- John Carpenter is a director who made a career out of getting a lot from a little. Give him a beach ball and some funny dialogue and you get Dark Star. Give him a police station and about a hundred extras and he'll make Assault on Precinct 13. Did Escape From New York require much more than Kurt Russell and night shots of St. Louis? Was the biggest expense from They Live the ridiculous signs? I suppose the exception to this rule is The Thing, which obviously featured some pretty cutting-edge special effects, but generally Carpenter did not give the impression of being a big budget director, even though he sometimes was. With Halloween, he shows what he can do with a mask and some music.
- In fact, that's pretty much the essence of Halloween. Sure, there's Donald Pleasance running around, Jamie Lee Curtis freaking out, and more than a few eerie jack-o-lanterns, but the things everyone remembers are the creepy mask and the piano music. And well they should, because those two things are pretty darn effective. With Michael Myers, Carpenter created a villain that is terrifying in much the same manner as the classic horror movie monsters. You can't talk to him, you can't reason with him, and you certainly can't kill him. It's no accident that everyone is watching Howard Hawks' production of The Thing on TV, because that creature and Myers have a lot in common.
- That said, the whole affair can seem a little underwhelming today, in large part because it was so shamelessly imitated in countless horror films that followed. Although Carpenter names Pleasance's character Sam Loomis in homage to Psycho (not to mention his casting of Janet Leigh's daughter!), his movie has much less in common with Hitchcock's heavily psychological thriller than with the stable of mindless slasher films that Halloween inspired. Unfortunately, that means a lot of dull teenage repartee whenever Myers isn't around. But when Myers is onscreen, things suddenly get very exciting indeed. And when he's off in the distance or slightly out of focus, well, that's how you convert a modicum of effort into an impressive amount of horror.
- The movie also features a character named Leigh Brackett, but I'm guessing that's mostly in homage to Rio Bravo.
