Halloween: Night And Day

So, it’s confession time. In all of the years I’ve been writing about scary movies, there’s been a pretty big gap in my cinematic education…

…I’ve never seen the original Halloween.

I did see Halloween 4 back in the day, and one of the first things I ever wrote here was a defense of Rob Zombie’s remake, but as seminal horror films go, this was a pretty big oversight on my part. I’m not really a fan of slasher films and never have been, but even I have to recognize the landmark status of this film. It wasn’t the first slasher film (what was is debatable, was it Black Christmas? Blood Feast? Peeping Tom? I’ll let someone else have that argument), but it was a watershed moment for the style. codifying it as a genre unto itself and spawning legions of imitators, not to mention so many sequels, reboots and remakes that there are literally multiple Halloween timelines at this point.

So even though it’s not really my style of movie, it still strikes me as one that I should really address. And since Sundays are when I watch the films I write about here, and since this most recent Sunday was the titular holiday, it seemed like this was exactly the right time.

Of course, there’s always baggage any time you come to an iconic film late in the game. Out of the ones I’ve written about here, some didn’t work for me because they’ve become too well-known, too embedded in popular culture to have any surprises left, some still have all their original power intact, and as it turns out, this one falls somewhere in between. Some elements haven’t aged as well as they could have, and hindsight means it’s hard to see past the things that aren’t yet cliches in the film, but will end up becoming so. But there’s still a lot here to admire, much of it in contrast to the movies that ended up taking its ideas and turning them into cliche. You can see how a lot of filmmakers missed the point or took the wrong lesson away from this film.

It begins on Halloween night in Haddonfield, IL, in 1963. It opens on a point-of-view shot - we’re seeing things through someone’s eyes. Whoever they are, they’re peering through a window at a young man and young woman making out on a couch. The couple go upstairs to do what you do in situations like these, and upon the young man’s departure, our point of view goes into the house, goes into the kitchen, and picks up a knife. The point of view puts on a mask, and now we see through the eyeholes of the mask. We can hear our point of view’s breathing. The point of view goes upstairs, where the young woman is brushing her hair, and it stabs her to death before walking back downstairs…

…where it is revealed to be a six-year-old boy.

The boy is Michael Myers, and he’s just murdered his sister Judith. Cut to Halloween in Haddonfield, IL, in 1978. Myers has been remanded to a hospital for the criminally insane for the majority of his life, and his supervising doctor, Dr. Loomis, and a nurse are preparing to take custody of Michael and escort him to a hearing. When they arrive at the hospital, there’s been a security breach. Michael Myers is loose. He steals a car and heads for Haddonfield, to finish what he started fifteen years ago.

The events of the film take place over the course of a single day - it begins midday, night falls around the halfway point, and it ends before dawn. Framing it this way provides one of its first major strengths: This film uses pacing really, really well. It’s a much slower burn of a movie than subsequent imitators, and that works to its advantage. Because it’s set over the course of one day, the whole first half of the film is buildup, a slice of life in small-town Illinois. We’re introduced to our protagonists - Laurie, Lynda, and Annie - at school, as they’re enduring their classes for the sake of the fun they’re going to have that evening, unaware that they are being watched and followed. This is intercut with Loomis’ attempt to track down Myers and convince law enforcement that the people of this town are in danger. Meanwhile, Myers, back in his hometown, watches and waits for night to fall. A lot of this film’s power is in the way it makes you wait for something awful to happen, knowing that it will.

The relatively slow pace of the first two acts is the broadest example of this, but even on a scene-by-scene basis, this film does not rush. It takes its time, and draws everything out, but it rarely feels like it’s spinning its wheels. Even in the third act, at the film’s climax, it’s very deliberate - there’s an inevitability, an implacability to it, and even as familiar with the film as a pop culture artifact as I was (and having seen a remake that kept many of the broad strokes intact), there were still moments that made me gasp. The threat is clearly established early on, in the light of day, and we have to sit with the tension - we know something bad is going to happen, so when night finally comes, there’s a momentousness to it, a sense that shit is about to get very bad. Time is an effective element in this film.

