IF A film survives for almost four decades with its critical reputation and its cult status fully intact there’s usually a reason. Generally speaking that reason is it’s a good film.
Halloween (showing alongside David Cronenberg’s The Fly as one half of the latest Jameson Cult Movie extravaganza at the QFT in Belfast tomorrow night) is, first and foremost, a very good film. In fact it might just be one of the greatest ever horror movies to grace American cinema screens.
It’s certainly one of the most influential. Barely a blood-soaked teenage slasher film has emerged since that doesn’t owe something to it.
Made in 1978 for a paltry $300,000 by a then 30-year-old John Carpenter, it’s a clever, intense and hugely enjoyable slice of stalk and slash that changed the rules for the common-or-garden horror movie forever.
As 70s shockers go, it’s hard to beat. That devilish decade spewed up all manner of ground breaking horror game changers, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Exorcist but few can hold a bloody blade up to Carpenter’s creation.
Storywise it’s very simple fare. On Halloween night 1963, a six-year-old child called Michael Myers mindlessly stabs his sister to death. Fifteen years later Myers escapes from the mental hospital where he’s been incarcerated, to play his murderous games once again.
In terms of plot that’s about it really but there’s something in the killer’s apparently motiveless campaign of terror that is genuinely chilling and it’s the gradual sense of dread that creeps up on you throughout that really hits home.
Shot beautifully by cinematographer Dean Gundey and directed with an Alfred Hitchcock-like eye for detail by the talented Carpenter, it was successful enough to spawn innumerable sequels, spin-offs, remakes and home video re-releases but most of them are so eye-wateringly bad they hardly justify mention. In reality it’s that first Halloween alone that is worthy of your time.
You want reasons why it’s a thrill ride worth taking? Well, there’s the sight of terrorised baby sitter Jamie Lee Curtis becoming a star just as her real-life mother Janet Leigh had done 18 years before in Psycho, for a start. Then there’s the actorly weight of Donald Pleasance to enjoy as the long-suffering psychiatrist trying to get his charge back behind bars but, more than anything, there’s the unforgettable image of Michael Myers himself to savour.
Played with mute menace by Tony Moran, he is the ultimate “won’t stay dead” killer. Clad menacingly in ice-hockey mask and wielding a sharpened knife like a bombed-out Gordon Ramsey, he is unquestionably one of the most effective horror movie bad guys of all time.
Other films of a similar inclination, such as Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, offer equally iconic lead characters but, memorable a creation as someone like Freddy Krueger is, there’s an element of humour and cartoon-strip madness on show there that Halloween avoids completely.
Serious minded and steeped in a creeping sense of dread, it jumps out at you just when you least expect it.
