Halloween (1978 film)

"Halloween (film)" redirects here. For the film series, see Halloween (film series). For the remake, see Halloween (2007 film).

Halloween
Film poster
Directed by	John Carpenter
Written by	John Carpenter Debra Hill
Produced by	Moustapha Akkad Debra Hill Kool Lusby Irwin Yablans John Carpenter
Starring	Donald Pleasence Jamie Lee Curtis Nick Castle Nancy Loomis Brian Andrews
Cinematography	Dean Cundey
Edited by	Charles Bornstein Tommy Lee Wallace
Music by	John Carpenter
Distributed by	Compass International Pictures
Release dates	October 25, 1978
Running time	Theatrical Cut: 91 min. Extended Cut: 101 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$325,000 US (est.)

Halloween (also known as John Carpenter's Halloween) is a 1978 American independent horror film set in the fictional midwest town of Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween. The original draft of the screenplay was titled The Babysitter Murders. John Carpenter directed the film, which stars Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, and Nick Castle as Michael Myers (listed in the credits as "The Shape"). The film centers on Michael Myers' escape from a psychiatric hospital, his murdering of teenagers, and Dr. Loomis's attempts to track and stop him.

Halloween was produced on a budget of only $325,000 and grossed $47 million at the box office in the United States, becoming one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Many critics credit this film as the first in a long line of slasher films inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). The movie originated many clichés seen in low-budget horror films of the 1980s and 1990s, although first-time viewers of Halloween may be surprised by the fact that the film contains little actual graphic violence or gore.

Critics have suggested that Halloween and its slasher film successors may encourage sadism and misogyny. Others have suggested the film is a social critique of the immorality of young people in 1970s America, pointing out that many of Myers' victims are sexually promiscuous and substance abusers, while the lone heroine is depicted as chaste and innocent. While Carpenter dismisses these analyses, the perceived parallel between the characters' moral strengths and their likelihood of surviving to the film's conclusion has nevertheless become a standard slasher movie trope. The film was remade, or rather "re-imaged" in 2007, directed by Rob Zombie.

Plot

On October 31, 1963, six-year-old Michael Audrey Myers stabs his sister Judith to death with a kitchen knife at their home in Haddonfield, Illinois. He is sent to Smith's Grove-Warren County Sanitarium and placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis. Loomis suspects that there is more to Myers than meets the eye and plans to have him committed indefinitely; he senses a tremendous amount of rage behind Myers' blank stare. Loomis explains to Sheriff Leigh Brackett: "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." At the age of 21, Myers escapes from Smith's Grove while being transferred, and returns to Haddonfield with Loomis in pursuit.

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Michael Myers, "The Shape," played by Nick Castle

In Haddonfield, Myers stalks seventeen-year-old Laurie Strode (apart from the fact that he sees her approaching his childhood home, no reason is given in the film why he does so; but it is later revealed that she is his younger sister, a retcon introduced in Halloween II). Laurie glimpses a man in a white mask (Michael Myers) from her classroom window, behind a bush while she walks home, and in the neighbor's clothesline from her bedroom window.

Later in the evening, Laurie meets her friend Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis), who is babysitting Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards) across the street from where Laurie is babysitting Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews). After arranging to pick up her boyfriend, Annie sends Lindsey to stay with Laurie at the Doyle house. Annie heads back to the Wallace house and gets in her car, only to find every window fogged. Myers (who has followed her and Laurie) pops up from the backseat, strangles Annie until she weakens, and slits her throat. Tommy sees him carrying her body into the Wallace house and thinks Myers is the Boogeyman. Laurie dismisses Tommy's terror and sends him and Lindsey to bed. Myers later murders Laurie's other friend Lynda Van Der Klok (P. J. Soles) and Lynda's boyfriend Bob Simms (John Michael Graham) who had arrived at the empty Wallace house and decided to retreat upstairs to have sex after Lynda orders Bob downstairs for a beer. Bob does as told but is attacked by the Shape. The Shape lifts him up against the wall and stabs him once. Bob struggles, then the Shape stabs him, only this time the knife holds Bob up and the Shape stares at him for a brief moment. Lynda, upstairs and bored, sees a shape with a sheet over his body and Bob's glasses. On assuming its Bob she calls the Doyle house but is attacked.

