Halloween (1978) Review

  • Director: John Carpenter
  • Writers: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
  • Stars: Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tony Moran
  • Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes

Synopsis

In Haddonfield, on Halloween night, 1963, a little boy enters a house, wanders around, and grabs a big knife from the kitchen. He then goes upstairs and kills his sister, who screams, “Michael!” As she dies. He goes outside and his parents find him holding the bloody knife. This kid ain’t right…

We fast-forward to 1978, where Dr. Loomis and his nurse are driving in the rain. The patient they are going to see hasn’t spoken in fifteen years. Loomis refers to the patient as “it,” not “him.” Loomis doesn’t want this patient to ever get out of the asylum. When they get there, patients roaming the hillside in the pouring rain; something is very wrong. He gets out of the car, and one of the lunatics attacks the nurse to steal the car. Loomis thinks he’ll be returning to Haddonfield.

The next day, back in Haddonfield, it’s Halloween. Laurie Strode walks to school alone, and she stops by the old Myers place to drop off a key. She doesn’t see the figure lurking inside. After school, she’s doing babysitting duty. Laurie sees Michael a few times that day, just sort of watching her.

Loomis is at the cemetery and finds that Judith Myers’ headstone is missing. Someone broke into the hardware store and stole a Halloween mask and some knives. The sheriff takes Loomis to the old Myers house. Loomis explains what kind of monster the six-year-old Michael Myers was. How he is “inhumanly patient.”

Laurie and Tommy are sitting at home watching the original “The Thing” film on TV, but Tommy thinks the Boogie-man is coming for them. He’s seen him outside. Laurie’s friend Annie comes over, and not long after, she’s killed in her car.

Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob, go over to Annie’s place, and no one is there. They start making out as Michael watches. Michael stabs Bob in the kitchen, and then goes into Lynda’s bedroom covered in a sheet so she thinks it’s Bob.

Once the kids are asleep, Laurie goes looking for Annie or Lynda at their house. She goes wandering through the apparently-empty house until she finds Annie, Lynda, Bob, and the missing tombstone. Michael stabs at Laurie, but she ends up falling down the stairs and hiding from him. She gets out of the house and screams for help while falling down a lot.

She eventually runs back to the house where she was babysitting the kids, but he gets in easily. She stabs him, but of course he gets back up. She hides in the closet, and he comes in after her. She fights him off with a coat hanger to the eye. She stabs him again, and he’s gotta be dead now, right?

Laurie sends the kids to the neighbor’s house to call the police, and then we see Michael sit up in the background. The screaming children get Loomis’s attention, and he goes in the house just in time to shoot Michael repeatedly. Michael falls off the balcony after Loomis’s gun runs out bullets. When Loomis looks down, the “Boogie Man” has vanished.

Commentary

Michael Myers drives a car, and he spends a lot of time behind the wheel in this film. For the first forty minutes or so, he’s only seen in his car. It’s an hour and eight minutes in before we see the famous white mask on Michael.

Once again with a John Carpenter film, the simple, repetitive soundtrack totally sets the mood for the entire film. The kids are watching “The Thing From Another World,” which John Carpenter remade as “The Thing” just two years after this.

This film is 43 years old, and Kevin is still confused by why the kids are trick-or-treating in the daylight. It’s just unnatural. Other than a lack of cellphones, it holds up just fine. It’s a little hard to locate its exact position on our top ten lists, but it’s definitely somewhere in the middle of the short list. It’s good enough to make at least a dozen sequels.