The father of all slasher movies that include an unstoppable killer

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2006)

What else can I say about John Carpenter's Halloween that hasn't been said before. Let's give it a go. Halloween is perhaps the best of all the slasher horror films that gives us the unkillable menace. John Carpenter works his magic by using point of view shots, spooky locations, atmosphere, lighting and darkness, a fantastic musical score and panning camera shots to give us the scariest but not goriest of all films of this kind. Halloween is far superior to the Friday the 13th movies which imitated it. Sean Cunningham does not have Carpenter's skill and went the cheap route by using more gore with Friday the 13th instead. This brings me to the point that gore itself does not make a great horror movie but suspense included with the occasional gory scene does.
Back in 1963 on Halloween night a young six-year-old Michael Myers kills his sister after she has sex with her boyfriend. Cut to 15 years later on the night before Halloween 1978, Michael Myers escapes from the institution where he has been kept and returns to Haddonfield on Halloween to continue his murderous rampage on three unsuspecting teenagers who are babysitting for the night. One of the babysitters is of course Jamie Lee Curtis in her first role. Her name in the movie is Laurie Strode.
Hot on Michael Myers tail is his doctor Sam Loomis, (Donald Pleasance in his most famous role) who wants to find him and return him to the institution before he kills again. Containing some of Donald Pleasance's most famous lines of dialog, Sam Loomis explains to the police, who are working with him to find Michael Myers, why he has to be found and returned.
In this movie, Michael Myers is known as the shape. This of course is the perfect description for what Michael Myers really is, a specter of evil that is unable to be stopped because, as John Carpenter said in one conversation about the movie, you can't destroy evil. This is actually a great explanation because Michael Myers seems to appear out of nowhere like an evil phantom, kills, and then appears elsewhere to create more carnage. He does all of this while wearing a white William Shatner mask that is itself ghostly in appearance.
Now to explain some of the technique Carpenter used to make one of the best and most famous slasher movies of all time. Using washed out colors for daylight and deep in-penetrable blackness for night, this adds to the spooky atmosphere of Halloween, making it look like fall even though I believe this movie's setting was done in California in the summertime. Other things used include panning camera shots which have things loom up in front of you almost out of nowhere. Sometimes it is a tree or some other distraction, but than sometimes it is the killer himself, usually the point of view shot when the killer is involved is from the back of his head and over to the left or right. This all adds to making the viewer uncomfortable, and that is the idea. And if all that wasn't enough, who can forget the fantastic musical score which is one of the most famous horror musical scores of all time along with Psycho's.
Man I could go on and on about this movie. If anybody is ever a student of film and wants to do a paper on a slasher movie, Halloween would be a great movie to do it on. I'm surprised however that this movie is only rated a 7.8 on IMDP's score. It is a much better film than that. I know that the acting isn''t that great, but is is still better than the acting in the countless imitations that were spawned by it.