Laurie worries after receiving a strange phone call from the Wallace house, thinking it's Annie. It was actually Lynda, screaming as Myers strangled her with the phone cord. She walks across the street and discovers the three bodies and Judith Myers' missing tombstone. She is attacked by Myers but escapes back to the Doyle house. Laurie stabs Myers with a knitting needle in the neck, a clothes hanger in the eye and a knife to the chest, but he continues to pursue her. Eventually, Loomis spots Tommy and Lindsey running from the house and finds Myers in the upstairs hallway. Loomis rescues Laurie, shooting Myers six times and causing him to fall from the house's second-story balcony. Upon looking out the window for Myers' body, however, Loomis discovers that he is nowhere to be found.

The film closes on a shot of the Myers house and the sound of Michael breathing beneath his mask.

Production

After viewing John Carpenter's film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) at the Milan Film Festival, independent film producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad sought out Carpenter to direct a film for them about a psychotic killer that stalked babysitters. In an interview with Fangoria magazine, Yablans stated, "I was thinking what would make sense in the horror genre, and what I wanted to do was make a picture that had the same impact as The Exorcist." Carpenter and his then-girlfriend Debra Hill began drafting a story originally titled The Babysitter Murders, but Carpenter told Entertainment Weekly that Yablans suggested setting the movie on Halloween night and naming it Halloween instead.

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John Carpenter on the set of Halloween in 1978

Akkad fronted the $325,000 for the film's budget, considered low at the time (even though Carpenter's previous film, Assault on Precinct 13, had an estimated budget of only $100,000). Akkad worried over the tight schedule, low budget, and Carpenter's limited experience as a filmmaker, but told Fangoria, "Two things made me decide. One, Carpenter told me the story verbally and in a suspenseful way, almost frame for frame. Second, he told me he didn't want to take any fees, and that showed he had confidence in the project." Carpenter himself only received $10,000 for directing, writing, and composing the music, retaining rights to only 10 percent of the film's profits.

Because of the low budget, wardrobe and props were often crafted from items on hand or that could be purchased inexpensively. Carpenter hired Tommy Lee Wallace as production designer, art director, location scout, and co-editor. Wallace created the trademark mask worn by Michael Myers throughout the film from a Captain Kirk mask purchased for $1.98. Carpenter recalled how Wallace "widened the eye holes and spray-painted the flesh a bluish white. In the script it said Michael Myers' mask had 'the pale features of a human face' and it truly was spooky looking. It didn't look anything like William Shatner after Tommy got through with it." Hill adds that the "idea was to make him almost humorless, faceless—this sort of pale visage that could resemble a human or not." Many of the actors wore their own clothes, and Jamie Lee Curtis's wardrobe was purchased at J.C. Penney for around a hundred dollars.

The budget also dictated filming location and time. Halloween was filmed in 21 days in the spring of 1978 in South Pasadena, California and Sierra Madre, California (cemetery). An abandoned house owned by a church stood in as the Myers house. Two homes on Orange Grove Avenue (near Sunset Boulevard) in Hollywood were used for the film climax. The crew had to work to find pumpkins in the spring, and artificial fall leaves had to be reused for multiple scenes. Local families dressed their children in Halloween costumes and trick-or-treated them for Carpenter.

In August 2006, Fangoria reported that Synapse Films had discovered boxes of negatives that contained footage cut from the film. One was labeled "1981" suggesting that it was shot as additional footage for the television version of the film. Synapse owner Don May Jr. said, "What we've got is pretty much all the unused original camera negative from John Carpenter's original Halloween. Luckily, Billy [Kirkus] was able to find this material before it was destroyed. The story on how we got the negative is a long one, but we'll save it for when we're able to showcase the materials in some way. Kirkus should be commended for pretty much saving the Holy Grail of horror films." It was later reported, "We just learned from Sean Clark, long time Halloween genius, that the footage found is just that; footage. There is no sound in any of the reels so far, since none of it was used in the final edit."

Writing

Yablans and Akkad ceded most of the creative control to writers Carpenter and Hill (whom Carpenter wanted as producer), but Yablans did offer several suggestions. According to a Fangoria interview with Debra Hill, "Yablans wanted the script written like a radio show, with 'boos' every 10 minutes." Hill explained that the script took only three weeks to write and much of the inspiration behind the plot came from Celtic traditions of Halloween such as the festival of Samhain. Although Samhain is not mentioned in the plot of the first film, Hill asserts that

the idea was that you couldn't kill evil, and that was how we came about the story. We went back to the old idea of Samhain, that Halloween was the night where all the souls are let out to wreak havoc on the living, and then came up with the story about the most evil kid who ever lived. And when John came up with this fable of a town with a dark secret of someone who once lived there, and now that evil has come back, that's what made Halloween work.

