Halloween

Alphabetical order brings the occasional happy coincidence — Groundhog Day coming up in February, for example. But Halloween is next, and this is March. We soldier on.

The first time I watched Halloween, my family caught the televised version at some point in the '80s. I was maybe 8 or 10 years old — far too young by today's standards, but my parents let me watch anyway. I've mentioned before how they rarely prevented us from watching anything except sex scenes (which were often just fast-forwarded — comical to watch and to contemplate as an alternative to watching at regular 30 frames per second).

I'm thankful my parents let me watch whatever, because I was exposed to so much great cinema at an early age. I often romanticize the weekends when Dad would bring home a pile of VHS tapes from the local video store, and I attribute much of that to a lack of money in those Reaganized '80s, but there's also a twinge of sadness when I look back, because as a family we really aren't that functional. We don't talk and when we do, we don't have much to say. We get along okay, but sometimes there are long silences.

We watched movies well, though.

Not surprisingly, Halloween scared the living shit out of me — the breathing noises, the "eyehole" perspective, the over-the-shoulder shots of Michael wandering around Haddonfield in broad daylight, the creepy music, the scene when Michael kills the German shepherd, and that moment in the night when he is standing across the street, silhouetted in the porchlight, and then...gone.

John Carpenter's script simply referred to Michael as "The Shape," which is pretty much the freakiest descriptor you could put on a killer stalker type in the late '70s/early '80s. This "shape" picked the one night of the year that he could walk around Haddonfield acting creepy, walking from place to place wearing a mask, and no one would suspect him (except Loomis).

Halloween is credited as the first "slasher" film, as well as inventing a host of other horror film cliches and spawning much discussion:

"The film set in motion the Puritanical, psycho-pathological principle that one's survival was directly proportional to one's sexual experience. It also asserted the allegorical idea that sexual awakening often meant the literal 'death' of innocence (or oneself). With the title character Laurie (Curtis) a virgin, she is able to escape mostly unscathed (as does the asexual Dr. Loomis and the young pre-teen Tommy Doyle), but others who are more promiscuous and sexually-charged are less fortunate and suffer deadly consequences as victims. In this film, murders often occur after sexual encounters when victims are distracted and off-guard."

Surprisingly, in addition to scaring me half to death, Halloween brought out my empathy. I remember feeling a strong sense of sadness and pity when the bullies knock the little schoolboy to the ground, shattering his pumpkin. I was sort of that same picked-on boy back then.

As an adult, the film doesn't work as a horror film for me anymore, but as a classic John Carpenter film, oh yes. As I get older, I appreciate Carpenter's efforts more, because I see how technically sound his work is now that I've studied film and watched thousands of terrible movies. For me, films don't get much better than Carpenter's work from 1978-88.

The Carpenter geek in me loves seeing the tribute to The Thing From Another World on televisions on this Halloween night. Carpenter would go on to make his own version of the film, a modern reimagining/tribute/sequel/somethingeruther that's not only a great horror picture, but just great filmmaking (not a surprise).

I didn't realize what I was watching then — Carpenter seemed to blend in with a lot of the cinema of the time, and I was too young to really know the difference (or associate names with films — but when you put Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live up against most modern excuses for filmmaking (especially genre pictures), you really can see a difference. Look at what John Carpenter was able to pull off without a lot of money but with a ton of creative control. He should be a hero to aspiring indie filmmakers.

I didn't want to watch this film lately because I wasn't feeling particularly Halloween-y in March, but I'm glad I forced myself to push through. Thankfully, I don't have any of the sequels to choke down (though Halloween II isn't bad). I've seen all the films in the original franchise, and they just get worse and worse.

And don't get me started on Rob Zombie's version, which took Michael Myers, the horrifying, unstoppable, mad killing machine, and made him a whiny little boy with flowing hair for the first half of the film. Basically, Rob Zombie did to Michael Myers what George Lucas did to Darth Vader. Not cool.

Somewhere along the way, filmmakers, writers, and audiences became obsessed with origin stories — and generally wanting to know how a madman is created. Okay, here's the challenge: Find one of those films where the madman origin prequel story is more terrifying than the actual, original film.

I contend that knowing how a villain got here is not nearly as scary as a villain who exists from nowhere, with little motivation. (Witness Heath Ledger's Joker for an example.) That's far more terrifying than knowing that a character was molested or abused in some way a la Zombie's interpretation, or fed "sister stew" a la Hannibal Lecter.

Madness comes from a deep, black void that defies description. The original Michael Myers personifies that void; we're looking off a balcony and seeing nothing but darkness and space where a man should be.