Movie title: Halloween
Release Year: 1978
Type of movie: Horror
MPAA Rating: R
Our rating: 10/10
Re-watchability: 10/10
What we thought about it:
Halloween is a film directed by John Carpenter that came out in 1978. It introduced the world to the masked serial killer Michael Myers. Halloween was also the launching point for actress Jamie Lee Curtis in her first starring role. It has spawned numerous sequels over the last 40 years and a remake back in 2007 by director Rob Zombie. Halloween jump started what is now known as the slasher genre in horror movies. Interesting to note that while it started the slasher genre only 5 people die the entire movie and some of them aren’t even on-screen deaths.
Halloween was rated R by the MPAA for sex, nudity, blood and gore. John Carpenter did not have to cut a lot out of the movie after the first edit as they allowed his vision to go through.
What makes Halloween such a creepy movie is that throughout the whole movie, starting from when Michael killed his older sister in the beginning, Michael never says a word. He doesn’t speak throughout the movie and his motives for killing baby sitters is never known. He just silently kills them and moves on without any explanation. They remind him of his older sister? It is never clear. The mask of Michael Meyers is a William Shatner mask that they spray painted white. It was done this way to represent an emotionless killer who doesn’t find joy or anything in killing “innocent” people. It may also say something about William Shatner’s acting, but we’re not sure.
While the movie is set up as a good vs evil movie that spawned sequels, the original was never developed that way. John Carpenter did write the movie to end with you guessing what happened to Michael, but it wasn’t really so Michael could come back to kill again in another sequel. It is more about good (Jamie Lee Curtis) defeating the bad (Michael) so he is driven out, perhaps to rethink his life. Still, Halloween sets up a formula for many future slasher movies in this genre where the basis for killing someone is predicated on if you have sex you die. If you drink beer you die type of formula. Unfortunately, that formula misses much of the key reason why Halloween was such a good movie. In these other slasher movies there is no “good” versus “evil” there is just uncontained “evil”, that pops up at unexpected times and places, driven more by surprise and gore than actual plot.
The storyline behind Halloween begins when 6-year-old Michael Myers on Halloween night kills his older sister who is supposed to be watching him that night, but instead goes and has sex with her boyfriend. So of course, Michael does what any normal 6 year old would do, he grabs a butcher knife and stabs her to death. This gets him committed to an asylum for the next 15 years, until he escapes and returns home to stalk baby sitters, silently knocking them off one by one, until he meets up with the heroine who fights back instead of just waiting to die.
Halloween is for sure one of our favorite horror movies of all time. It sits up there with the Exorcist, because if you examine it from a single movie stand point it makes perfect sense as to why it’s called Halloween, Michael only kills people on Halloween night. We thoroughly enjoy watching this movie no matter how many times we may have seen it. If you are in the mood for a slasher flick and want the best this time of the year, this is it for a great scary horror movie with a message. While Halloween isn’t as scary by today’s standards as some others, it is and always will be the one that started them rolling.