Hill wrote most of the female characters' dialogue, while Carpenter drafted Loomis's speeches on Michael Myers's evil. Many of the details of the story were drawn from Carpenter and Hill's adolescence and early career. The fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois came from Haddonfield, New Jersey, where Hill grew up, and most of the street names were taken from Carpenter's hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Laurie Strode was the name of one of Carpenter's old girlfriends and Michael Myers was the name of an English producer who had earlier entered Assault on Precinct 13 in various European film festivals with Yablans. Carpenter pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock with two Halloween characters' names. Specifically, Tommy Doyle is named after Lt. Det. Thomas J. Doyle (Wendell Corey) of Rear Window (1954), and Dr. Loomis's name was taken from Sam Loomis (John Gavin) of Psycho, the boyfriend of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). Sheriff Leigh Brackett shared the name of a film screenwriter.

Casting

The cast of Halloween included a motley crew of veteran actors such as Donald Pleasence and then-unknown actress Jamie Lee Curtis. The low budget limited the number of big names that John Carpenter could attract, and most of the actors received very little compensation for their role. Pleasence was paid the highest amount at $20,000; Curtis received $8,000; and Nick Castle earned only $25 a day.

The part of Dr. Sam Loomis was offered to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee; both declined the part due to the low salary (though Lee would later tell Carpenter that declining the role was his biggest career mistake). English actor Pleasence—Carpenter's third choice—agreed to star. Pleasance has been called "John Carpenter's big landing." Pleasence's daughter supposedly saw Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and liked it, thus encouraging her father to star in Halloween. Americans were already acquainted with Pleasence as the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967).

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Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie Strode in her first feature film.

In an interview, Carpenter admits that "Jamie Lee wasn't the first choice for Laurie. I had no idea who she was. She was 19 and in a TV show at the time, but I didn't watch TV." He originally wanted to cast Anne Lockhart, the daughter of June Lockhart from Lassie, as Laurie Strode. Lockhart, however, had commitments to several other film and television projects. Debra Hill says of learning that Jamie Lee was the daughter of Psycho actress Janet Leigh, "I knew casting Jamie Lee would be great publicity for the film because her mother was in Psycho." Halloween was Jamie Lee Curtis' feature film debut and launched her career as a "scream queen" horror star.

Another relatively unknown actress, Nancy Kyes (credited in the film as Nancy Loomis) was cast as Laurie's promiscuous friend Annie Brackett, daughter of Haddonfield sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers). Kyes had previously starred in Assault on Precinct 13 and happened to be dating Halloween's art director Tommy Lee Wallace when filming began. Carpenter chose P. J. Soles to play Lynda Van Der Klok, another promiscuous friend of Laurie's best remembered for dialogue peppered with the word "Totally." Soles was an actress familiar for her supporting role in Carrie (1976) and her minor part in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). According to one source, "Carpenter realized she had captured the aura of a happy go lucky teenage girl in the 70s."

The role of "The Shape"—as the masked Michael Myers character was billed in the end credits—was played by Nick Castle, who befriended Carpenter while they attended the University of Southern California. After Halloween, Castle became a director, taking the helm of films such as The Last Starfighter (1984), The Boy Who Could Fly (1986), and Major Payne (1995).

Direction

Historian Nicholas Rogers notes that film critics contend that John Carpenter's directing and camera work made Halloween a "resounding success." Roger Ebert remarks, "It's easy to create violence on the screen, but it's hard to do it well. Carpenter is uncannily skilled, for example, at the use of foregrounds in his compositions, and everyone who likes thrillers knows that foregrounds are crucial ...."

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Opening title of Halloween

The opening title, featuring a jack-o'-lantern placed against a black backdrop, sets the mood for the entire movie. The camera slowly focuses on one of the jack-o'-lantern's eyes while the main music for Halloween plays in the background. Film historian J.P. Telotte says that this scene "clearly announces that [the film's] primary concern will be with the way in which we see ourselves and others and the consequences that often attend our usual manner of perception."

