Halloween By Murray Leeder Essay

Halloween
By Murray Leeder
“Halloween” is a franchise of
sequels and remakes, and sequels
to remakes, and novels
and comic books and masks
and memorabilia, plus a legendarily
terrible 1983 video
game. It spawned countless
imitators, triggering the cycle
of low budget slasher movies
aimed at replicating its success.
But before all that, there
was a single film: bold, frightening
and intense, but with a
sense of restraint and subtlety.
It brims with the youthful energy
of its creators, displaying obvious
love for the craft of filmmaking,
but it also contains an ineffable
elegance and grace that few of
its successors could equal.
Its origins were humble. “Halloween” was made for
around $320 000 and shot in 21 days in 1978. California
subbed for Illinois, March subbed for October,
in neither case seamlessly. Producer Irwin Yablans
conceived it as “The Babysitter Murders,” an inexpensive
horror film with teen appeal, featuring
events unfolding over a single night. Partnering with
Moustapha Akkad, Yablans approached John
Carpenter, attracted by the low-budget innovations
demonstrated in “Assault on Precinct 13” (1976).
Shortly afterwards, Yablans had perhaps the key
insight: why not set the film at “Halloween”? The holiday
provided a logical release date and a set of recognizable
iconographies to mine.
A savvy young graduate of USC’s Cinema program,
Carpenter agreed to the job with several conditions:
that he would have near-complete creative control,
could use his own cast and crew, would earn a
share of the film’s profits, and could compose the
score. The only familiar name in the cast would be
Donald Pleasence as the gun-toting psychiatrist Dr.
Loomis and the lead role of Laurie Strode went to
Jamie Lee Curtis; the fact that she was the daughter
of “Psycho” (1960) star Janet Leigh made for free
publicity. Important collaborators included coscreenwriter
and producer Debra Hill, production designer/editor
Tommy Lee Wallace and cinematographer
Dean Cundey. The key design element was the
mask worn by Michael Myers, modified from a William
Shatner mask purchased for two dollars. Expectations
were low, but word of mouth, a striking publicity
campaign and some strong reviews (notably
from Tom Allen, Dave Kehr and Roger Ebert) made
“Halloween” an unexpected hit, earning more than
$70 million on its initial worldwide release.
“Halloween” is distinguished by a number of technical
innovations. It was the first film to make extensive
use of Panaglide, the chest-strapped Steadicam
that facilitated the film’s numerous long takes. The
gliding camerawork approximates the movement of
the human body but with an unearthly, ghostly
smoothness. From the first scene, Panaglide is associated
with Michael Myers’s perspective, so its use
throughout the film, even in scenes where Michael is
physically absent, helps construct him as an omnipresent,
unseen, haunting force. Carpenter’s careful
widescreen compositions, using an Anamorphic
2.25:1 aspect ratio, allow the intrusion of unexpected
figures into the frame. Few films have been as damaged
by being cropped for television and home video
screenings. Furthermore, “Halloween” is unthinkable
without Carpenter’s primitivist, minimalist score,
fit to jangle the nerves of even the most jaded viewer.
Carpenter, whose father was a music professor
and who has fronted several bands, has scored
most of his films, developing a more coherent sound
than many “professional” composers have managed.
The iconic main theme from “Halloween” is in 5/4
time, its unevenness in the repetition of certain
phrases; it is dominated by a rhythmic ostinato that
continually sequences through a number of minor
chords, destabilizing any sense of tonal certainty.
Like Panaglide, the score functions to implying
Michael’s presence even in the absence of his image.
Its restless quality infuses tension into the most
incidental scenes.
“Halloween” owes much of its success to effective
casting and characterizations. The unforced, believable
banter between Curtis’s Laurie and her two
friends, Lynda (P.J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy
Loomis) makes them more than mere forgettable victims.
Donald Pleasence plays Dr. Loomis as a driven
man who has looked into the face of evil too long;
Loomis seems himself to skirting the edges of madness,
but Pleasence remains restrained, even playing
down rather than up as he intones about “pure
evil.” And Curtis embodies Laurie marvelously: sensible,
resourceful and capable but with an underlying
sadness as she watches her more outgoing friends
live a freer life than she can allow herself. The “Final
Girl” character type that she embodies is often criticized,
perhaps justly, for making a survivor of the
most conservative and virginal girl, there is no denying
Curtis’s accomplishment in making Laurie a vivid
and memorable protagonist.
Michael Myers, on the other hand, is memorable precisely
because of a lack of characterization. Who or
what is this being who murdered his sister as a child:
a disturbed man, or a supernatural monster? What
does he want? What has brought him back to
Haddonfield? Why does he stalk babysitters? Why
does he kill sexually active women (and why then
would he want to kill Laurie?)? His blank white mask
yields no answers, and when it is stripped off, his
face reveals no more. He stands still as a statue and
stares constantly (like the ghosts in “The Innocents”).
The script calls him “the Shape,” children prefer “the
boogeyman,” and Loomis likes just “it.” But nobody
ever, ever calls him “Michael Myers” (“Michael” is
only said in the introductory sequence and “Myers” is
only used with reference to his sister and the house).
The name seems inadequate. The lack of the explanation
or motivation is one of the film’s best decisions
–
Michael is frightening precisely because he is unmotivated,
inexplicable, and unstoppable. The lame explanations
the sequels provide is evidence of how
wise Carpenter was to leave his motivation unclear.
Like Michael himself, the “Halloween” franchise collapses
occasionally but never stays down. The brand
has threatened to swallow up the original work. Yet
“Halloween” the film retains a stature apart from
“Halloween” the franchise and the empire, and its
presence in the National Film Registry is a testament
to its singular and continuing power.

Murray Leeder is the author of Halloween (Auteur, 2014),
Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)
and The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of
Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), as well as the
editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from
Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is
currently an instructor in Film Studies at the University of
Calgary. Leeder, who earned his masters and PhD degrees
from Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, is an
instructor in Film Studies at the University of Calgary
where he currently teaches a course on the film authorship
of John Carpenter.

https://www.loc.gov/programs/static/national-film-preservation-board/documents/halloween.pdf