“introducing JAMIE LEE CURTIS as Laurie”

It’s Wednesday night, it’s Halloween and what better way to spend it is revisiting John Carpenter’s 1978 classic at the Astor. Getting prepared comes in general horror banter, ‘which is scarier’, Freddy, Jason, or Mike Myers and who, even won out of Freddy vs. Jason (2003)?

Then the iconic credit sequence “introducing JAMIE LEE CURTIS as Laurie” establishes it is show time.

Beginning through the eyes of Michael Myers or as we simply refer to him as ‘Mike’ we get a sneak peek into the evil he breeds. Firstly as a child, through a voyeuristic attack on his sister before he is bound to an asylum, then what becomes his escape fifteen years later and the Halloween night on which he craftily takes down Laurie’s circle of friends. 

It was a boisterous experience seeing Halloween. Hearing the audience interact and embody near death situations. During which, the words, I’ll be right back’ had cropped up. A phrase familiar to the likes of the Friday the 13^th and the Scream narratives was indeed chuckle worthy. But indifferent to the teen slasher sub genre, Carpenter presents a monster that is not afraid to be seen day or night. A predator to the neighbourhood, framed in such a way as to disrupt and spoil what could be a safe picture. Carpenters use of wide angle shots creates disorientation and uneasiness to these streets.

Ending on a montage that looks like a crime scene, it shows us everywhere evil has been. It becomes unsettling after it is revealed Myers’s dead body has disappeared. Like a case for an unsolved massacre, discomfort still lingers on.

It was my third viewing of Halloween, but never I noticed playing on the TV whilst Laurie is babysitting, Howard Hawk’s The Thing from Another World (1951).  A film re-made in 1982 as the Thing, a celebrated and important film yet again from Carpenter.