During the conception of the plot, Yablans instructed "that the audience shouldn't see anything. It should be what they thought they saw that frightens them." Carpenter seemingly took Yablans's advice literally, filming many of the scenes from a Michael Myers point-of-view that allowed audience participation. Carpenter is not the first director to employ this method or use of a steadicam; for instance, the first scene of Psycho offers a voyeuristic look at lovers in a seedy hotel. Telotte argues, "As a result of this shift in perspective from a disembodied, narrative camera to an actual character's eye ... we are forced into a deeper sense of participation in the ensuing action."

The first scene of the boy Michael's voyeurism is followed by the murder of Judith Myers seen through the eye holes of Michael's clown costume mask. According to one commentator, Carpenter's "frequent use of the unmounted first-person camera to represent the killer's point of view ... invited [viewers] to adopt the murderer's assaultive gaze and to hear his heavy breathing and plodding footsteps as he stalked his prey."

Another technique that Carpenter adapted from Hitchcock's Psycho and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was suspense and murder without blood and gore. Debra Hill states, "We didn't want it to be gory. We wanted it to be like a jack-in-the box." Film analysts refer to this as the "false startle" or "the old tap-on-the-shoulder routine" in which the stalkers, murderers, or monsters "lunge into our field of vision or creep up on a person."

Carpenter worked with the cast to create the desired effect of terror and fear. According to Jamie Lee Curtis, Carpenter created a "fear meter" because the film was shot out-of-sequence and she was not sure what her character's level of terror should be in certain scenes. "Here's about a 7, here's about a 6, and the scene we're going to shoot tonight is about a 9 1/2," remembered Curtis. She had different facial expressions and scream volumes for each level on the meter.

Music

Another major reason for the success of Halloween is the moody musical score, particularly the main theme. Lacking a symphonic soundtrack, the film's score consists of a piano melody played in a 5/4 time rhythm composed by director John Carpenter. Critic James Berardinelli calls the score "relatively simple and unsophisticated," but admits that "Halloween's music is one of its strongest assets." Carpenter stated in an interview, "I can play just about any keyboard, but I can't read or write a note." In the end credits, Carpenter bills himself as the "Bowling Green Orchestra" for performing the film's score, but he did receive assistance from composer Dan Wyman, a music professor at San José State University.

Some songs can be heard in the film, one being an untitled song performed by Carpenter and a group of his friends who formed a band called The Coupe DeVilles. It is heard as Laurie steps into Annie's car on her way to babysit Tommy Doyle. Another song, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by classic rock band Blue Öyster Cult, appears in the film.

The soundtrack was first released in the United States in October of 1983, by Varese Sarabande. It was subsequently re-released in 1990, and then again in 2000.

Reception

Halloween premiered on October 25 1978 in Kansas City, Missouri, and a few days later in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Although it performed well with little advertising—relying mostly on word-of-mouth—many critics seemed uninterested or dismissive of the film. The first glowing review by a prominent film critic, however, came from Tom Allen of The Village Voice. Allen noted that the film was sociologically irrelevant, but applauded Carpenter's camera work as "duplicitous hype" and "the most honest way to make a good schlock film." Allen pointed out the stylistic similarities to Psycho and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).

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Poster used to advertise Halloween to audiences in West Germany; the German subtitle is Die Nacht Des Grauens ("The Night of Horror").

Following Allen's laudatory essay, other critics took notice. Renowned American critic Roger Ebert gave the film equal amounts of praise in a 1979 review for the Chicago Sun-Times, choosing it as one of his top five films of 1978. Once-dismissive critics were impressed by Carpenter's choice of camera angles and simple music and surprised by the lack of blood, gore, and graphic violence.

The film grossed $47 million in the United States and an additional $8 million internationally, making the theatrical total around $55 million. While most of the film's success came from American movie-goers, Halloween premiered in several international locations after 1979 with moderate results. The film was shown mostly in the European countries of France, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Yugoslavia, and Iceland. Admissions in West Germany totaled around 750,000 and 118,606 in Sweden, earning SEK 2,298,579 there. The film was also shown at theaters in Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. Halloween grossed AU$900,000 in Australia, which was a large and impressive amount of money for a film to gross at the box office in Australia, in that day, and HKD 450,139 in Hong Kong.

