“Death has come to your little town, sheriff.” – Dr. Samuel Loomis.
Every year, a haunting date makes its way onto your calendar, a day of ghosts and ghouls. This day, known generally by the public as Halloween, is a time where children and their friends LARP as their favorite fictional and nonfictional persons and travel door-to-door, collecting candy from strangers and getting a good laugh out of scaring the pants off of their squeamish friends. But if you look beyond the jack-o-lanterns, lurking in the trash pile of chocolate wrappers are the real “frightful” surprises of the night. Wolves with the physical attributes of a human howl throughout the night, blood-sucking stalkers infiltrate the houses of their next victims, and William Shatner doppelgangers double as boogeymen, looming the late hours of their childhood neighborhood in search of their sister. Okay, so that doesn’t sound like a typical Halloween. Usually, it’s carving pumpkins with your babysitter and watching scary movies with the girl next door. But for Laurie Strode, Dr. Loomis, and all of Haddonfield, Illinois, it’s a night they’ll never forget.
We’re introduced to this story through the 6-year-old eyes of our young antagonist, Michael Myers, as stalks around his house late at night. He enters the kitchen, grabs a large carving knife, puts on his clown mask, and heads upstairs to his sister Judith Myers’s room. He infiltrates her room, where his sister then “ran into his knife” about ten times until she eventually collapses and passes from her wounds. Michael then leaves the house, with his parents inexplicably arriving home at the same time as the murder, approaching the young killer and questioning why he is carrying a bloody knife.
We jump to fifteen years later at Smith’s Grove Penitentiary. We are introduced to Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael’s doctor and psychologist, who has been with him since he murdered his sister on that fateful Halloween night.
“I spent eight years trying to reach him,” recalled Dr. Loomis. “and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil.”
Later, Loomis, along with a nurse, drive up to Smith’s Grove to pick up Michael and transfer him to another location. However as they approach the building, Loomis noticed that there are inmates roaming outside. Loomis immediately tells the nurse to stop the car, and upon doing so, he runs inside to make sure that his patient isn’t out with everyone else. However, as soon as he goes into the building, Michael jumps onto the car and proceeds to attack the nurse. He throws her out of the vehicle and drives away from Smith’s Grove. How he can successfully drive a car after spending fifteen years in the same building without any contact with the outside world is very impressive, so props to Mr. Myers on that one.
Michael has pulled off this attack and car theft with the purpose of returning home for more victims. In Haddonfield on Oct. 30, we find protagonist Laurie Strode at school, gazing out the window at a mysterious figure behind a police car. But she turns away for a moment to answer the teacher, and when she glances back both the car and the shape are gone without a trace. Not sure how he could leave with the car and for Laurie not to hear the car start up. However, I really like this about Michael, and it is shown again throughout the film. I mean, he’s the boogeyman. The embodiment of evil. This gives the character a sense that he could be anywhere at any given time, making him even more terrifying than the shape already is.
After this scene, Michael follows Laurie and her friends in the police car as they walk home from school. Laurie gets nervous, recognizing the vehicle as the same she saw out the window, and her friend jumps to her defense. But after he passes them, the girls continue along their way, unaware they have become a killer’s new targets. This is another thing the movie does right: everything happens for a reason. Every event Michael takes part of all lead with motivations leaning towards a single purpose. Everything mentioned and achieved feels very natural, as if months of planning had gone into play. No one is thrown away or taken for granted. Every character, big or small, strongly contributes here.
Cut to the elementary school where Tommy Doyle, a young boy that Laurie babysits, is carrying a pumpkin that he wants to carve. He is teased by the other children, who tell him the boogeyman will come for him. They shove him onto the ground, and his pumpkin splits under him. The shift of the camera angle switching to the ground as Tommy falls onto and smashes the pumpkin is very impactful, and connects the viewer with him in his moment of weakness. Next to the scares, something that this movie executes extremely well is the characters. Each one of them is relatable in their own ways, and you almost instantly feel for them.
As the boys run away from Tommy, Michael catches one of them outside the gate, but lets him go. Then Michael stares at Tommy from outside the fence, following him first on foot and then in the stolen car. Something that this film does a great job of, and this scene really shows that, is the suspense in this film. Even if you think you do, you never really know what is going to happen, and you are always left in a state of panic and paranoia every time that he is present in a scene. There are points where you know where he is, and the anticipation gets to you, or you know that he’s there, but you don’t know where in the room, or house, that he is at in that moment.
This movie is filled with lots of suspenseful material, as well as plenty of horror and scares for anyone to enjoy. And I absolutely LOVE this movie. It’s a masterpiece in my eyes; from the acting to the plot structure, this movie has everything you’d want to find inside a slasher film. This was the first horror film I saw, and I have been watching it every Halloween since I was about three years old. It’s a film that I could watch over and over again and it is always enjoyable and very exciting to watch. It’s really spectacular: the characters in all of their respects are very relatable and memorable, and the fact that the love for this film has been just as strong today as it was in 1978 is truly amazing. This earns its spot as a fantastic slasher film, as well as standing its ground in history as one of the best horror movies of all time.