The Halloween Series, part 1

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Starring Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis


 Plot Summery


The world needs another Halloween review like Bruckner’s symphonies need more revisions.  But one can hardly talk about the Halloween series without first dealing with the original, as I shall make this to the point: everything great about Halloween is due to how it was directed.               

The very simple story is nothing special.  Carpenter and Hill did an admirable job of writing the story to be a slow burn, but the fact is there is a good hour of this film where nothing really happens.  The dialogue more-or-less does the job, but there isn’t much said that you will come away quoting.  The acting gets the job done, but little else.  Based on all of this, Halloween shouldn’t even be a very good film, let alone a great film.  Oh but it is, and that is completely due to John Carpenter’s hand behind the camera (aided in no small part by the great DP Dean Cundey).

Take the story for example: a good 2/3 of the film contains no action, just characters going about their daily business.  Neither the dialogue nor the acting are good enough to carry film, and nothing is actually happening with the plot.  Why does it work?  It works because something is almost happening.  Michael Myers is always there, looming at the edge of the frame, appearing and disappearing at random.  The characters don’t see him, but we do.  We see him and we wait, convinced that any second, Myers will jump out and make a kill, but he doesn’t.  And so we wait, and wait, and wait.  Even when we don’t see Myers hovering in the edge of the frame, we start imagining where he might be.  Perhaps he is just behind that tree, ready to strike.  Maybe he is already in the house, about to claim a victim.  It goes back to what Alfred Hitchcock used to say.  When there is a bomb under the table and it blows up, that’s a surprise.  When there is a bomb under the table and it doesn’t blow up, that’s suspense.   Halloween is that adage come to life.  Nothing happening has rarely ever been this intense.  When Myers does lower a boom, it’s crushing.  Not because there is a big shock, but because we have become so unsure of when Myers will strike.  It is that uncertainty which is truly terrifying. 

It is also about where that uncertainty is that’s striking.  This takes place in an average mid-western town, full of regular people just going about their daily lives.  This is where you have to give credit to executive producer Irwin Yablans for pitching the idea of “the babysitter murders” to Carpenter.  Everyone in America knows what a babysitter is.  It is part of life.  The script does its job in that it gives the normal routine of these girls a chance to become familiar.  Still, again I have to say, all of these good ideas would have come to naught, if it wasn’t for Carpenter’s way of visually presenting the normalcy all the while still building the suspense.

I’m not insulting the actors here, as both Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence do fine work.  It is just that, in the wrong hands, this film would have been massive bore (read: every Friday the 13^th film).  So, bottom line?  John Carpenter takes what could be a snooze inducing, teenage slice and dice, and makes it a classic.  So, see it.

More important, when looking at the series as a whole, is what does Halloween tell us about Michael Myers.  He, after all, is the connecting thread of the series (Season of the Witch not withstanding).  Here, Myers is simply the boogieman.  There is no rhyme or reason to what he does.  He simply does it.  This is why the idea of Michael Myers (or as he is perfectly named in the credits, the Shape) is so much more effective than any of the other modern horror movie icons.  He is the unknown.  His MO is that he has none.  He could be anywhere.  That sound you heard outside your window while you were reading this?  That’s him.  That thing you saw out of the corner of your eye, but wasn’t there the next second?  Him too.

Look at what Myers does to Laurie.  He kills her friends, and sets them up for Laurie to find.  Then, when she has been reduced to a shivering mess, he stabs her in the arm, knocks her down the stairs, and gives her a fair chance to run for it.  He is just having fun.  Stabbing her seems to be his way for shooing her forward. He wants a good chase.  He hasn’t terrified her enough yet.  Such trouble he went through simply to make he had scared Laurie as much as possible.  If that doesn’t make him the boogie man, I don’t know what could.  Of course, if you are an evil-hearted person yourself.  In that case, Myers might come off as a sadistic prankster.  Maybe he does have an MO: scaring people shitless.  Death is just the inevitable consequence of his fun.

As is well known, the success of Halloween spawned what we know today as the “slasher” film.  After this sub-genre took off, and you had successes like Friday the 13^th (sigh), a sequel to Halloween was a given.  So, in 1981, three years after the original, we have…

Directed by Rick Rosenthal

Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Starring Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis


Plot Summery


There is a moment at the very end of the first film where Loomis goes over to the window to look at Myers’ body, having just shot him out the window.  When he sees that Myers isn’t there, he gives a look implying that he isn’t at all surprised to that Michael Myers has gotten up and walked away.  How can you kill something that is “purely and simply evil,” after all?  In the very beginning of Halloween 2, they re-edit the ending of the last film, omitting that shot and instead, adding one where he runs to the front door, and looks on in surprised terror.

