Halloween (1978)
|
|
|
Halloween
is as
pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield,
Illinois, a
teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless
terror,
during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally
charged
youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and
orchestrates a
superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its
dark
spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting
(which
is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky
music
sets the tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with
references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho.
The baby sitter
is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho
victim
Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is
named Sam
Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho.
In the end, though, Halloween
stands on its own as an uncannily frightening experience--it's one of
those
movies that had audiences literally jumping out of their seats and
shouting at
the screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget,
the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of
which
approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more
installments: 1981's
dismal Halloween II,
which picked up the story the day after the
unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally gripping Halloween
H20,
which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after 20 years. --Robert
Horton |
| Related News: |
