A Fright from Start to Finish

Rating: 10/10 (15 March 2004)

Halloween is one of my favorite days of the year. Sure, it's not a holiday where people take a day off from work, but I loved the atmosphere where kids and adults alike dress up in scary costumes and get candy or scare people for that matter. In John Carpenter's Halloween, this is more of a treat than a trick.
The film's prologue begins on Haddonfield, Illinois 1963 where it's just an ordinary Halloween night like no other. Except for little Michael Myers who happens to be coming home when he catches his sister Judith making out on the couch with her boyfriend and then goes upstairs to have sex for which Michael goes into the house and takes a butcher knife and waits for the boyfriend to leave to make his kill on his older sister. His parents come home and see little Michael dressed in a clown suit with a butcher knife with blood on it. With the ominous music of John Carpenter, the suspense has just begun.
Fifteen years later, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has pleaded with the courts to take a catatonic Myers to a maximum-security prison where he feels that the staff will at least try to watch over him. During the entrance of the minimum prison, an adult Myers attacks the nurse and escapes in the car leaving Loomis more in a panic than ever in his life as "The Evil" has gone.
It's Halloween 1978, and everything is pitch perfect in Haddonfield where not a murder has occurred since 1963. The neighborhood kids called the old Myers house "The Spook house" where many people (even adults) feel the presence of Michael Myers hiding somewhere in the house. The new character in the movie is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), an average American girl who has ambitions of going to college, but at the same time baby-sits in order to make cash for herself, as her father is a realtor, he even asks her to put the key under the old Myers house. Laurie's friends are Lynda (P.J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) who are partygoers than she is, and want to hook Laurie with a boyfriend for the school homecoming after Halloween. At the same time, a man dressed in a William Shatner mask is stalking all three girls with Laurie trying to figure out who could it be.
Loomis is on the run looking for Michael Myers as it becomes hopeless that nobody will ever listen to him, except for Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) who decides to help Loomis look for him.
The night of terror is about to beginÂ… as Myers has found the neighborhood where Laurie and Annie are babysitting two different kids. He haunts them and kills a dog to cover his distraction.
I've given away so much of the plot, that I can't go on any further. One thing about Halloween that most critics (Gene Siskel, Richard Corliss) talked about was how the villain stalked their victims during premarital sex, which is now common for a lot of horror flicks (Freddy Krugger, Jason, Pinhead) where the virgin lives and the sluts' die. Are these psychopathic men working for the pope and God? Overall, Halloween is a masterpiece that once again resurrected the pleasures of going to see a horror film; I wouldn't recommend watching this film alone or in the dark.