AmateurMovieReviews.com

The Story: A psychotic murderer institutionalized since childhood escapes to kill his sister while his doctor chases him through the streets

Halloween is of course the movie that made struggling writer/director John Carpenter and unknown newcomer Jamie Lee Curtis superstars, and to this day is arguably the best work either has done. It was made for about $350,000 and eventually grossed a then-astonishing 80 million dollars. What is easily forgotten until you let this cruelly effective screamer catch you unaware again is just what a stark assault of brute horror it is.

We open on a malevolently grinning Jack o' Lantern on Halloween night and move into prowling camerawork with beautiful blue-dominated lighting around a nice, middle class small-town home. We've studied our Argento films and recognize that someone's gonna get it. Someone does get it, in a quite scary but not overly graphic prologue. 15 years later, a psychotic young man whom psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has given up any hope of helping and is indeed terrified of, escapes from the booby hatch he was sent to after dicing his sister up, and the fun quickly begins.

From here on out, there is no real plot to speak of. We simply meet some refreshingly sympathetic, likeable and intelligent teenagers (probably the last time we ever see such people in a slasher film, sadly enough) and some children Curtis is babysitting. In contrast to most slasher flicks to follow, we identify with and feel terror for these people as they one by one stumble helplessly into the masked nut job's clutches. This builds to a protracted showdown between the knife wielding psychopath and the last teenaged survivor (Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie). The festivities come to a close with a classic, matter-of-fact final line from Pleasance (who delightfully stays just about a millimeter on the right side of overacting - a triumphal peak of his career).

I don't really want to go into more detail, because this is the kind of film you just allow to happen to you and surprise you as it assaults your senses, and to give many more details would dampen the effect. If you just walk into this film and let it do its work on you, you will be guaranteed quite a few jolts and jumps, and you and your date will have finger-shaped bruises on your forearms for days afterwards. It's that good, and that unforgettably intense.

This movie has wit, style and class to burn and comparing it with the hundreds of cheap imitators or even the few good slasher films to follow would be unfair. At this hungry stage in his career, Carpenter was a master of timing, mood and color. He once called Halloween "my Argento film" but managed to outclass Argento just this once. The brightly colored but precisely positioned and shaped lighting recall Suspiria without being a copyist, and the long, studied camera shots leading to the vicious attacks recall the finest moments of Argento's giallos. Where Carpenter parts company with Argento and virtually all of the imitators is in his restraint. There is so little blood in this film, I would imagine it could almost be shown on television with but a few minor cuts.

The music by Carpenter himself deserves special praise here as well. It is, like some of Argento's scores, a deceptively simple synthesized score but Carpenter is more subtle and masterfully builds the suspense in each scene by starting with a simple rhythmic pattern and almost imperceptibly building upon it until your nerves are ready to shatter.

Unfortunately, the slasher film imitators to glut the horror market in the following years were able to copy the particulars (teenagers, sex, masked murderer, dead bodies showing up later, and so on) without coming close to an understanding of style and class. If you have seen many of the copies but managed to miss the original, some of the effect and some of the surprises may be slightly dulled.

This film is truly one of a kind and one of horror cinema's true artistic triumphs. Rent or buy this one to watch over and over again, and use it to show your friends what true quality horror is. This film deserves a place in the horror pantheon with Psycho, the Exorcist and Night of the Living Dead as a groundbreaking masterwork.