The Shade creeps on in Halloween
“I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing
left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary
sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old
child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the
*devil's* eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven
trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that
boy's eyes was purely and simply... *evil*.”
-Dr. Sam Loomis
If Psycho is the grandfather of the slasher film than
Halloween is the father. Halloween is the greatest and most frightening horror
picture of all time, without question. It, to this day, stands head and shoulders
above all the films, including its lackluster sequels, in the genre it created.
Halloween is scary for reasons that no other horror film since has understood
or captured and is a masterpiece in every sense.
The first of many reasons that Halloween is better than any
other slasher film is that it’s all about atmosphere. It starts from the very
first frame with arguably the most recognizable theme in all of horror filmdom.
It’s simple and concise but grabs the viewer into the film right away creating
a creepy vibe that is carried throughout the entire film. Credit has to go to
director John Carpenter for his creative filmmaking vision and general love for
the art of film that comes in every frame.
Halloween, unlike its many imitators, didn’t focus on the actual
killings themselves; instead it focused on creating suspense and atmosphere. In
fact there is hardly any gore throughout the picture. Most of the murders
present in the film aren’t displayed for the camera and are left mostly up to
the imagination, much like the main murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Carpenter
seems to understand that the killings aren’t what make the film frightening it’s
the atmosphere and looming threat that truly gets the fear.
The other piece of the puzzle that Carpenter nails is the
characters. The villain (known not as Michal Myers in the film but just as the
Shade) in the film is shrouded in mystery and his motivations are unknown; all
we know is that he’s pure evil. Not humanizing the villain is the best thing
that the film does as it’s way scarier than when the sequels decided to give
him a name and a backstory. The second character that is well served is Jamie
Lee Curtis’s Laurie who is never presented as a helpless victim and is able to
protect herself through most of the film. She still has to scream and run every
once and a while but when you have a scary evil who feels no pain chasing after
you it must be done once and a while.
John Carpenter’s out of nowhere masterpiece is another example
of a masterpiece that spawns films that don’t understand the reasons why it is
a masterpiece. Halloween is a pure exercise in the power of atmosphere and how
it is the true form of scares.
-Frederick Cholowski
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