Killer plays deadly tricks on All Hallows Eve

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2006)

I saw this movie several months after it had been on its first run in theaters. On the way home, I kept looking back over my shoulder as I walked down a very long, dark street similar to the ones that Michael Myers stalks in the movie. I knew logically that there wouldn't be a maniac in a white mask following me, but the impact of the movie was strong enough to cause that kind of fear, however unrealistic. I think this movie is a modern classic, even if flawed. There are plenty of holes in the plot and unexplained details and down right impossibilities, but I think you have to see it not so literally to enjoy it. I think that Jamie Lee Curtis makes an astonishing debut here, having to carry a great part of the movie. I told friends at the time that it was clear she was a young actress headed for bigger things. There are good, strong performances from Donald Pleasence as the doctor and Charles Cyphers as the sheriff, and the teenage girls and their boyfriends are realistic and appealing. In fact, I think that's a lot of what gives the film its power to terrorize even after repeated viewings: Carpenter makes us care about these young people and get to know them SPOILERS AHEAD: before they are brutally killed, and the powerful sense of loss is overwhelming when Laurie discovers the bodies of all three of her friends displayed as a ghastly Halloween joke. There is a real feeling of the grief and shock felt by Laurie, followed by genuine terror as she realizes the killer is coming after her next. Carpenter is very effective at capturing that feeling of fun and excitement, mixed with the possibility of actual danger, that many of us can recall from our own childhood trick or treating adventures. One of the most unsettling aspects of the movie, that helps to make it really creepy, is the realization that all of his dreadful actions are clearly seen as 'fun' by Michael Myers, including the theft of his sister's gravestone and dressing up in a ghost sheet and his latest victim's eyeglasses before killing his next victim. The fact of his inscrutable silence and that we have little, if any ,clue as to what makes him do what he does is seen as a weakness by many viewers, but others feel that his very inexplicability and apparently random attacks on people he doesn't know is what makes the movie so frightening. Perhaps Dr. Loomis is right when he argues with the nurse at the beginning and she objects to his use of the word " it" to describe Michael Myers, and when he later tells the sheriff " This isn't a man." Who or whatever he may be, Michael Myers occupies a special place in the pantheon of movie villains, and Halloween remains a tight, spooky little thriller that has lost little of its power to scare viewers over the years.