p e n g u i n d e v i l

Since it is October and I haven’t quite been taking in the horrors like I should, and since I won’t be able to make out it to any movies, it seemed that the time was right to watch Halloween again…

well, it gets scarier than this…

While it may not be the brilliant masterpiece that is The Thing, Halloween must be given kudos for some things: the simply brilliant and brilliantly simple soundtrack, being the inspiration for Friday the 13th (and therefore, instigating the entire genre of 80’s slasher movies) and its fresh purity of vision. Though Michael Myers does have the unstoppable aspect common to future slashers, and the seeming desire to kill those who have loose morals (always saving the good girl for last), Halloween is pleasingly free of the hokey “clever kill” scenes that became the stock in trade of the slashers that followed… And in the case of these current ones (you know which I mean), some movies are nothing but dull, witless and banal “clever kills”.

If you don’t recall the story, Michael Myers is a six year old who knifes his sister to death (former Playboy Playmate, Sandy Johnson!) and then is institutionalized under the care of his doctor (Donald Pleasence). Cut to 1978, 15 years later, and he escapes and returns to his abandoned family home where he fixates on a neighbor (Jamie Lee Curtis) and begins pursuing her and her friends. It’s a Halloween night of trick-or-treating, watching the The Thing from Another World (oddly enough), baby sitting, and stalking and killing… The three girls who are the focus of Myers always seem to be in the wrong moment to realize what is unfolding, while his doctor and the skeptical sheriff are fruitlessly trying to track him down. Of course, some of them don’t make it back home. One gimmick that would soon become a bit weird is that the young Michael killed his sister while wearing a clown suit and just two months after the release of this film, John Wayne Gacy would be arrested for being a clown (in real life) who murdered 33 people… Way more than Michael Myers does in this film!

two months later, it gets much scarier than this…

the real john wayne

As a horror movie though, it really no longer comes across as scary or suspenseful. I don’t know if it’s just due to how many of these I’ve watched or if we are just used to this kind of stuff so we have a higher tolerance, but it is still a very fun and entertaining movie. The adult Myers character is still my favorite (as in, the most stylistically pleasing) “horror film slasher guy” and though he carts that famed knife around, he seems to be more the strangling-type which makes for a more visceral movie going experience.

Halloween brought us Jamie Lee Curtis in her first film role, which would lead to a short but notable horror film career, including a number more with John Carpenter, and it also stars one of my favorites, Donald Pleasence, who would also sally forth with Carpenter a few more times (including a starring role in my all-time favorite horror film Prince of Darkness!).