I was fortunate enough to see John Carpenter’s Halloween during a weeklong run at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Maryland for the film’s 40th anniversary. Is there really anything left to say about this film? It’s hardly Carpenter’s best, in fact it is pretty weak, narratively: It never occurs to Dr. Loomis or to the police or to anyone to search for the car that Michael Myers stole, and if one is being pedantic it really doesn’t make any sense that parents would go out on Halloween night and leave their kids -who would likely want to go trick-or-treating- at home with babysitters. But, obviously anyone who has seen the film will gather that that’s not the point.
It’s undeniably fun to watch. The film is now 40 years old and yet large portions of it still seem fast-paced, exciting, and scary. This is the third Carpenter film I’ve seen in a cinema after The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, and as I see more of his films projected in a theater setting -the manner in which many of Carpenter’s heroes, such as Howard Hawks, could only have been seen in his time- I appreciate more and more how old-fashioned he is as a director. The use of Steadicam technology in the film, for instance, almost undermines and ‘spoils’ you for many of the conventions and preconceived aesthetic notions we currently have regarding contemporary horror and thriller films: The long takes following the girls through the neighborhood streets or Loomis and the caretaker through the cemetery suggest scenes that you might see in genre films from the 1940s: stagelike, connoting a distinctive ‘organ’ of the film rather than a diffuse ‘connective tissue.’ It’s rewarding to me personally to see sequences done in that way rather than in the manner of say the cemetery sequence in David Gordon Green’s version of Halloween from this year, which was clearly shot via at least three or four different camera setups to allow for the most ‘coverage’ possible and contains dozens of edits for no reason. Scenes were staged and shot by necessity, and were not overproduced.
Halloween is really at its best, I think, in its portrayal of The Shape. A favorite anecdote I have is Carpenter’s direction to Nick Castle, who plays The Shape: “Don’t emote, don’t ‘act.’ Just walk, stand there, stare.” The horror of the story is that the character is absolute: there’s no real ‘motivation’ for what he does. The speeches by Loomis almost seem like a crutch for the audience in that they spin some kind of ‘reasonable’ explanation for why the killer does what he does: Michael is simply ‘evil’ in Loomis’ mind, but for me, the character exists beyond good and evil. He’s a destructive force of nature, like a plague or a tropical storm. A tropical storm doesn’t destroy your house because it’s ‘evil.’ That’s just what it does.
Seeing it in a cinema you’ll also get a better sense of how film exploited photography and sound. I noticed this time around that the film cuts abruptly from daytime to nighttime, and for a while after that, it almost seems too dark. But your eyes adjust to the shadows (some of the interior shots could be from a German Expressionist film), and the cinematography almost intentionally toys with the audience. The pools of light cause you to look in all corners of the frame for things that aren’t there -especially during the iconic scene where Laurie runs through the street (the 2018 film imitates this sequence, but it’s clear that the filmmakers didn’t understand what Carpenter and Cundey were doing or why). The sound was recorded in mono, and a theater setting explicates how the film relies on music and stings rather than on a stereo ‘envelope’ of sound in order to frighten the audience. So even if you don’t care about this kind of movie, it’s worth seeing in a theater as an example of film assembly.
Henri de Corinth 