Halloween (1978)
Fifteen minutes into this and I’ve realised I’ve never watched this before! Never! But the film is so ubiquitous that I feel I’ve seen it all, the soundtrack is part of the horror lexicon as is the mask.
The initial killing owes so much to Psycho, no visible knife penetrations, but there was a little bit more flesh on show here.
Also the bit where Dr Loomis is being driven to the asylum in the rain is so out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show 😂
So many of the tropes set up in this have become horror staples though so feeding the future as well as a homage to the past. The telephone, the running on the lawn, the bodies hidden in different places.
A film full of long slow takes building up a tension and then never quite getting to the release, teasing confrontations, but these confrontations are stalled right up to the last portion of the film where Michael Myers finally gets to show his true self.
With the stalking done, with the tension built, we get a few jump scares and deaths but again almost no blood, and the killing spree does feel almost rushed and a bit tame though the relentlessness of Myers was so creepy.
The finale of the film sets us up for what has become a part of a never ending series, some of which are truly terrible instead of this which was of its time.
7.7
