HALLOWEEN is a Compass International Pictures presentation, rated R for violence, sexuality/nudity, drug use and some language. The run time is 91 minutes and the movie debuted in U.S. multiplexes on October 25, 1978.

HALLOWEEN has been talked about so much that I fear reviewing this for redundancy. What haven’t you heard about this movie? The many references to PSYCHO by use of a character named Sam Loomis and the appearance of the daughter of a legendary shower vixen? The early use of the Steadicam, the great tracking camera used to follow the point of view of the killer? The grand dark cinematography by Dean Cundey used to make this movie look like a pure nightmare? The fact that this movie seemed to have spawned numerous imitators and inferior follow-ups? It’s all been said before in countless interviews, reviews, documentaries, articles, and conversations.

The fact that really sticks out to me is that HALLOWEEN is truly one of a kind. This movie didn’t quite invent the slasher film genre though. Pundits look to PSYCHO as an early inspiration, but the early seventies saw the appearance of many of them. Bob Clark made BLACK CHRISTMAS in 1974, Mario Bava made TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE in 1971, and in 1972, a film came out which had the alternate name of THE SLASHER. But the results weren’t truly played for sheer “boo” horror until HALLOWEEN was released.

It was the third major feature for one John Carpenter. In 1974, he collaborated with the great Dan O’Bannon on a comical sci-fi adventure called DARK STAR, and in a couple years released the action flick ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. But he collaborated on this one with a woman named Debra Hill, who had been born in the Jersey state of Haddonfield and worked on PRECINCT 13 as assistant editor and script supervisor. With executive producers Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans on board, the idea was solidified to make a feature about the bogeyman, that legendary imaginary creature that’s the stuff of childhood terror, as a real person intent on stalking and killing some unfortunate babysitters.

That in a nutshell is the plot, in that someone is on a murder spree and he has to be stopped. That alone was enough to get the juices of many other producers and filmmakers going, and soon we had this whole WAVE of horror films which could be summed up as the Dead Teenager Movie or Mad Slasher Picture as coined by Roger Ebert. But all those movies, from PROM NIGHT to GRADUATION DAY to all the FRIDAY THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN sequels and even today’s modern slasher pictures are all seen as masturbatory rehashes of the original HALLOWEEN. When those movies blew their wad, the result was much more bloody and messy than anything in that feature film. The emphasis was valued more upon the FX than the suspense, and that only makes HALLOWEEN more timeless.

The movie starts out with a grisly murder well enough. From the camera’s P.O.V., we follow an unseen presence creeping around the household where Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson) lives. She has a quickie with her boyfriend and during which we see the killer sneaking around and entering through the back of the house, heading toward the kitchen for a nice butcher knife, hiding as the boyfriend leaves, heading upstairs, picking up a mask on the floor, then walking in on her half-naked sister. She is then stabbed to death by who we find out about a half of a minute later is actually her six-year-old brother, Michael (his face as a boy belongs to Will Sandin and as an older person to Tony Moran).

This was on Halloween night in 1963 in the small Illinois town of…Haddonfield! When the story continues we jump 15 years later to the night before Halloween in 1978. In a mental institution at Smith’s Grove, we see a nurse driving Myers’ psychiatrist to the site. This man is Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance), and when they get to the hospital, they are surprised to see the inmates lurking around outside in a rainstorm. When he goes to check it out, Michael Myers commandeers the station wagon by his own force and drives away to where he belongs: home! But he successfully manages to steal his sister’s tombstone and break into a store on the way.

The movie then follows Myers as he singles out his three potential victims, all high school girls. There’s the clean-cut and virginal Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is stuck babysitting little Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews) on Halloween night. There’s her friend Annie (Nancy Kyes with the ironic pseudonym “Nancy Loomis”), who wants to spend her night with her boyfriend Paul, who gets away from being grounded, but is also stuck looking after a child, Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards). And there’s Lynda (P.J. Soles), who just wants to get frisky with her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) in the Wallace house. Myers effectively takes out Annie, Bob and Linda, all the while Tommy is afraid of a dark figure he can see outside the living room window that looks like the “bogeyman” his schoolmates taunted him about.

This bogeyman is Michael Myers, masked and armed with knife, and Laurie is forced into a life-or-death run for her life against the violent psycho. All the while, Dr. Loomis is right around the corner, and is awaiting the chance to visit his old patient and possibly plant six slugs into his chest.

