“I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.”
So many stories aim to be layered and complex, but Halloween is a relentless shark of a film. From the camerawork to the lighting and editing to that nerve-jangling score, this film is coming to get you and there’s little you can do to stop it.
I was lucky enough to first watch Halloween in a theater at midnight on Halloween night, back in 1990. The experience has stuck with me. By then the first wave of slasher films had buried the genre deep into the ground, but this film got to me in a big bad way. I didn’t sleep well that night and purchased the film soon after so that I could shake the experience and start enjoying John Carpenter’s technique. I found a lot to appreciate.
Carpenter really gets how to use the widescreen frame in a way few filmmakers have attempted. There are few jump scares and a lot of creepy pans to something ominous, usually in the foreground but not always. He builds suspense perfectly; the asylum escape scene remains one of the more unsettling moments in the film, with the too quick edit of someone climbing the car and that hand taking a beat before it strikes the window. Michael Myers is such an enigma, this quiet shell of a human containing pure evil, that he becomes fascinating through subtle gestures. He moves slow, savoring the moments. Every kill is some kind of child-like game. He’s in no hurry to kill. He wants to have fun, wants to play. There’s a classic moment where he pins a guy to the wall with his knife and then his head tilts slightly in wonder at what he’s done.
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