{"id":11798,"date":"2013-10-23T21:27:41","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T11:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=11798"},"modified":"2014-05-12T15:10:25","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T05:10:25","slug":"halloween-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=11798","title":{"rendered":"Halloween [1978]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?attachment_id=11799\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11799\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-11799\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/tfwhorror.jpg\" alt=\"tfwhorror\" width=\"598\" height=\"74\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/tfwhorror.jpg 598w, http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/tfwhorror-300x37.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 598px) 100vw, 598px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/m3YXl2MzMhw\" width=\"631\" height=\"473\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>There are only a handful of movies that I ever really watch more than once.\u00a0 Most of them would be comedies.\u00a0 However, I can always pop on John Carpenter&#8217;s <em>Halloween<\/em> when this time of year rolls around.\u00a0 To my mind, it is the perfect slasher flick.<\/p>\n<p>Made on a shoe-string budget of $300,000 and starring Jamie Lee Curtis in her first feature length film, <em>Halloween<\/em> is also one of the most influential contemporary horror films ever made.\u00a0 This film wrote the rules on teen slasher films.\u00a0 The masked killer.\u00a0 The order in which people die.\u00a0 Who gets to survive.\u00a0 All those rules quoted by that movie buff from <em>Scream<\/em> more or less originated with <em>Halloween<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>We start the film with a scary, voyueristic POV shot of a young Michael Myers peering into the window of his own home, watching his older sister make out with her boyfriend on the couch.\u00a0 When the boyfriend leaves, Myers goes upstairs and stabs her to death.\u00a0 It&#8217;s as creepy and disturbing today as it is back then.\u00a0 If anything, I think the effect of this scene is heightened when viewed through a modern lens as the teenagers and children involved seem so much more naive and unassuming.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?attachment_id=11800\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11800\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-11800\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/halloween1978.jpg\" alt=\"halloween1978\" width=\"630\" height=\"370\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/halloween1978.jpg 630w, http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/halloween1978-300x176.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fifteen years later, Michael Myers escapes captivity at Smith&#8217;s Grove Hospital and returns to Haddonfield, the town where he murdered his sister, on Halloween night.\u00a0 He is pursued by his psychiatrist Doctor Loomis who knows Myers is not rehabilitated and likely to kill again.<\/p>\n<p>Myers discovers and begins to stalk Laurie Strode, a bookish high school student.\u00a0 Laurie is babysitting on Halloween night but her friends in the neighbourhood are taking advantage of some parents being out of town so they can get high and have sex.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?attachment_id=11801\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11801\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11801 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/lauriestrode.jpg\" alt=\"lauriestrode\" width=\"400\" height=\"597\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/lauriestrode.jpg 400w, http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/lauriestrode-201x300.jpg 201w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Myers carefully and silently stalks his prey and then moves in for kill in a bloody and memorable final act.<\/p>\n<p>This is a film filled with wonderful little details, some of which have aged well and others which haven&#8217;t.\u00a0 I love the inventiveness and inherent DIY B-movie production values.\u00a0 Michael Myers&#8217;s mask is $2 buck Captain Kirk mask bought from a convenience store and its difficult to unsee it once you know.\u00a0 The film unashamedly features some gratuitous topless women in the most contrived circumstances.\u00a0 Spilt some butter on your top?\u00a0 Better take off all your clothes and head to the dark, isolated laundry room!\u00a0 The economy of the film&#8217;s production is plain to see.\u00a0 It&#8217;s more or less shot in two houses and uses the exterior of a school and a hospital and thats it.<\/p>\n<p>So many things come together to make this film greater than the sum of its parts.\u00a0 The character of Michael Myers is simple in design and concept but creepily effective.\u00a0 Carpenter lucks out with Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut performance.\u00a0 She makes a terrific straight-laced heroine who is implausibly befriended by a bunch of teenage caricatures who obsess with beer, weed and sex.\u00a0 The main Halloween theme of course is memorably eery so they use it about twenty times over.<\/p>\n<p>Best of all, the film is fantastically put together.\u00a0 There&#8217;s nudity and plenty of violence but Carpenter shows great restraint in the second act, setting everybody up on Halloween night, before Myers eventually strikes.\u00a0 He has all sorts of interesting and effective shots in his bag of tricks.\u00a0 There&#8217;s POV shots, tracking shots, jump cuts and that brilliant first contact between Laurie and Myers when he slowly appears out of the dark&#8230;right&#8230;next&#8230;to&#8230;her!<\/p>\n<p>This film has a million sequels and a remake and they are all varying degrees of awful.\u00a0 None of them have a patch on the original <em>Halloween<\/em>.\u00a0 As a stand alone film however, it has aged exceptionally well and is an easy recommendation for anyone who is a fan of horror films but has somehow missed this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are only a handful of movies that I ever really watch more than once.\u00a0 Most of them would be comedies.\u00a0 However, I can always pop on John Carpenter&#8217;s Halloween when this time of year rolls around.\u00a0 To my mind, it is the perfect slasher flick. Made on a shoe-string budget of $300,000 and starring &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,1800,5],"tags":[673,1679,1692,1691],"class_list":["post-11798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-classics","category-films","tag-halloween","tag-horror-films","tag-jamie-lee-curtis","tag-john-carpenter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11798"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14097,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11798\/revisions\/14097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}