I mention this because, everyone has their own idea of what the worst film in the Halloween series is.  You can make valid arguments for many of them, and I will when we arrive at the film I feel to be the worst.  There can be no argument, however, as to the film that “ruined” the Halloween series.  That film is the John Carpenter and Debra Hill written and produced  Halloween 2.

Now wait, you say.  Don’t most critics, those predisposed towards slahser films anyway, call Halloween 2 a respectable sequel?  Don’t most feel it did a decent job continuing the orginal?  Well, most people would be wrong.  As Carpenter was writing this film, he hit a wall.  Why were they making this?  It is simply an inferior remake.  It was then, on a night Carpenter describes as being fueled by writer’s block and Budweiser, he figured out the twist to Halloween 2.  Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ sister.  He is trying to kill his sister.

Now, stop and think about that in the context of the first film.  It renders almost everything he did pointless.  If he wasn’t pure evil, if he wasn’t the boogeyman, if he wasn’t a sadistic prankster, if he just wanted to kill his sister, why didn’t he?  He had ample opportunity, but he never did it.  Why did he keep trying to terrify her if he just wanted her dead?  It makes no sense.  I understand movies like this don’t always obey real world logic, but a film must still maintain its internal logic.  At its best (think Godfather, part II, The Empire Strikes Back or Aliens), sequels expand and enrich the stories they follow.  Halloween 2 is, therefore, the worst kind of sequel; it cheapens and degrades the original.  It actually makes Halloween less effective.  Even Psycho II, which is but a pale shadow of Psycho, manages to expand on the character of Norman Bates without pissing on the first.

Even viewing the film on its own merits… well, the few merits it has anyway, leads to disappointment.  Starting up mere minutes after the end of the first, Laurie is taken to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital (voted most abandoned hospital in America five years running) to have her injuries attended to.  Myers follows her there and starts killing off the staff while looking for her.  Loomis still hunts for Myers.  While the first film took the time to establish the normalcy that Myers was invading, and the daily lives of the characters, the sequel doesn’t.  It is simply a body count movie.  Characters are introduced for the sole purpose of getting killed.  What is that strange noise?  Well, I better go investigate.  Without the merciless buildup, the shocks have no power.  The film is relying on gore for its scares, and if it is gore you want, Friday the 13^th does it better (I can’t believe you are making me compliment Friday the 13^th, Halloween 2). 

OK, something good… well, the nearly empty hospital setting does provide a creepy setting for the killing to take place,  It doesn’t match the terror of having it on suburbia’s back door, but it works well enough in its own right.  The very end, with the “demise” of Michael Myers is a good moment.  The highlight of the film is when someone gives himself a concussion by slipping in a pool of blood and hitting his head on the floor.  That is a funny moment, and something you think would happen more often in blood drenched films of this nature.

I also want to tip my hat to the director Rick Rosenthal.  Although he doesn’t have Carpenter’s eye for composition, I still think he does the best he can with a lackluster screenplay.  Cinematographer Dean Cundey also returned for this film, but his talents are wasted on a film of this type.

Of course, I am now thinking of how they turned Dr. Loomis completely insane, having him (and an incompetent cop) kill an innocent civilian.  Then there is the security officer who doesn’t train the nurse how to use the radio, despite her pleas that she doesn’t know how to use it, before going off and discovering the intruder.  If he had done that, the police would have arrived too early in the film, and spoiled the fun (Roger Ebert liked to call this the idiot plot).  You could also take issue with the fact that Laurie is given very little to do in this film.  So, to even give a care about the person who is supposed to be the main character, you need to have seen the first film, which invites an ugly comparison.

This is every bit the run-of-the-mill, uninspired slasher film.  On its own, it is absolutely nothing special.  As a continuation of one of the best horror films ever made, it is a travesty.  

For a good laugh, look at the taglines on the posters.  Halloween 2 might have the most hilariously literal sequel tagline ever!

*Halloween III: Season of the Witch 

Ok.  This film exists because John Carpenter and Debra Hill thought to turn the Halloween into an anthology series, with a new horror film every year bearing the Halloween name, but otherwise being unrelated.  It is a great idea.  Unfortunately, it was a great idea laid to rest by this mostly poor film.  The acting is passable, but the script is nonsensical and the pacing is poor.  This film is nothing more than a footnote to the series.  So I mention it here, as a footnote.