slasher Black Christmas was another horror story ripped from the true crime headlines. The story, which is about a group of sorority sisters being stalked and murdered by a serial killer, was jointly inspired by a series of holiday-season murders in Montreal and the still-popular “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs” urban legend, also known for the trope “the call is coming from inside the house.” (There is debate about a real-world origin of the urban legend, but it is commonly linked to the murder of babysitter Janett Christman in Missouri in 1950.)
Black Christmas is notable for its use of scenes shown from the killer’s point of view, which are now commonplace in horror movies, and especially in slasher and slasher-adjacent movies that include elements of the killer moving and creeping along, following and stalking victims as the tension builds. Because the movie was made a couple of years before the invention of Steadicam and other camera-stabilizing systems, Black Christmas filmed those scenes by actually strapping the camera to the camera operator’s head.
The slasher subgenre was steadily growing in popularity, but it was Halloween (1978) that truly launched it into the mainstream, giving it the sort of pop cultural staying power that would go on to generate some of the most well-known horror films and franchises in movie history.
If you do a bit of reading into ’70s horror movies, you will inevitably come across the statement that Halloween is either a rip-off of Black Christmas or an unofficial sequel. It’s not entirely incorrect, but the connection seems to have been fairly amicable. In a 2005 interview, Clark talks about how he chatted with Carpenter about a sequel idea he had no plans to make. It’s not clear how serious or literal he is being, as he is lightly recounting an interaction that happened in the mid-’70s, but Clark doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings or feel like he deserves any credit for anything beyond making a movie that influenced another movie.
Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill may have incorporated some of those ideas into Halloween, but the movie actually had a different point of origin. Independent film producer Irwin Yablans wanted to make a make a horror movie as shocking and impactful—and successful—as The Exorcist. He was a fan of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and approached Carpenter with an idea: how about a movie about a killer stalking babysitters? According to Carpenter, it was also Yablans’ idea to set the movie on Halloween night. Carpenter brought Hill into the production and agreed to make a movie with Yablans—as long as he got full creative control.
As an indie production, the money came from a single person, financier Moustapha Akkad, who had an extra $300,000 left over from another film. Even in 1978, that wasn’t much money for a film, but it was still about twice what Carpenter had worked with to make Assault on Precinct 13. For comparison, The Exorcist had a budget of $11-12 million, while another horror success, Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), was considered cheap with a budget of about $1.8 million.
Now, the money stuff is generally the least interesting part of filmmaking, but I mention it here because the fact that Halloween (and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before it) was a very low-budget indie film is a significant part of its legacy in horror cinema. Low-budget indie horror films are a vital part of the film ecosystem. They are made very fast, relatively cheaply, with small and sometimes unknown casts, utilizing ordinary locations as sets, often promoted with minimal or unconventional marketing, and rely on word-of-mouth among dedicated horror fans to build success upon release. There are so many examples of this type of film in horror that it’s impossible to imagine what the genre would look like without them—for example, The Evil Dead (1981), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), etc.
Halloween was filmed in three weeks with minimal sets and props. The Myers house was a real abandoned house that they fixed up for the opening scenes; Michael Myers’ infamous mask was a $1.98 Captain Kirk costume mask that was painted and stretched. The only well-known actor in the cast was Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis; everybody else was fairly new and unknown. That included nineteen-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie. Carpenter was reluctant to cast Curtis because he knew nothing about her, but he figured that having the daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh in his film would help boost its visibility. Many of the cast wore their own clothes or ordinary street clothes (Curtis’ outfits came from J.C. Penney), and the actors often helped with the production aspects of the movie, such as moving and setting up equipment. Carpenter paid his friend Nick Castle $25 a day to don the coveralls and mask and loom menacingly behind hedges.
Now you’ll have to excuse me while I spend some time raving about the visual artistry of this film.
The wide daytime shots of a normal neighborhood as we follow Laurie throughout her day, slipping into her point of view just long enough to glimpse Myers and lose sight of him again. The interior scenes in which light so often seems to come only from other rooms. The oppressive way darkness closes in as night falls. Dean Cundey’s cinematography and Carpenter’s direction are a brilliant combination, working together to generate not just a spooky atmosphere, and not just momentary scares, but a creeping, unrelenting dread that builds and builds and builds. Halloween, as a whole, does not have much on-screen violence; by the standards of later horror films what it shows is actually quite tame. The film understands that true fear come from the expectation of violence.
Let’s look at the opening scene. The film begins with a shot of the Myers house, and we know right away that it’s a character point-of-view shot because the camera wobbles as it approaches. The camera operator is using Panaglide here, a chest-mounted stabilizer similar to Steadicam, which allows the point-of-view to move as the character is moving. The exterior is very dark and unwelcoming; light is very limited, the house is cool blue, and the only spot of warmth is a jack-o-lantern.
The camera carries us along as the unseen character creeps around the shadowy outside of the house and peers through the window. The scene inside is much brighter and warmer; Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson) and her boyfriend (David Kyle Foster) are making out on the sofa. If the movie began inside that room, it might allow a moment to feel cute or sexy or fun, but we only see it from the outside, from the perspective of a voyeur. It’s deeply unsettling even before the hidden POV character enters the house—but there’s a bit of a twist here, because he doesn’t sneak around. He turns on the kitchen light, so we can see clearly as he grabs a kitchen knife.
We know exactly what’s going to happen, but we can’t get away. We are still going along with the hidden POV character, moving through the house, watching the boyfriend leave (after, uh, a very short time, but I’ll let you make your own jokes about the sexual prowess of teenage boys). We climb the steps, we don a mask, and finally we approach the naked Judith in her room. All the while, we stay in the POV of the hidden character.
