RogerBW's Blog

1978 horror, dir. John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance: IMDb / allmovie. The killer child has grown up and come home.

Not the first slasher film, of course; the gialli got there earlier. In North America,Black Christmas (1974, killings in a sorority house) has the killer's eye shot, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, yet another film loosely inspired by Ed Gein) brought in the masked killer. But this was the hugely successful one.

I think the main innovation here is to set the action not in the wicked big city, or in an isolated location, but in normal boring suburbia (and it clearly is boring). These people aren't visitors trying to fit in to an alien social setting; they live here, and it doesn't help.

Both Carpenter and Debra Hill have denied that they planned the deaths to be in ascneding order of righteousness, but Carpenter at least undercuts himself by going on about the sexually frustrated nature of the stabbing Laurie does; well no, she's trying to stay alive in a fight with a maniac, I don't think she really has time to think about sex. (And Laurie is happy to take a drag off Annie's joint, and would be happy to have a boyfriend, she's just not very good at that social stuff—which I suspect makes her rather closer to viewers of the film than the other characters.) What I would argue, though, is that the deaths are in ascending order of responsibility: Laurie is the one who takes babysitting seriously, who's actually made some preparations for an enjoyable evening with the kid, rather than using it as an excuse to be unsupervised with a boyfriend.

There are moments of glorious efficiency: Loomis meets the sheriff, and all the scene has to establish is that that has happened. But the murder car is in the background too, raising the tension.

But while there are many excellent bits, too often the film drops the ball—such as when Laurie, told by her babysittee that the boogeyman is out there, dismisses this with generic reassurance. Well, no, you're already on edge and you think someone is lurking; you're the one person here who should believe him!

And it's Loomis who saves the day, preventing Laurie from being a final girl. But I do wonder: it's increasingly clear that Michael is supernaturally durable, coming back from a knitting needle in the neck, a coat hanger in the eye and a knife in the chest. So why shouldn't he come back after six shots from Loomis's gun too? (Particularly since it's explicitly shown that there's no body lying where he fell.) Why doesn't he just go back upstairs and kill them both? Did he run out of Monster Points and need to take a break to recharge? In terms of the shape of story, of course, it's because the film has to end some time; but when you've gone to some trouble to set up an unstoppable killer, there's no diegetic reason why he should ever stop.

This was a highly influential film, but I think that that was in part because there were obvious superficial things that could be copied: set it somewhere normal where it's cheap to film, have some pretty young women who don't mind taking their tops off for the camera, have a killer who's a force of evil nature rather than one with mere human toughness—as opposed to the things that make this good when it is good, which to my mind are principally "hire one of the finest actors of her generation for her first film role" and "pick the right actor as the exposition wizard". (Apparently Christopher Lee was considered for the role, but Lee would have made his claims sound entirely reasonable, whereas Pleasance comes over as someone who could plausibly be overreacting to the fear caused by his fifteen-year obsession.) Oh, and of course "have theme music in 5/4", which possibly disposes me to like this film more than it really deserves.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.