Defining Favourites: Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter's iconic slasher started a whole new movement for the horror genre to follow.

Photo: Compass International Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Debra Hill, John Carpenter
Produced by Debra Hill
Starring Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, P. J. Soles, Nancy Loomis
Premiere Date: October 25, 1978
Running Time: 91 minutes

It simply begins at how we perceive evil. Everything in Haddonfield looks so ordinary, for it’s just any other American suburb within the 1970’s, one that had been shaken up with an incident in which a young boy named Michael Myers had stabbed his older sister to death. And that’s how the name “Michael Myers” had become a big staple of pop culture and one of the most iconic horror film villains of all time. As for the film in which he originates from, John Carpenter’s Halloween isn’t only the prototype for many slasher films that have come since, but like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before it, Halloween feels so steeped in a clever commentary about American-made evils – and how the public continually manifests them.

Adding to this, there’s no better testament to seeing how John Carpenter feels about America than the fact that the blank face which Michael Myers has built himself on is none other than a mask of William Shatner’s face, painted bright white. But at the same time, the blank expression on such a face might be the best statement that one can make about the nature of evil, for it’s an emotionless entity that kills without hesitation and takes whatever shape we can only imagine it will. That John Carpenter had chosen that of an ordinary man perhaps might be what created one of cinema’s most terrifying villains, for that evil could simply start with such simple means.