John Carpenter’s Halloween opens on a child with a kitchen knife and closes on an empty suburban street. The film runs 91 minutes. It cost $300,000. It grossed $70 million. Those numbers are the least interesting thing about it, but they explain why every slasher that followed looks the way it does. Critics credit Halloween with pioneering the slasher genre, alongside Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas.
Trailer, via Trancas International Films.
Six-Year-Old Michael Myers in Haddonfield
The story starts on October 31, 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois. Six-year-old Michael Myers stabs his teenage sister Judith to death with a chef’s knife. Fifteen years later, on October 30, 1978, his psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis and nurse Marion Chambers drive to the sanitarium to escort him to a court hearing. They find the patients have broken out. A male patient jumps on the car roof and attacks Marion through the passenger window. She runs. The patient steals the car and drives away. Loomis concludes it was Michael.
The 1963 murder is the film’s cleanest piece of direction, and it does the work of a whole reel of explanation. We know what Michael is before anyone says his name.
The Mask, the Rope, Two Kitchen Knives
Michael returns to Haddonfield. He kills a mechanic and takes his coveralls. He steals a white mask, a rope, and two kitchen knives from a hardware store. That is the entire origin of one of horror’s most recognizable images, assembled from a hardware store shelf and a dead man’s clothes.
The film does not linger on the mechanics. It moves. In this paper’s reading, Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill keep the violence brief and the waiting long — the opposite of what their successors took from them.
Laurie Strode Drops Off a Key
On Halloween morning, Michael begins stalking Laurie Strode when she drops off a key at his abandoned childhood home. Her realtor father is trying to sell it. Laurie notices Michael throughout the day. Her friends Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok dismiss her concerns.
That dismissal is the engine of the whole film. Laurie is not a fool and not a scream queen. She is a teenager who sees something wrong and cannot get anyone to agree. Jamie Lee Curtis plays her straight, without a wink, and the movie is better for it.
Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis
Loomis arrives in Haddonfield and finds that Michael has stolen Judith’s tombstone from the local cemetery. He meets Sheriff Leigh Brackett, Annie’s father. They visit Michael’s house and leave convinced he has returned.
Pleasence was paid $20,000, the highest fee in the cast. Curtis received $8,000. Nick Castle earned $25 a day. The role of Loomis was first offered to Peter Cushing, who had just played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. Cushing’s agent rejected it over the salary. Christopher Lee was approached next and turned it down. Lee later told Carpenter and Hill that declining was the biggest mistake of his career.
“Jamie Lee wasn’t the first choice for Laurie. I had no idea who she was. She was 19 and in a TV show at the time, but I didn’t watch TV.”
Carpenter wanted Anne Lockhart, June Lockhart’s daughter, for Laurie. Lockhart had commitments to other film and television projects. Hill saw the publicity value in casting Janet Leigh’s daughter, since Leigh had starred in Psycho. Curtis took the part, though she had reservations. She felt she identified more with the other female characters, describing herself as a smart alec and a high school cheerleader, and worried about being considered for the quiet, repressed Laurie.
The budget shaped every one of those decisions. It also shaped the film’s look, which is spare in a way that money would have ruined.
Annie, Lynda, and the Babysitting Jobs
That evening, Michael follows Annie and Laurie to their babysitting jobs. Laurie watches Tommy Doyle. Annie stays with Lindsey Wallace across the street. Michael spies on Annie and kills Lester, the family’s German Shepherd. Tommy spots Michael from the windows and thinks he is the boogeyman. Laurie sees nothing and dismisses him.
Annie takes Lindsey to the Doyle house so she can pick up her boyfriend, and Laurie watches both children. The film’s geography is simple and exact. Two houses, one street, one night. Carpenter uses that small map better than most directors use a city.
A Score That Does the Work
Carpenter scored the film himself. Critics have praised the direction and the score above everything else, and they are right to. The theme is a handful of notes in an odd meter, and it does more to hold tension than any shot in the movie.
The film was shot in Southern California, standing in for Illinois. It was produced by Compass International Pictures and Falcon International Productions, and released by Compass International and Aquarius Releasing in October. It became one of the most profitable independent films of all time.
Its reputation has only grown. Halloween is considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. In 2006, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It spawned a film franchise comprising thirteen films.
Critics credit the film with pioneering the slasher genre alongside Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas. That is a shared credit, not a lineage, and the distinction is worth keeping. Halloween is the one that made the template portable and cheap:
- A masked killer with no motive
- A small town with one street
- A babysitter who survives because she is responsible
- A doctor who explains the evil and cannot stop it
- A score that carries the fear the budget cannot buy
Every one of those pieces is here, and every one of them is used with restraint. That is the difference between a film that starts a genre and a film that ends one.
What Halloween Gets Right
The killings are not the point. The film is at its best in the long stretches before anything happens: Laurie walking home, the shape standing behind a hedge, Tommy yelling about the boogeyman while the adults ignore him. Carpenter trusts the audience to be afraid of what it cannot quite see. That trust is rare, and it is why the film still works when the shocks have been copied into meaninglessness.
The performances hold up. Pleasence gives Loomis a conviction that borders on obsession, which is the right note for a man convinced a patient is not a person. Curtis is the reason the film has a center. She is watchable in the ordinary scenes, which is harder than being watchable in the scary ones.
The weak points are the ones nobody remembers. In this paper’s view, the dialogue is functional and some of the supporting performances are thin. The final act is the least controlled stretch. None of it matters much.
What matters, as this paper reads it, is that Halloween is a machine with no wasted parts. Ninety-one minutes, no subplot that does not pay off, no scene that exists to explain what a look could carry. The sequels and remakes that followed have more money and more gore and less of everything else — a judgment, not a measurement.
The film’s real subject is not Michael Myers. It is a town that does not believe its own children. Laurie tells Annie and Lynda that someone is watching them, and they laugh. Tommy tells Laurie there is a boogeyman at the window, and she tells him there is no such thing. The horror in Halloween is not that a killer escaped a sanitarium. It is that everyone who could have listened was too busy to bother.
That is why the film endures and why its imitators do not. They copied the mask and the knife and the babysitter. They did not copy the part where nobody listens.
Halloween earns its place. The direction is exact, the score is inseparable from the film, and Curtis carries a role that could have been a prop. It is not a perfect movie, but it is a complete one, and completeness is rarer than perfection in this genre.
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