Everything about HALLOWEEN has become the lifeblood of the slasher film, nothing more well-known than the fact that sex, drugs and impure thoughts will get you on the sh*tlist of any horror villain. It’s the cliché which drives the victims of all slasher films to die, and was so wonderfully pointed out in the 1996 blockbuster SCREAM. Carpenter didn’t want to kill the Sexual Revolution as he and Hill like to point out to many people, and yet thanks to many imitators we know now the rules of surviving a horror film, which can be summed up as the Antiheroine Skin Rule in the book of Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary. P.J. Soles bares her breasts and dies, and Nancy Kyes strips to her underwear (although we only see her backside) and dies. Laurie Strode, however, is fully clothed and is deemed the survivor.

But the real reason why HALLOWEEN clobbers competition in that the villain is a true keeper. Michael Myers, in a black jumpsuit and white-colored Captain Kirk mask with eyeholes, is a cold-blooded monster. Dr. Loomis explains this to Annie’s father, Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers), inside the Myers household, where Myers has murdered and partially consumed a dog:

“I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left: no reason, no conscience, no understanding and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.
I met this six year old child with this blind, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes…the devil's eyes.
I spent eight years trying to reach him 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.”

When he kills, he simply does it without thought or sense. For instance, when he sticks it to Bob in the kitchen of the Wallace’s household, he looks at the impaled corpse with a fascination, and even if a knitting needle ends up lodged in his neck, he simply plucks it out and keeps coming at you. It’s this unstoppability that caused him to become the most durable monster next to Jason Voorhees. Nick Castle put on the Myers costume here and does an admirable job playing a silent, deadly being. But don’t blink at the end of the movie, for then you may see the face of Michael Myers, something which no other sequel would bother to unveil. In fact, future sequels tried to justify Michael’s killing sprees and in a way they ruined the mysterious menace of Michael Myers.

John Carpenter gets the terror out of it all in purely visionary ways. The opening murder sequence is amazingly done in one single and unbroken shot which lasts about five minutes, and the camera work is so good in expressing the POV of young Michael that when he dons the mask, we see it like he himself was a walking camera, with eyeholes revealing the way to and from Judith’s death bed. When Michael escapes, the result is a brief, but nerve-jangling chill, punctuated by the legendary piano-and-synths theme music composed by Carpenter himself. And the third act with Laurie dodging the threat of the bogeyman is a neverending exercise in nail-biting.

For a movie shot on such a miniscule budget, Carpenter made this film with so much good intentions to scare and shock that no movie can rival it. It was once hailed as the most successful independent horror film in history until the Blair Witch bonanza stormed in, but even then HALLOWEEN still packs a larger punch than that other movie. The music, the direction, the editing (by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace, the latter responsible for making the infamous third entry in the series) and the cinematography all mesh into a perfectly disturbing atmosphere. Even the opening credits with the sinister looking Jack-O-Lantern gets you in the mood. And like I said before, there is no need for excessive gore (the knife death I mentioned in the kitchen is relatively bloodless and relies mostly on expression and motion), and later films couldn’t stop flaunting their plasma.

The film is natural, and even the dialogue between the three girls, which can be considered way dated, seems steeped in the reality. This leads me to the acting critique. Nancy Kyes (who also played in Carpenter’s follow-up THE FOG) and P.J. Soles (who rocked me as the Ramones fan in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL) look like twentysomethings, but do natural jobs playing hormone-mad teenagers. Charles Cyphers was alright as the Sheriff and returned for the sequel in 1981. However, there are only two performances vital enough to make HALLOWEEN such a good film.

Jamie Lee Curtis was only 19 in her feature debut here, a fresh-faced actress who is at once engaging as a heroine and able to scream like she’s truly convinced Nick Castle was really going to plant a knife in her gut. It’s a testament to her that we truly feel scared and we root for Laurie to get out of harm’s way and live to tell later on. This was the role that made her the penultimate scream queen, although I still cite the earliest example of a scream queen being Marilyn Burns in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Still, Curtis was on her way to future roles in such films as THE FOG, PROM NIGHT, and HALLOWEEN II, and this was before she became the great sex symbol and power player she is now.

And Donald Pleasance was 58 at the time he made HALLOWEEN, and of course he had over 100 previous film, TV and stage credits before this. But rarely did there surface such an idolized hero in horror films than Dr. Loomis, the kind of character who can face evil, feel vulnerable, and yet still be tough enough to track down the enemy. Pleasance of course had a focused and believable presence, and this was what made him such a vital part of all the other sequels up until the sixth film in 1995, which proved to be his swan song as he died early in the year due to replaced heart valve complications. But his earlier performance in the original HALLOWEEN remains a classic of all of his many, many roles.

