Everyone’s entitled to one good scare: Halloween reviewed in 1979

What is most admirable, first of all, about Halloween is what it is not: despite its setting in the sort of snug, small Mid-Western town which has been host of late to many a rampaging Z-feature mutant (and prompted some equally misbegotten critical theses on the Family), it cannot really be described at all in terms sociological or psychological. It is one of the cinema’s most perfectly engineered devices for saying ‘Boo!’; it is also a good illustration of director John Carpenter’s philosophy of film and audience involvement: “Movies are not intellectual, they are not ideas… Movies are emotional, an audience should cry or laugh or get scared.” (Sight and Sound, Spring 1978). 

Responses to Halloween will depend not on audience recognition that its indestructible psychopath is a threat to their own quiet lives – despite Donald Pleasence’s gnomic warning, “Death has come to your little town” – but on their susceptibility to Carpenter’s virtuoso manipulation, which is itself the ‘subject’ of the movie. There is a contradiction, and a fine line, here – and one which Carpenter treads with unerring skill: the first tenet of classic Hollywood storytelling, which Carpenter takes as his model, is its invisibility; yet in order to touch the nerves of an audience which has seen it all so many times before, Carpenter must employ the style in a manner which allows them to recognise the manipulation and still willingly submit to its spell. 

His reservations on this score about the opening of Assault on Precinct 13 – a long hand-held tracking shot, which he felt was necessary as an audience hook but also a “bit self-conscious” – have been elaborated here into a style that is both elementary and as self-consciously wrought as possible. Halloween begins with a similar sequence – a subjective, hand-held camera indicating the unknown maniac stalking his first victim – but one lasting considerably longer, as the killer follows a girl round and through a house, climbs some stairs, dons a Halloween mask, commits the bloody crime then hurries back outside, where the first cut to a retreating crane shot outrageously reveals his identity. Thereafter, Carpenter uses similarly elaborate tracking movements not merely to indicate when the killer is back on the scene, but to point up how easily the audience can be made to respond as if he were. 

The trick is carried over in an elegant sense of composition, in which dark spaces suddenly opening up behind characters’ shoulders become charged with our eager anticipation. That the victims are all youngsters caught in, before or just after flagrante delicto also complies with the sexual hang-ups of movie monsters but is not, the film is careful to establish, part of any psychological theme. Interestingly, the Carpenter-scripted Eyes of Laura Mars failed because of the attempt to suggest that a similar perceptual/formal trick, the heroine’s ‘second sight’, did have psychological significance. To pursue the subject here would lead down as false a trail as the psychiatrist’s thoughts on Norman Bates’ role switch in Psycho – and more pertinent, given Carpenter’s general allusiveness, is the fact that Jamie Lee Curtis, admirably playing the heroine who finally escapes the monster’s clutches and whose purity is repeatedly stressed, is the daughter of Janet Leigh. 

Just to make sure his intentions are not misconstrued, Carpenter includes a psychiatrist (with the same name as Psycho’s hero) whose role is to deepen not elucidate the mystery, and whose predictions of his patient’s intentions owe nothing to Freud and everything to Jeremiah. Such delighted self-awareness, of course, is characteristic of neo-Hollywood directors in general – although it’s interesting that Robert Wise coolly deploys similar perceptual devices in Audrey Rose to develop a hocus-pocus plot in intellectual rather than visceral terms. 

But, as in Precinct 13, Carpenter manages to avoid the excesses of Bogdanovich and De Palma-ism – even if he comes close with repeated glimpses of The Thing and Forbidden Planet on TV – and steers Halloween safely between indulgence and useful recreation of his sources. Now that he has proved in two films that he can pull off this difficult balancing act with consummate ease, one just hopes that Carpenter doesn’t get stuck in an aesthetic high-wire routine.