Or, "The Shape Of Horror: What John Carpenter's Halloween Still Has To Teach The Genre"
I thought we outgrew superstition. True, stating that is mostly a riff on a line spoken by Jamie Lee Curtis in one of the most iconic horror films of all time, John Carpenter's 1978 "
Halloween", but there's a quality about the film that actively works towards keeping the idea of what superstition can be fully and vibrantly alive - and it's fascinating that, all these years later, there's still a natural element to be found in what basically amounts to a story about an asylum escapee randomly targeting a bunch of teenagers against the backdrop of a holiday. On paper, it sounds relatively dull and overly simplistic. Definitely not what you'd consider "horrific" or even intrinsically scary. And when you learn more about the movie, you find all of these elements that really shouldn't work. It was made for just over 300 thousand dollars by a studio that didn't really believe in it. It was written by a couple of twenty-somethings who only had one film to their credentials. It was made in the late 1970's, well beyond the point of becoming outdated and losing it's impact. The point is that when you think about it on a basic conceptual level, nothing about Halloween should be considered worthy of the praise that's still heaped upon it very nearly 40 years since it's release.
And yet, Halloween stands above a myriad of successors, imitators, ripoffs, and pretenders to the throne it never intended to build for itself. Much like Steven Spielberg's
Jaws or James Cameron's
The Terminator, Carpenter's Halloween is among a select few of horror movies - or hell, movies in general - that transcend their own limitations built on by time and the advancements of how to make movies, how artistic interpretations and tastes change, and ultimately what makes a horror film scary according to modern sensibilities. Halloween is a slow burn build to a night of realistic horror that can't be achieved with ghosts or demons, yet it's got a subtle infusion of the supernatural that keeps it from playing like a docudrama. It features believable protagonists that aren't stereotypes, aren't played to be unlikeable and worth killing off, and really develop naturally over the course of the film. In most cases, the characters don't even feel like characters. You feel like you're watching people go about their day only to have this nightmare scenario unfold and entrap them before they can even be made aware of it. You don't get the "sting" that's been played out a hundred times of every character reacting to a scare, you just get it once, maybe twice in total.
But... why is that so effective?
