I am grateful to Gareth Anton Averill for reminding me of the existence of this review, which originally appeared in the listings magazine In Dublin, at the time of the film’s original release in 1978. Keiran Hickey was an Irish film director.
At one point in John Carpenter’s Halloween, a babysitter settles down with her charges in front of the TV to watch two 1950s science-fiction classics, Forbidden Planet (1956) and Howard Hawks’s The Thing From Another World (1951). Apart from the joke of having his characters watch imaginary monsters while a real monster lurks in the shrubbery outside, Carpenter is making a deliberate act of homage. He belongs to the new generation of American film-makers with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood, committed to working within the cinematic grammar established there.
Carpenter would endorse Kieran Hickey’s remark in the current, excellent issue of the Irish magazine Film Directions that Hollywood was ‘the best system yet devised for the production of motion pictures’; indeed, he has expressed the wish to be sent back in time to work in the studio system of the 1940s. His understanding of the Hollywood grammar is second to none; in particular, he likes to work within genre. His three major features have been Dark Star (1974), a science-fiction film which simultaneously undermined the pretensions of Kubrick’s 2001 and paid homage to the fifties science-fiction cycle; Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), a reworking of Hawks’s great western Rio Bravo (1959) in terms of modern urban youth gangs; and now Halloween, which returns the old-dark-house formula, so successfully exploited by Alien, to its roots in teenage middle America.
Fifteen years after he was incarcerated for the murder of his sister, Michael Myers escapes and returns to his home town. As excited children prepare for the mock horrors of Halloween and lovely, long-legged girls anticipate heavy dates, he prowls their ordered, tree-lined suburbs, watching and waiting, knife at the ready. The setting, amid the wood-frame houses of a small town, derives from Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt (1943), and the characterisation from the pyjama-party formula of nubile nymphets threatened by a psychopath with a phallic knife; there are echoes of Psycho (1960) and a quote from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).
And that’s the problem: Carpenter has done his homework, but where does it get him? Hollywood was more than a set of formal conventions. Its importance lay in its close alliance with the American collective psyche: it would be possible to write a history of America in the twentieth century just from its films. Hollywood’s formal skills were evolved to express a rich thematic content. Carpenter’s steely adherence to the formal mechanics of storytelling results in a cold, manipulative cinema of sterile calculation. Halloween is thoroughly effective and at times exhilaratingly brilliant. In particular, the ease with which the killer gains access to houses terrifyingly denies the equation of ‘home’ with ‘security’.
But at the same time, despite the careful reticence of its bloodletting, this is a repellent film, which equates mental illness with homicidal psychopathy, punishes sexual permissiveness with agonising death and thus perpetuates genre conventions deriving from the moral climate of twenty years ago. It was all very well to duck the question of the social and psychological matrix of urban violence in Precinct 13 — the shooting, early in the movie, of a little girl was a deliberate, pre-emptive strike on the possibility of audience sympathy for the gang — but to do the same thing in Halloween, reducing the killer to a mindless, masked monster, lurking in the shadows, simply won’t do.
Carpenter is an exceptional stylist and technician — his handling of violence is nothing short of genius — but it is to be hoped that in his future work he will pull his head out from up his own rectum and take a good look around.
Donald Hounam 