They said it in "Scream" so it must be true - you have to be a virgin to survive one of these films... But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
The plot is beyond simple. It is, unsurprisingly, Halloween. In the first ten minutes with a steadicam, we see a low-to-the-ground point of view with a knife wander into a house and proceed to stab (a lot) a teenager caught in flagrante delicto. There are screams of surprise. Then the little low-slung camera sways out of the house, where parents look astonished - our little voyeuristic lens is actually their eight year old boy - who has just chopped up his teenage sister...
Young Michael Myers (for it is he) is shortly packed off to a home for the cinematically iconic, but twenty years later escapes (on Halloween - keep up now) only to make his way back to the house that raised him - once again with a (no doubt improperly sanitised) kitchen implement...
Jamie Lee Curtis plays the pure centre of his subsequent and systematic extermination of all teenage life - the only one who doesn't throw her morals off at the first sign of a warm body, and hence the only one likely to survive the movie. Myers, in the meantime, is being ardently pursued by dirty-mac-wearing (and equally disturbing) Donald Pleasance.
I'll stay away from blunt adoration of the film (and indeed the good films of the series [1,2&H20]), but suffice it to say, they are taut, elegantly plotted and utterly terrifying.
Instead I'd like to look at the way the film works - what it does - what it's *about*.
One of the traditional interpretations (and it's in Scream) of Halloween is to do with sexual disgust and violence. A lot of store is placed on Michael Myers' voyeuristic peeping tom behaviour and on the fact that only the pure and virginal survive, while the experimental youngsters become meat sushi in mere moments.
But this makes it sound like a modern day morality tale slamming the evils of sex. This couldn't be further from the truth - the "bogie man" is out there, and he attacks young Jamie Lee for a very specific reason (although this isn't revealed until the second film). The fact that she survives is due to her cunning, her desperation and her ability to function even though she is panicking. It's this violence and savagery that saves her - her return to a pre-cultural point of atavistic animalism. It is this move that the rest of them don't make. They are too tame, too unaware of the dangers of the film-world they inhabit. The fact that they are sexually active is seen by the film as more an indication of decadence and weakness than it is of impurity and evil (if you can see the difference).
No - Halloween is a very different kind of film...
If the Matrix was about people being woken from their 'dream' of a mundane reality, and Fight Club was about people finding life only worth living in violence and outside convention, then the Halloween series (by which I mean 1,2 & H20) is about the fight to stay *in* the dream *against all odds*. It's a film about a young woman who keeps getting initiated into the way the world *really* is, but can't accept it - *fights against it*. Nowhere is this more clear than in H20 when she spends the first half of the film drowning in a fog of alcohol and pills before finally accepting her role and becoming the creature that she was always meant to be.
And think of the audience - think of their satisfaction over these three films - their ability to escape their mundanity for an hour and have it built up again nicely for them at the end - albeit with the escapes of Michael, the sense that he could be anywhere, unresolved - a continually terrifying example of the life outside that civilised humans are too scared to experience.
That is until the very last film, when finally they are allowed to accept their fate.
Along with Jamie Lee they become one with Michael Myers...
On a black and unholy Halloween night years ago, little Michael Meyers brutally slaughtered his sister in cold blood. But for the last fifteen years, ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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