Amazon.com Essentials:
Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title.
In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter
tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which
a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged
youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and
orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie
much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements
than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed
by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the tone; and his
script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other
horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby sitter is played
by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim
Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence
is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho.
In the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an
uncannily frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had
audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the
screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget,
the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels,
none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two
more installments: 1981's dismal Halloween II, which picked
up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally
gripping Halloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter
was still haunted after 20 years. --Robert Horton
Amazon.com Essentials:
Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the
small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to
survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a
knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged
youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and
orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much
scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its
explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by
Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the
tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with
references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby
sitter is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim
Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is
named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho. In
the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an uncannily
frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had audiences
literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the screen. ("No!
Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget, the picture turned
a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of which approached
the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more installments: 1981's
dismal Halloween II, which picked up the story the day after
the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally gripping Halloween
H20, which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after
20 years. --Robert Horton