We know the murder is coming; we’ve known it all along, but the opening has a shock for us in the reveal of the killer’s identity: he’s a six-year-old child who has just murdered his sister.
Halloween establishes the template for future slasher films. It’s a very simple template, with elements that are by now very familiar: a mundane American setting, unsupervised teenagers having sex and doing drugs, a killer lurking in the shadows, an innocent but tough final girl. The structure of the film is part of this template, with the initial introduction of the threat, followed by the lengthy daytime build-up of tension, and finally the nighttime confrontation and explosion of violence. It contains all the necessary elements of a horror movie, each one stripped down to its barest essentials.
The spareness works to its benefit. We don’t need to see elaborate or lengthy stalking; not when a man standing perfectly still behind a hedge serves the same purpose. We don’t need a detailed backstory; not when a single moment of shocking violence sets the tone. We don’t need a complicated or clever killer; not when unstoppable brutality is so effective. The setting is simple, the plot is simple, even the script is simple; Debra Hill wrote the scenes between the teenage girls based on her own past experiences as a teen babysitter. The music is famously simple and has been recognized as a key element of the audience reaction to the movie since the earliest public screenings.
In my article about The Thing (1982), I mentioned how the reaction to that film was informed by the timing of its release. That is, The Thing offered a bleak, uncertain, decidedly non-triumphant story at a time when American moviegoing audiences wanted comfort and certainty. Even though it came out just four years earlier, Halloween experienced the exact opposite effect. Although it was released with few expectations and no hype—it premiered in Kansas City, Missouri of all places—it quickly grew to be an absolute smash hit, the kind of runaway box-office success filmmakers and studios dream about. Part of the reason is because it’s a great movie that does exactly what it sets out to do. But another part of the reason is the timing.
Senseless violence, unseen threats, inexplicable crime that targets ordinary people in ordinary neighborhoods, and, of course, serial killers were all at the forefront of the American public consciousness in the late ’70s. I’ve already mentioned Ed Gein, who inspired both Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and would later inspire Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs in 1991), but there was also the Manson family, the Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, the Hillside stranglers Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the Co-Ed Killer Edmund Kemper… Honestly, I could go on forever. American news in the ’70s was chock-full of stories about deadly threats lurking behind every corner, peering through the windows of every home, and most importantly, most terrifyingly, hiding in plain sight surrounded by unsuspecting neighbors, coworkers, acquaintances. And the grim news stories simply did not stop. Halloween was released on October 25, 1978, and within a month the nightly news reports would be filled with stories about the mass murder at Jonestown, and within two months those stories would be joined by news about the arrest of friendly neighborhood serial killing contractor/clown John Wayne Gacy.
Now, leaving aside the question of how anybody made it out of that era alive, it’s clear that Halloween perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the time. The Cold War fears of danger coming from foreign governments and secret agents were giving way to fears born much closer to home. Halloween’s killer is as homegrown as they get; he is also both mundane and inexplicable. The movie has no explanation for why Myers would kill his sister as a six-year-old, then return fifteen years later to steal her headstone and kill again. Part of the horror is that we don’t know, and we can’t know, because Michael Myers never speaks, never explains himself. Even Dr. Loomis doesn’t try to explain, beyond a diagnosis of pure evil, even though his presence in the movie is an acknowledgement that we’ll always be searching for a rational explanation.
Any explanation we come up with, any assumptions we make about psychosexual motives or psychological rationalizations or homicidal thought processes, those are embellished by what we, the audience, bring to the film—and we bring plenty, because pop culture is fascinated by killers. Always has been, always will be.
Horror movies have always existed in that space between what we fear and our desire to confront those fears. Because they are often made quickly, cheaply, and in great abundance, horror is one of the more nimble film genres when it comes to reflecting the world back at us. It’s a deliberately distorted funhouse reflection, but it’s still a reflection, and that’s why they get under our skin.
Halloween was not the first and would certainly not be the last horror film to hit a bull’s-eye into the nerve center of public anxieties at exactly the right time, but the fact that it did, and did it so effectively, is why slasher movies are still playing with the form it perfected more than forty-five years later.
What do you think of Halloween? Do you like its minimalist score and moody cinematography? Here is where I admit that while I have seen Halloween several times, I have never seen a single minute of any other film in the franchise, so feel free to chime in with your thoughts on those movies as well!
The Invasion Is Not Proceeding as Planned
They’ve come a long way, and they do not come in peace.
For this next batch, we’re going to take a look at films about aliens invading Earth, or trying to invade Earth, with varying results.
Because of various holidays and other scheduling issues heading into the end of the year, we’re combining November and December and skipping some weeks—please note the dates below!
November 13 — Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), directed by Philip Kaufman.
I couldn’t decide which one to focus on, and both movies are beloved and admired, so I’m going do a compare and contrast.
Watch (1956): Fubo, MGM, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft.
Watch (1978): Amazon, Apple, AMC, Microsoft.
View the trailers: 1956, 1978.
November 20 — Attack the Block (2011), directed by Joe Cornish
Aliens visit a London council estate.
Watch: MAX, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
December 4 — Village of the Damned (1960), directed by Wolf Rilla
Aliens visit a small English village.
Watch: TCM, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
December 11 — Save the Green Planet! (2003), directed by Jang Joon-hwan
A young man believes aliens are trying to take over the world.
Watch: Kanopy, and it seems to be available on streaming services in some countries, or use can your clever internet searching skills to find an unauthorized upload.
View the trailer.
December 18 — The War of the Worlds (1953), directed by Byron Haskin
Just in time for the holidays, a cautionary tale about avoiding unfamiliar germs when you travel.
Watch: Amazon, Fubo, MGM, Apple, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