Halloween was nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for Best Horror Film in 1979, but lost to The Wicker Man (1973). The film has received other honors since its theatrical debut. Halloween is ranked at 68 on the American Film Institute's list 100 Most Thrilling Movies Ever, compiled in 2001. In 2006, the United States Library of Congress deemed Halloween to be "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Since Halloween's premiere, it has been released on VHS, laserdisc, DVD, and UMD. In its first year on VHS, Halloween earned $18,500,000 in the United States from rentals. Early VHS versions were released by Media Home Entertainment and Blockbuster Video issued a commemorative edition in 1995. Anchor Bay Entertainment has released several restored editions of Halloween on VHS and DVD, with the most recent being the 2003 two-disc Divimax 25th Anniversary edition with a lenticular 3D morphing cover and a commentary track including separately recorded contributions by John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and Jamie Lee Curtis plus the documentary Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest. The film was included with the 2006 documentary Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, commemorating the 25th anniversary of Halloween's release.

Criticism

The film received a mostly positive critical response at the time of its initial release, and in 2006 Halloween maintained a rating of 100 percent "fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes. Still, Pauline Kael wrote a scathing review in The New Yorker suggesting that "Carpenter doesn't seem to have had any life outside the movies: one can trace almost every idea on the screen to directors such as Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and to the Val Lewton productions" and claiming that "Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness — when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) — it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do." Many compared the film with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, although TV Guide calls comparisons made to Psycho "silly and groundless" and critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s blame the film for spawning the slasher sub-genre that rapidly descended into sadism and misogyny. Almost a decade after its premiere, Mick Martin and Marsha Porter critiqued the first-person camera shots that earlier film reviewers had praised and later slasher-film directors utilized for their own films (for example, Friday the 13th (1980)). Claiming it encouraged audience identification with the killer, Martin and Porter pointed to the way "the camera moves in on the screaming, pleading, victim, 'looks down' at the knife, and then plunges it into chest, ear, or eyeball. Now that's sick."

Many criticisms of Halloween and other slasher films come from postmodern academia. Some feminist critics, according to historian Nicholas Rogers, "have seen the slasher movies since Halloween as debasing women in as decisive a manner as hard-core pornography." Critics such as John Kenneth Muir point out that female characters such as Laurie Strode survive not because of "any good planning" or their own resourcefulness, but sheer luck. Strode, in fact, is rescued in Halloween and Halloween II only when Dr. Loomis arrives to shoot Myers.

On the other hand, other feminist scholars such as Carol J. Clover argue that despite the violence against women, slasher films turned women into heroines. In many pre-Halloween horror films, women are depicted as helpless victims and are not safe until they are rescued by a strong masculine hero. Despite the fact that Loomis saves Strode, Clover asserts that Halloween initiates the role of the "final girl" who ultimately triumphs in the end. Strode herself fought back against Myers and severely wounds him. Had Myers been a normal man, Strode's attacks would have killed him.

Other critics have seen a deeper social critique present in Halloween and subsequent slasher films. According to Vera Dika, the films of the 1980s spoke to the conservative family values advocates of Reagan America. Tony Williams says Myers and other slashers were "patriarchal avengers" who "slaughtered the youthful children of the 1960s generation, especially when they engaged in illicit activities involving sex and drugs." Other critics tend to downplay this interpretation, arguing that the portrayal of Myers as a demonic, superhuman monster inhibited his influence among conservatives.

Carpenter himself dismisses the notion that Halloween is a morality play, regarding it as merely a horror movie. According to Carpenter, critics "completely missed the point there." He explains, "The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that's killed him. Not because she's a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy."

Influence

Halloween has influenced many films and filmmakers, most notably of the horror genre since its release. Although a Canadian horror film directed by Bob Clark titled Black Christmas (1974) preempted the stylistic techniques made famous in Halloween, the latter is generally given credit by film historians and critics for initiating the slasher film craze of the 1980s and 1990s. First-person camera perspectives, unexceptional settings, and female heroines define the slasher film genre. Riding the wave of success ushered in by Halloween, several films that were already in production when the film premiered, but with similar stylistic elements and themes, became popular with audiences. The Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street films, and countless other slasher films, owe much of their success (if not inspiration) to Halloween.

The unintended theme of "survival of the virgins" seen in Halloween became a major trope that surfaced in other slasher films. Characters in subsequent horror movies who practice illicit sex and substance abuse generally meet a gruesome end at the hands of the killer. On the other hand, characters portrayed as chaste and temperate face off and defeat the killer at the end of the film. Director Wes Craven's dark comedy Scream (1996) details the "rules" for surviving a horror movie using Halloween as the primary example: no sex, no alcohol or illicit drugs, and never say "I'll be right back." Keenen Ivory Wayans's horror movie spoof Scary Movie (2000) likewise parodies this prominent slasher film trope.

