Watching Halloween on Halloween- this movie is a sweet trick and treat flick for that day.

Rating: 8/10 (31 October 2013)

Glad, this movie was call 'Halloween' then the original script title 'The Babysitter Murders'. 1978's Halloween is a pretty good low budget independent slasher horror film directed/scored by John Carpenter. It might be a little dated, but it's still pretty scary. Pretty realistic that something like this could happen. The film was very popular, and was the first installment in what became the Halloween franchise of sequels and reboots. On Halloween night in 1963, a six-year-old Michael Myers murders his older sister by stabbing her with a kitchen knife. Fifteen years later, he escapes from a psychiatric hospital, returns home, and stalks teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends. Michael's psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasanton) follows him to prevent him from killing. Like, I say before, Halloween is really low-budget. It was so low budget, it didn't bother even showing us the hospital, or much locations. When the film aired on television, Carpenter filmed 20 minutes of additional material scenes for the film mostly of the hospital where Myers was staying. Those scenes does that help plug a lot of plot-holes between the first movie and the second movie 1983's Halloween 2 like why he was stalking Laurie. Halloween would end up being one of the most profitable independent films to ever come out, and in my opinion, pretty much help the independent film movement getting established. Another thing, Halloween did inspired a long line of 1980's slasher films to follow it. While, it's not the first movie to use the POV camera angle of the perspective of the killer nor the first slasher film as 1974's Black Christmas, 1960's Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) came before it. It did had some scary sadistic voyeurism moments. The opening shot was pretty intense, and well done in my opinion, but it did get carry away later in the film. Halloween did create the many several horror clichés found in low-budget horror films of the 1980s and 1990s. The movie help create the idea of the 'final girl' trope concept that specifically refers the final girl alive who is face to confront the killer. According to term, the final girl shares common characteristics: she is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, or mostly avoids the vices of the victims (sex, illegal drug use, hedonistic lifestyle, etc.). There is a bit of misogyny and misandry sexual psychology terms in these types of films. If a woman shows any interested in sex. She will happen to die. If a man happens to be interested in women, he must be a serial killer, pervert or deranged. Men are always represented as deadly creatures in these films, hints why there is few final guys in horror films. Men can survive any threat, tossed at them, while women tend to be more violable. Only by becoming masculinized by the end of the film, the final girl is able to survive. By picking up a weapon, it shows that she has become a man as the weapon represent the male penis. In this film, I wouldn't call Laurie a saint. She wants to get with Ben Tramer, and also she did smoke weed, earlier in the film. She did had some girly damsel in distress confrontation moments and had some help against the killer with Dr. Samuel Loomis. So, I wouldn't say, she fit the final girl concept too well. This was Jamie Lee Curtis, in her feature film debut, but I wouldn't call her a 'Scream Queen' because I felt that didn't express the fear that great in my opinion. While she can come off as a bit bland, she's still a good person who isn't a complete moron or tool, and that goes a long way with me. There seem to a bit of a strong connection to Halloween and Psycho. Both have characters in the film, name Samuel Loomis, the two killers happen to murder with knifes, and lastly, Jamie Lee Curtis happens to be the daughter of Janet Leigh, the main star of the Alfred Hitchcock film. Surprising, the film contains little graphic violence and gore. Still, there is a bit too much nudity that is a bit laughable as the writers had to find a way to get the supporting female characters to take their clothes off. The whole ghost scene was just awful and cheesy. Also, what type of babysitter allow her friends to have sex at her employer's house with children around? I also found it, disturbing that Lynda (P. J. Soles) wanted to rip the child's clothes off. The critics were kinda right, it felt a bit like hardcore porn. The children actors were OK, but they were never in any real danger. I thought it was a miss chance as Laurie could had find her bravery by trying to protect the children like any mother figure. The Shape was the best thing in the film. While, the original mask Don Post Emmett Kelly looks scary. The mask, they pick was creepy. I had to say, the pale white- William Shatner mask really does look scary when the actor playing the 'shape' tilt his head a couple of times as he was observing a corpse. The scene where The Shape seems to appear out of the darkness behind Laurie was amazing done. The score by Carpenter is pretty good, but it used way too much in the film, that it wear down its welcome, and became a bit annoying. The suspense was pretty long as most of the film has nearly nothing going on. The whole stalking thing in the beginning is intense, but a bit boring. Even the opening title credits went a bit too long. The ending cliff hanger was pretty perfect. It's like the saying, you can't kill evil; you can only survive it. Evil is ever presented and that's how every horror movie should end. That's why this film works.