One of the greatest horror films, in the ranks of Psycho....

Rating: 9/10 (24 March 2008)

No director since Alfred Hitchcock has managed to capture the voyeurism of horror as well as John Carpenter has with his classic Halloween, a film so entrenched with our primordial anxieties that it continues to define the genre more than twenty years later. Indeed the comparison between Hitchcock is no stretch; Halloween is saturated with Hitchcock tributes, namely Psycho and Rear Window, even down to the casting of a young Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of the infamous shower victim of Psycho, Janet Leigh.
Halloween's plot is as old as the hills, but when it was released, was remarkably original. Because of its success, it spawned countless imitators. It concerns several teenagers being stalked by a masked psychopath who kills in especially gruesome ways, usually after an episode of sex. The pronounced societal anxieties of Halloween's good versus evil plot is left unresolved, a strategy repeated consistently in slasher films ranging from Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and the most recent success, Scream. Halloween is genius with its camera work. Be it the predator or the prey, someone is always watching and lurking. The brilliant pacing and excruciatingly long takes manage to keep the adrenaline pumping as Michael slinks in the shadows rising from death again and again to chase the clever, bookish and virginal heroine Laurie Strode. In the end, we are left to confront the thread of separation between fact and fiction. Halloween is a merciless, unmissible horror film that reigns high above every other slasher flick.