The one and only... there never should have been ANY sequels

Rating: 10/10 (28 August 2006)

John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN may be influenced stylistically by the work of Bava and Argento, and more than a little derivative of Bob Clark's BLACK Christmas. ALIEN was derivative of IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE and the original THE THING (moreso than Carpenter's own remake). SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was derivative of THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE and MANIAC. However, ALIEN and SILENCE were both great movies in their own right, and so is HALLOWEEN. I think they can be forgiven for (at least partially) lifting their stories and style from previous works.
Enough has been written about HALLOWEEN. No need to go into the brilliant direction, editing or photography. It's a solid chiller that plays like a carnival funhouse from Hell, with some of the screen's all-time greatest scares waiting around every dark corner.
What a lot of people don't seem to notice or take into account is just how much of the horror is built into Carpenter's and late, great producer Debra Hill's screenplay. The story is deceptively simple. Kid kills his sister one Halloween in 1963. Fifteen years later he escapes from a mental hospital and returns to his hometown to wreak havoc on Halloween night.
It's easy to forget that in Carpenter's original movie NO MOTIVE is ever given for why Michael Meyers kills his sister, or, more importantly, why he targets Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) for his Halloween night rampage. It could be as simple as her having dropped a key off at the Meyers house, and him targeting her from there.
As subsequent entries in the series would put forth, Laurie is Michael's sister, and he has come back to kill her on the fifteenth anniversary of his other sister's murder. Now, this is just my opinion, but this plot contrivance takes away all of the mystery as to why Michael is stalking Laurie, and therefore makes it less scary. Why do we need an explanation for his actions? Is his being crazy, or, even worse, evil not enough of a reason?
My personal interpretation of HALLOWEEN is the following: Six year old Michael Meyers decides to play the ultimate Halloween trick, not only on his sister, but the whole town. He will kill her, and allow himself to be locked up in an asylum where he will sit in a catatonic state for fifteen years. Then, on Halloween night, he will escape and find some random girl, around his sister's age at the time of her murder, and put her (and the town of Haddonfield) through a night of terror. So determined is he to scare the living Hell out of the town, that he simply refuses to die, until his night of terror is over (presumably at midnight).
Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) delivers some of horror cinema's greatest and most atmospheric exposition, as he explains to Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) that somehow he always knew that Michael was evil incarnate, and was waiting for this night to finish his little Halloween scare on the town.
And that is Michael's motive: to scare. To scare Laurie, to scare Dr. Loomis, to scare Haddonfield. There is no family secret. He simply wants to haunt the dreams of the people of his little town forever. Because, as Dr. Loomis suspected all along, Michael IS The Boogeyman. This is also the reason why Michael chooses his infamous "Shape" mask: it's featureless, ghost-like appearance allows his victims, or even people who happen to see him, to project their own fears and nightmares onto him. He becomes their deepest darkest fears.
That, to me, is much scarier than him having a vendetta against his sister.