Dissecting Slashers: Halloween (1978)

The John Carpenter classic.

BACKGROUND

Director John Carpenter made his 1978 slasher Halloween into a masterpiece of horror and suspense – but when we trace the project back to its roots, it’s producer Irwin Yablans who we have to thank for its existence. It was Yablans who was inspired to make a movie about a babysitter being stalked by a killer. In fact, he was originally thinking of calling the movie The Babysitter Murders. Then he realized that nobody else had ever made a Halloween movie, and that setting could make for an even better horror film than The Babysitter Murders might be on just any random night. He took the concept of a killer stalking a babysitter on Halloween to Carpenter, who had directed Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13. Then Carpenter had to figure out how exactly to make it work. 

It wasn’t a complicated process. He put the script together with co-writer/producer Debra Hill while Yablans and uncredited executive producer Moustapha Akkad secured the funding, raising a budget of $325,000. Hill would start off the writing, then Carpenter would punch up her work and put extra emphasis on the evilness of the killer, who was named after Precinct 13's UK distributor, Michael Myers. The script was finished in just ten days. A quick and easy work-for-hire job.

In the spring of 1978, Carpenter was given a three week production schedule to bring the story to the screen. Replicating the look of a Midwestern Halloween (the story takes place in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois) during a California spring wasn’t the easiest job, but the director and his crew managed to pull it off. They only had two pumpkins to work with, but they made some fake ones to use for set decoration by painting squashes. Painting was also required for the “dead leaves” that were scattered and blown across the ground for scenes - production designer Tommy Lee Wallace had to paint three trash bags worth of leaves brown for that bit of set dressing. Robert Englund, who would go on to play the iconic horror character Freddy Krueger a few years later, was one of the crew members tasked with tossing the leaves around.

Knowing that Halloween wasn’t an idea that originated with Carpenter makes it even more impressive that he brought the concept he was given to the screen with such great style and artistic vision. The finished film looks like it was a passion project... even though it wasn’t.

SETTING

As mentioned, the story plays out in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, which seems like your typical peaceful little town in the Midwest... but from the start, that peace and the feeling of safety that comes with it is being shattered by one particularly problematic local.

The majority of the scenes take place in pleasant residential neighborhoods, characters walking past – and inhabiting – your average one and two-story homes. Sidewalks lined with trees and shrubs. It’s nice landscaping to look at. Unfortunately, now there’s a killer lurking around and he could be hiding behind any of those trees or shrubs.

If you’re familiar with the small towns of middle America, the setting of Halloween will feel like home to you. Just try to ignore the California mountains and palm trees that made their way into some of the shots... unless you’re from California, in which case those elements will feel like home to you, too.

KILLER

Irwin Yablans wanted John Carpenter and Debra Hill to set a killer loose on Halloween night. A killer who would be fixated on a babysitter. But he didn’t specify who this killer should be. Carpenter and Hill considered making him someone who would be in the life of the typical babysitter. A parent she would deal with, or maybe a teacher from her school. But they ended up deciding it would be more terrifying if he was an almost-supernatural force of evil. The Boogeyman. And that’s when they started building up the mythology of Michael Myers... a character they referred to as The Shape.

The film opens with an extended POV shot. It’s Halloween night, 1963, and someone enters the home of teenager Judith Myers, puts on a clown mask, grabs a kitchen knife, and stabs the girl to death. The POV then wanders back outside – and that’s when it’s revealed that the murderer we’ve been seeing through the eyes of is just a six year old child. Little Michael Myers. Judith’s younger brother.

Michael is sent to the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, where he spends the next fifteen years silently sitting in his room, just staring at the wall. On Halloween Eve, 1978, he escapes. He goes back home to Haddonfield, killing a mechanic on the way so he can steal the man’s coveralls, breaking into a hardware store to steal a mask, rope, and knives. His childhood home has been abandoned since the night he killed his sister – but he becomes fixated on a teenage babysitter when she comes by the front door, dropping off a key for her realtor father. (We never get any further information on that key or who it was left for, even though we spend plenty of time around the old Myers house after this scene.) Some of the sequels give a specific reason for why he becomes obsessed with this babysitter, but within the context of this film, it’s purely random. She’s there, he sees her, he spends the rest of the movie stalking her and the young boy she’s taking care of. And killing her friends. It was just bad luck. Or fate.

The Shape was designed to be a blank slate, which is why the script didn’t even call him by his birth name. He’s a manifestation of pure evil rather than a psychologically complex character. He wears a white, emotionless mask. A blank. He never speaks, doesn’t react to pain, and shows no remorse. His motivations are never explained in this movie, he’s just committing random acts of violence because he is evil. Given his behavior - watching victims for a long period of time before he strikes, setting up gruesome tableaus for people to come across - we do get the idea that he must have a sick sense of humor, even if he isn't laughing out loud or dropping one-liners.

Michael Myers is a scary guy who does some terrible things, but the movie wouldn’t be nearly as effective at making him come across as scary if not for the fact that he has a hype man who tells us repeatedly throughout the movie that he is a being of pure evil. That hype man is his psychiatrist Sam Loomis (played by the great Donald Pleasence), who tracks him back to Haddonfield after he escapes from the mental hospital and has dialogue where he tells other characters, and therefore the viewer, that Michael Myers is purely and simply evil, with the blackest eyes he ever saw. The Devil’s eyes. He calls his patient “It,” “The Evil,” and “Death,” and if he weren’t going on and on about the guy all the time, Michael Myers and the movie as a whole would be less disturbing.

FINAL GIRL

Jamie Lee Curtis is coming up on 100 screen acting credits. She has worked in a variety of genres, starring in popular comedies and action movies. She has even won an Oscar. And yet, for many, she’ll always primarily be known as Laurie Strode, the final girl from Halloween. Sure, that perception is enhanced by the fact that she returned for multiple sequels... but even if she hadn’t come back so many times, Laurie would probably still overshadow most of her other roles.

