Classic horror flick is more sexy and suspenseful than scary

Rating: Null/10 (29 October 2004)

John Carpenter's Halloween may not be the actual first slasher flick, but it was, given its initial cost, the most successful and inspired a flood of inferior copycats (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.). From the very first time I saw it at age 15--lying about my age w/a bunch of friends in order to get admitted--to the present day I have felt that Halloween is more suspenseful and even sexy than it was scary. That being said, the film is nonetheless very tightly made and quite entertaining, even bearing repeated viewings, but it works perhaps as much because it speaks to our secret desires and fears as because it scares us.
A little needs to be said about the slasher sub-genre, of which Halloween is the defining archetype. Slasher films are as much about teenage sexuality as they are about killing. Much has since been written about the type of character, the "final girl," who usually survives the encounter with the slasher. She is the innocent virginal outsider, the good girl who doesn't get the guy and is not the party animal her friends are. In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis' character is sweet and bookish, even commenting early on in the movie about the meaning of fate. One by one, the slasher stalks and kills her sexually active teenage friends until he meets her. Unlike the other victims, she fights back, using her brains and her courage to stay alive and even strike blows against her attacker. Like the final girl, the slasher is also an outsider, but his only means of connecting with others is via his knife (an obvious phallic symbol). He is unable to participate in the normal sexual congress that he sees, envies, and then hates enough to kill.
The movie Halloween itself, whether by design or by accident, has seductive elements to it. The score by Carpenter himself is both haunting and scary but also has a seductive, almost dance-like cadence to it. The languid pace at the beginning of the movie and the cinematography lovingly set up the perverse "romance" that is to come later between the slasher and his virginal prey. And let's not forget the teenage sexual banter and actual fooling around of Laurie's friends that occurs before the killing starts.
Halloween is a classic because it works, perhaps unintentionally, on more than one level. We all seek pleasure and even sometimes find more joy in illicit pleasure than in wholesome fun, but we also feel more guilt in it as well. Halloween ponders our fear and fascination with death, sex, pleasure, and the teenage coming of age years. There is a Christian, even Puritanical, subtext to this genre and film: go ahead and fool around and live it up as a teenager but someday, maybe soon, you will pay some sort of price, because there is no pleasure in life without pain and even death. This message is as old as the Garden of Eden. The final girl derives her power, by reason of her virtue and purity, while the slasher represents an avenging angel (as well as demon) of sorts, punishing humans for their thoughtless sensuality.
And finally, there is the holiday from which the movie draws its name. Halloween the holiday has its beginnings in pagan harvest and fertility celebrations that both honored the bounty of the harvest season as well as the obvious demise and death of living things around us. Halloween, both the holiday and the movie, work because they tap deep roots within all of us.