John Carpenter's Halloween demonstrates a solid classic horror piece at its finest

Rating: 8/10 (31 October 2017)

The late 80s was the age of numerous slasher horror films that later elevated into long-running franchises of far less superior sequels. John Carpenter's classic horror piece is the movie that raised wide influence of psychotic serial killers dressed in a mask and dispatching their victims of bladed weapons. Although Halloween was not the first slasher flick to hit the celluloid as the genre dates back to Alfred Hitchcock's classic 'Psycho', it is the film that set the bar of entries of the genre. The film is a spine-chiller from the opening moments when we are introduced to the psychotic killer Michael Myers, and the moments to follow are a series of sequences set to pull audiences into in dark, scare-your-heart-out frenzy where suspense is the key and the pacing moves at a reasonable speed. And if John Carpenter proves something crucial, it is that blood and gore, which stands as a staple of slasher pictures is only a bonus and not a necessity. This film opens up in 1963 where we meet Michael Myers, a mentally disturbed youngster who murders his parents and sister on Halloween night and is sent to live in a mental asylum. Fast forward to fifteen years, we meet high school teen Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) who is asked to babysit her neighbor's young daughter Lindsay (played by Kyle Richards) and son Tommy (played by Brian Andrews). What starts off as a normal, peaceful night turns into a Halloween nightmare when Michael Myers (played by Nick Castle) escapes the mental asylum and begins stalking Laurie and her friends. And the worst part is, he has a knife and mask and is ready to murder them.
John Carpenter, director and writer, knows how to keep viewers shivering in their seat when things begin to go south. The minute the masked killer arrives on the scene, the atmosphere quickly boils, daring viewers to lean at the edge of their seats. If there is anything that the simple story falls short of, it is depth to what went wrong in the killer's background to turn him into the psychotic maniac. We are left to believe that he is just mentally ill. However, the film does not have time to dive into detail. It's main purpose is to scare the pants off of viewers, and with Carpenter's method on shooting each scene, generating sheer suspense, and warming the atmosphere with his eerie piano score that has now become iconic; it effectively gets the job done. Compared to most slasher flicks, this one is very tame on gore, so the graphic aftermath of the killer slaying his victims is mostly to your imagination. Carpenter's effective stabs piercing us with hair- raising scares brilliantly establishes the vulnerability of Jamie Lee Curtis's character as she is chased by the masked heathen. The only downside is Curtis's performance which, by today's standards, really did not age well and feels slightly below the bar of a solid performance. But there are just enough goods throughout the picture to forgive her for that. After all, Carpenter knows his way around the genre.
Halloween stands as a solid horror film that takes the crown on influencing many slasher projects of the 1980s, even if it is not the most glamorous entry of the horror genre. For an appropriate film to watch over the Halloween holiday, this movie bears a satisfying choice for those hungry for a good scare, if nothing more.