‘Tis the Season to be Scary
SAM SCHOFIELD
Halloween is fast approaching, and consequently scary movie season is upon us. One of the best of these, still, is John Carpenter’s 1978 classic: Halloween. Set in the otherwise normal American suburb of Haddonfield, Illinois, monster man Michael Myers returns to his home town to wet his knife with the blood of teenagers and anyone else unlucky enough to cross his path. Sounds like regular slasher movie stuff, right? Well, unlike other slasher movies that came before it, Halloween puts the audience behind Michael’s mask. We stalk Michael’s prey with him, from behind a bush or around corners.
The movie was made with a surprisingly small budget of 300,000 dollars and shot within 20 days. John Carpenter composed a great deal of the score for the movie himself. Without the aid of either a big studio or a big budget, he made one of the most successful horror movies of all time – whether you measure success by critical acclaim, timelessness, or box office earnings. In Halloween, Carpenter made a movie that could (well, almost) have been made by anyone. There aren’t any super expensive effects; all the locations could have been any standard American suburb. Yet (as he continued to do throughout his career) John Carpenter made a timeless thriller that spawned many copycats and wannabes trying to top his original classic slasher movie. In spite of their bigger budgets and bigger baddies, these subsequent efforts don’t elicit for me the same visceral response I had the first time I watched Halloween, many Halloweens ago.
Halloween will be shown at the Electric Palace, High Street, on 31 October at 7:30PM
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