HALLOWEEN is a timeless horror film, one to be cherished every October 31 with friends in a dark room. And I think that Video Treasures/Anchor Bay Entertainment have well understood the fact. Five DVD releases have been issued, including a standard version from October 1997, a limited 2-disc set from 1999 which contained a special edition of the film plus the coveted “Extended Version” of the film, the special edition minus the bonus disc, and also in 2001 a release of the “Extended Version” which included the TV footage edited back in. Now here is August 2003, and Anchor Bay have done it again: the new 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, part of Anchor Bay’s collection of DIVIMAX-enhanced titles, “digital video to the max.”

Presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio (anamorphic widescreen), this picture looks strikingly different from previous transfers, both good and bad. Well, let’s start good: the problems with previous transfers in the form of grain and edge enhancement and lack of proper shadow detail seem less evident. Some grain exists, but not excessive amounts, and the black levels and shadows are as solid as a ruby. Edge haloes are never a concern. Those are the good aspects of this new lively transfer, now get ready for this…THE BLUES ARE GONE! And I’m talking about the filters, which have brought out the colors in the pumpkins and provided so much of the night atmosphere. These hues have been drained to the point where the movie looks more blatantly colorful, so that when we see Laurie screaming “TOMMY, OPEN THE DOOR!” outside the house, we notice the picture surrounding lacks the original blue tinting Dean Cundey aimed for, and was kept in previous transfers which were actually approved by Dean himself. I didn’t see him anywhere acknowledge personal supervision on the new transfer. In other words: DON’T TRADE IN YOUR OLD DVD!

The difference doesn’t get considered throughout, as the commentary track and documentary extras focus on the preferred darker look of the film. As for the audio tracks, which consist of English Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 surround tracks and the original mono stereo mix, nothing seems to have changed. The mono mix is mostly on listen with this 5.1 mix, but it opens the door for louder effects and music reinforcement. For instance, the effects of the rainstorm come through a lot, and the doomy keyboard score really gets intense at times. Dialogue was clear and without tin or hiss, and the music sounds great no matter what audio option you prefer.

This is not the Ultimate Edition of the movie, though, so here’s another reason I suggest you keep the older special edition VHS/DVD release you might own. For instance, you know all that additional TV footage restored in the extended version and available as separate extras on previous SE’s…they’re non-existent here. The plan was to include a branching version with this additional footage, but it failed to happen. Also gone out of the picture are the classic “Halloween Unmasked” documentary and most of the copious film production stills of older releases. I’ll get to the differences later.

However, this release reissues a classic extra from the Criterion laserdisc: the screen-specific audio commentary track which contained John Carpenter, Debra Hill and Jamie Lee Curtis. This may sound like a basic recollection of nuggets and praise any diehard fan will know by heart, but remember that this was recorded mid-1990’s when they had only just begun talking about the movie, and before they had been hounded by this film in interview after interview. Full of information on every aspect of the film from conception to acceptance, and true to the quality of a good no-B.S. Criterion commentary, this is a really engaging extra.

The new 89-minute documentary HALLOWEEN: A Cut Above The Rest is a chestnut of already familiar interview snippets (including Jamie Lee on the set of HALLOWEEN H20 and Carpenter’s filmed-for-AMC comments) along with brand new pieces of talk from the likes of Debra Hill, Dean Cundey, P.J. Soles, Irwin Yablans, Fangoria Magazine editor Tony Timpone, and many others. This is the most complete and heavily detailed documentary that can be assembled though, although judging from the participation of Fox and the constant voice-over narration, it felt like it was going to be aired on TV. Still, this is the source for the last words on HALLOWEEN.

On Location: 25 Years Later, at 10 minutes, focuses on the setting of Haddonfield where it was then and now, and it’s got interviews with Hill and Soles to boot. Although they could’ve done without praising the script and Jamie Lee Curtis once again, I was quite fond of this extra, simply because now the Myers house belongs to a doctor.

The remaining extras are simple. You get an alternate red-band theatrical trailer for the film, two TV spots, two radio spots, a still gallery of 58 frames mainly consisting of promotional material (and not the penultimate collection of photos as it should be), talent bios, a neat 16-page color booklet with stills and an essay by another Fangoria contributor, Michael Gingold, and a couple of DVD-ROM extras including the complete script and two screensavers. I’d go ahead and recommend it to anyone new or old who lives on the thrill of HALLOWEEN or to diehards who want to complete their collection of this film’s available extras while keep their older Anchor Bay editions in check as well.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age