And so is space, for that matter. This film’s other big strength is its staging. The whole first half of this film takes place in broad daylight, punctuated by instances of Myers stalking Laurie. It’s audacious - generally night makes everything scarier, but breaking that particular rule makes everything that happens that much more unsettling. And it’s never really front and center - this film does a very good job of letting creepy things happen in the background. We never really get a good glimpse at Myers during the day - he’s crowded into one side of the frame, just shoulders and a torso, or partially obscured by scenery. We know someone’s there, but they’re largely a mystery. Likewise, until night falls, all we ever really see is the aftermath of his violence (barring his escape at the beginning) - he’s moving through the world, and at first all we see is the wake he leaves behind him. So you get a sense that there’s someone bad out there and that they are doing bad things, but for the first half of the film, it’s all in the margins, visually and narratively.

But when night falls, it becomes a whole other matter. The violent moments in this film are generally minimal, though in two instances it lingers long enough that you get a sense the suffering and distress he’s causing, which is something that largely goes ignored in other films in the genre. Some die slowly, some die quickly, but it’s here, in the final act that Myers is revealed - the iconic blank white mask, the violence depicted as it’s happening instead of after the fact. There’s a reason Loomis is worried, he’s not a crazy old man, and now we see why. But there’s a restraint there many other films in the genre lack. It’s still more suggestion and aftermath than explicit gore - much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this film is a lot less bloody than you think it’ll be. But it works because we’ve had the entire first half of the film to get to know these people, so when they die, they are people dying, not cannon fodder for practical effects.

Visually it does a lot with a little, making excellent use of shot composition to reveal Myers emerging from the shadows, framed as a lone, stark figure who is suddenly there, then just as suddenly gone. The blank white mask does a lot of work in this regard because it’s a striking element that can just as easily blend into the background as be brought forward in our attention. A lot of this film works because Myers is lurking in the background, and it’s what he’s doing while other people are in the foreground unaware, or elsewhere in the house, that ramps up the tension and dread. As an audience, you know what’s coming and you’re sort of helpless to watch it play out, like a nightmare.

It does have its shortcomings, though. The dialogue’s pretty corny throughout, some of it landing clumsily, and some of the effects work hasn’t aged all that well (the opening sequence feels especially clumsy to the modern eye), but given that it was a low-budget independent film in the late 1970s, that it still gets over to the degree that it does is a testimony to the filmmaking skill behind it. Characterization is a bit thin, though in some instances this works to its advantage - we know nothing about Myers, and that’s as it should be. He would eventually be over-explained into the ground by almost all of the Halloween movies that followed, but here all we know is that he’s unknowable, and the unknown is frightening. There’s not much to Loomis either - he seems to be defined by his need to stop Myers, the Van Helsing to Myers’ Dracula. Annie and Lynda are mostly ciphers, teenage girls more interested in boys and partying than school. Laurie gets a little more depth - she’s the good one, the “girl scout,” but she isn’t prissy or prudish. There’s real adolescent vulnerability there - she’s smart, but it’s the late 70s, so that keeps her on the outside. It’s less a rejection of her friends’ ways and more the feeling that it isn’t an option for her, and you can sense some sadness around that. Which is more than characters in films like these usually get, but you can see how subsequent filmmakers would turn this into “masked murderer picks off horny teenagers, only to be foiled by a virginal Final Girl,” codifying the “rules” of the slasher film so thoroughly that Wes Craven would eventually turn that into something surprisingly fresh and interesting with Scream…which would of course get its own slate of sequels, adding smirky self-awareness to the mix. There’s a reboot of that franchise in the works as well.

And all of that bums me out, because there’s more than that going on here, and seeing where the cliches started makes me feel bad that this (and an absolute rat’s nest of sequels and remakes) would be its legacy, because it really does feel like it deserves more than that. I mean, it’s a classic, and rightfully so, but I wish what people took away from it instead was the value of restraint and suspense, instead of tits, kills, and body count.

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