Halloween
Year: | 1978 |
Production Co: | Compass International Pictures |
Director: | John Carpenter |
Writer: | John Carpenter |
Cast: | Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nick Castle |
Like most film fans, I first saw it on video during the 80s, and by then this sort of premise was a cliché. In hindsight a melding of Psycho and The Terminator, the motif of the relentless, silent, impossible-to-kill murderer is a good one, but it was a one-joke act and can't really be replicated, as increasingly lame Friday the 13th sequels and a legion of parodies have shown.
If you need the plot explained to you, you probably haven't seen Star Wars either. A young psychopath with a knife fetish escapes from the asylum after wielding his blade and wreaking havoc years before, and he's far from cured – as kindly psychiatrist Pleasance and babysitter Curtis are about to find out.
For all the schlock that surrounds the genre nowadays, it's easy to forget how effective it is; whether it's Carpenter's sparse direction or his chilling five-note riff (a nod to Close Encounters of the Third Kind?)