John Carpenter month: Halloween

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

A few technical issues delayed this posting but here it is. The film I personally think is John Carpenter's masterpiece. The Thing is great and is a landmark film in science fiction horror. But Halloween started a genre boom that would last for more than a decade. Slashers weren't a new type of film but they had yet to go mainstream in the states. The Giallos were popular in Italy but films like Black Christmas weren't getting mainstream traction in the US. Halloween changed that, leading to films like Friday the 13th, which inspired dozens of copycats itself, and Nightmare on Elm Street.

What makes Halloween work even all these years later? It's simple really. It's a perfect suspense film. The film doesn't rely on jump scares and instead builds the tension with shots of Michael Myers just staring at our characters from a distance. This boogeyman is built up until he finally strikes in the third act of the film. Most slashers find joy in their kills. Eventually, that's all Jason Voorhees became, a cool killer who dispatched people in brutal and fun ways. The kills in Halloween are not glorious or fun. They're disturbing, whether it be Michael's first-person POV murder of his sister or him slowly strangling a girl to death, Carpenter brings out the horror in the kills.

Halloween is a perfect companion to The Thing. They are the two best Carpenter films. Where The Thing is a spectacle of body horror and gore, Halloween is the opposite. Halloween's best strength is its subtlety. There's a dark truth to Halloween. Michael Myers is not a supernatural killer. He's not an alien. He's not a zombie. Michael Myers is the boy next door, who is so broken inside as to appear not human. Carpenter shows that the things we should fear the most aren't found in the middle of the woods or in an old run-down castle. It's just down the street from us.

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