Laurie is the typical virginal heroine. She’s the responsible, intelligent, bookish and shy one of her friend group. She’ll try some weed if a joint is passed her way, but she’s a good girl and a dedicated babysitter. It has been said that Halloween is a prime example of a slasher movie punishing teens for being sexually active and/or drinking and smoking – but that wasn’t the intention of Carpenter and Hill. They didn’t mean for it to come off like Laurie’s friends are punished for their actions or that Laurie is rewarded for being a virgin. Rather, her friends are being distracted from the dangers around them because they're focused on other activities. Since Laurie has nothing to do but spend a dull night babysitting, she’s more aware of her surroundings and is able to realize that something bad is happening.

Curtis did a great job bringing this character to life. Laurie comes off as being quite meek for most of the movie, but when she’s forced to fight for her life and the lives of the children in her care, she puts up quite a struggle and even happens to deliver some painful blows to her attacker with a knitting needle, a clothes hanger, and even his own knife.

She does need to be saved by Dr. Loomis in the final moments, but doesn’t come off as being weaker for needing help from a man with a gun. She held her own up until then.

VICTIMS

There are Halloween movies where the Michael Myers character kills a whole lot of people, but the original film is not one of them. There are only five deaths in this movie, and one of those happens off screen to someone we’re never introduced to, we just see their corpse lying in the weeds.

Judith Myers is the opening kill, and we don’t find out much about her. We just know that she wanted to have a quickie with her boyfriend while her brother was out trick-or-treating (and it is very quick; only a minute passes between the moment when her bedroom light goes off and her boyfriend is shown leaving the house).

We get to spend more time with a few more of the victims, especially Laurie’s friends Annie and Lynda. Annie is the tough, pot-smoking daughter of the local sheriff. She has been hired to babysit a little girl right across the street from where Laurie is babysitting – but when she gets a call from her boyfriend, she decides to ditch the kid with Laurie and head off to meet with her guy. She doesn’t survive long enough to make their rendezvous. Lynda is a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking cheerleader who likes to include the word “totally” in nearly every sentence she speaks. She thinks she and her boyfriend Bob are going to be hanging out with Annie and her boyfriend, but Michael Myers has different plans for them.

Annie and Lynda aren’t deep characters, but they’re entertaining to watch, and Nancy Loomis and PJ Soles did great work with the material they were given. As Lynda’s boyfriend Bob, John Michael Graham is only around long enough to do some drinking and smoking with Lynda, have some pre-marital sex, and speak some very questionable lines.

DEATHS 

The mechanic who loses his coveralls is the character with the off-screen kill. There are four on-screen kills, and Carpenter did something interesting with each one of them. Judith’s stabbing death is shown through the POV of the killer, looking through the eye holes of a mask. Annie gets the classic “someone hiding in the backseat of the car” jump scare attack, and at first Michael Myers tries to strangle her to death. When that proves to take too long, he pulls out his knife and does a quick slash. Lynda does get strangled to death, with the aid of a telephone cord, after Myers puts on a “sheet ghost” costume along with Bob’s glasses, tricking Lynda into thinking he’s her boyfriend. That’s how he gets close enough to strike without Lynda knowing she’s in trouble, and it’s another demonstration of the killer’s twisted sense of humor.

Bob gets the most memorable death, when Myers lifts him off the ground and pins him to the wall with a kitchen knife. As Bob’s corpse hangs on the wall, Myers takes a step back and cocks his head from side to side while looking at him, like an artist admiring his own work.

CLICHÉS

Halloween has its fair share of clichés – some of which were already cliché when this movie was made, and some of which weren’t quite so well established. But by featuring some of these clichés, it ensured that we would be seeing a lot more of them, as Halloween spawned a lot of imitations.

You have a silent, masked killer, which wasn’t originated here. (For a prior example, look back just four years to Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) Most of the victims are pot-smoking, beer-drinking teens who engage in pre-marital sex, which would become a major element of the slasher franchise. The heroine is the good-girl virgin who does take a puff of weed, but chokes on it. She seems meek, but she taps into her inner strength when faced with a blade-wielding madman... although she trips when she runs away from him. There are shots from the killer’s POV, which would become quite popular after this. And there are the authority figures, represented here by Charles Cyphers as Sheriff Brackett, who can’t seem to accomplish anything or save anybody.

The whole set-up also draws from famous urban legend stories about escaped, homicidal mental patients.

POSTMORTEM

Halloween reached theatres on October 25, 1978, just in time to draw in crowds of movie-goers looking to celebrate the Halloween holiday by watching a scary movie in a dark theatre. And some large crowds turned out to see it. The film earned over $70 million worldwide, becoming one of the most profitable independent films of all time. Despite being a slasher flick, it even earned some positive reviews from the critics due to the stylish direction, the performances, and the unforgettable musical score Carpenter composed to pair with his images.

Michael Myers became a pop cultural icon, one of the most popular horror characters of all time. Jamie Lee Curtis’s career took off. John Carpenter started to earn “master of horror” status. And it wasn’t long before Halloween was being named as one of the best horror movies of all time. Just four years later, an ad featured in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which takes place outside the reality of the first film) referred to Halloween as “the immortal classic,” which was probably a joke on the part of producer Carpenter, but Halloween really was already being considered an immortal classic by many horror fans by then.

Halloween has gotten a lot of sequels over the years, plus a remake, and some of those follow-ups have been very poorly received, but they haven’t done anything to tarnish the reputation of the original film. It still stands as an awesome horror movie, a great slasher, and one of Carpenter’s best movies.