Television version

Television rights to Halloween were sold to NBC in 1980 for $4 million. After a debate between John Carpenter, Debra Hill and NBC's Standards & Practices over censoring of certain scenes, Halloween appeared on television for the first time. To fill the two-hour time slot, Carpenter filmed twelve minutes of additional material that include Dr. Loomis at a hospital board review of Myers and Dr. Loomis talking to six-year-old Michael at Smith's Grove, telling him, "You've fooled them, haven't you Michael? But not me." Another extra scene features Dr. Loomis at Smith's Grove examining Michael's abandoned cell and seeing the word "Sister" scratched into the door. Finally, a scene was added in which Lynda comes over to Laurie's house to borrow a silk blouse before Laurie leaves to babysit, just as Annie telephones asking to borrow the same blouse. The new scene had Laurie's hair hidden by a towel, since Jamie Lee Curtis was now wearing a much shorter hairstyle than she had worn in 1978. The new scenes were shot during production of Halloween II. An extended cut of the television version was released on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment in 2001 as Halloween: Extended Version.

Adaptations

Main articles: Halloween (novel) and Halloween (video game)

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Halloween novelization by Curtis Richards

Shortly following Halloween's release in theaters, a mass market paperback novelization by Curtis Richards was published by Bantam Books in 1979 and reissued in 1982, although it is currently out of print. The novel elaborates on aspects not featured in the film such as the origins of the curse of Samhain and Michael Myers's life in Smith's Grove Sanitarium. For example, the opening reads:

The horror started on the eve of Samhain, in a foggy vale in northern Ireland, at the dawn of the Celtic race. And once started, it trod the earth forevermore, wreaking its savagery suddenly, swiftly, and with incredible ferocity.

In 1983, Halloween was adapted as a video game for the Atari 2600 by Wizard Video. Either as the result of poor research by developers or as an effort to save on licensing fees, none of the main characters in the game were named. Players take on the role of a teenage babysitter who tries to save as many children from an unnamed, knife-wielding killer as possible. The game was not popular with parents or players and the graphics were simple, as was typical of the 1980s. The game contained more gore than the film, however. When the babysitter is killed, her head disappears and is replaced by blood pulsating from the neck. The main similarity to the film is the theme music that plays when the killer appears on screen.

Sequels

Main article: Halloween (film series)

Halloween spawned seven sequels, and a remake — tentatively titled Halloween and directed by Rob Zombie — is scheduled for release in 2007. Of these films, only Halloween II (1981) was written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. Halloween II begins exactly where Halloween ends and was intended to wind up the story of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Carpenter did not direct any of the other films in the Halloween series, although he produced Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), the plot of which is unrelated to any of the other films in the series.

The sequels feature more explicit violence and gore, and are generally dismissed by mainstream film critics. They were filmed on larger budgets than the original: in contrast to Halloween's modest budget of $325,000, Halloween II's budget was around $2.5 million, while the most recently released sequel, Halloween: Resurrection (2002), boasted a budget of $25 million. Financier Moustapha Akkad continued to work closely with the Halloween franchise, acting as executive producer of every sequel in the series until his death in the 2005 Amman bombings.

Halloween's sequels continue to develop the character of Michael Myers and the theme of Samhain. Even without considering the third film, the Halloween series is plagued with storyline continuity issues, most likely stemming from the different writers and directors involved in each film.

Further reading

• Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. ISBN 0-313-27523-8.
• Baird, Robert. "The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory." Film Quarterly 53 (No. 3, Spring 2000): pp. 12–24.
• Carroll, Noël. "The Nature of Horror." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (No. 1, Autumn 1987): pp. 51–59.
• Cumbow, Robert C. Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter. 2nd ed., Lanham, Md.: Scarcrow Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8108-3719-6.
• Johnson, Kenneth. "The Point of View of the Wandering Camera." Cinema Journal 32 (No. 2, Winter 1993): pp. 49–56.
• King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1981. ISBN 0-425-10433-8.
• Prince, Stephen, ed. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8135-3363-5.
• Schneider, Steven Jay, ed. Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud's Worst Nightmare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-82521-0.
• Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8386-3564-4.

External links

• Official site of the Halloween series
• Official site of John Carpenter
• Halloween at IMDb
• Filming locations and photos by director David Winning.