The night he came home

Halloween creeps ever closer, and so it is time to give you another great seasonal film recommendation. And I'm going to jump straight to the best Halloween film of all time; the one that bears the name of the season itself.

There are probably too many reasons I love Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) for me to be coherent. I may as well just put the film on and stand there, pointing at it, shouting "That! That! That!" Alternatively, I could  pile dozens and dozens of copies of Rob Zombie's godawful 2007 remake in to a pit and then urinate constantly onto them, simultaneously drinking gallons of cheap lager to ensure there is no pause in my stream of contempt.

I really, really love this film. And because my love is an inarticulate, violent beast, I am going to simply list five reasons why Halloween is great.



1. The music.

I'm listening to it now. It's magical. Hey - you should listen to it too! Let's see if this works:




Ok, so hopefully you can now listen to it while reading. Cool. Anyway, the score, written by Carpenter, is a thing of eerie wonder. It is at once minimal and deceptively complex. The layers underneath the main theme build a sense of real dread. For me, anyway.

2. Mr Myers

This slim, spectral nightmare of a figure has wandered through my dreams ever since my young self first saw the film. Subsequent incarnations of the character have been somehow wrong - too bulky, too short, too 'I'm a monster'y. The origial Myers doesn't really seem to exist in this world, as if he's just passing through on the way to... I don't know, killing some angels. He's utterly unknowable, and thus utterly terrifying.

3.  The structure

Like all great drama, the film is tightly focused. Outside of a brief prologue, setting up Michael's childhood discovery that he really likes big knives, the film takes place over the course of 24 hours. Much of the story is set at day, which, for me, is when monsters are really scary. I mean, they should come out after dark, right? What kind of bold-as-brass psycho wanders around at day? Answer: a confident, patient one.

I love the time the film spends developing the town and the characters. The eventual descent into evening darkness is all the more creepy for having got used to the day. And, of course, once the night comes, it's here to stay. 30 Days of Night could have learned a trick from this.

4.   The cinematography

Carpenter really knows how to frame a shot. For years, I only had this story in a kind of sqashed up pan-and-scan TV version on VHS. This was back in the bad old days when TV broadcasters and VHS distributors alike thought nothing of lopping the sides of the picture off so it fit onto your resolutely square TV screen. But Michael Myers lives on the edges of the picture! That's where he lurks, all white masked and spooky. Only when I finally got to see a proper widescreen copy did I fully realise the brilliance of the film making. Rather than focus on the killer, as most half wit horror directors are wont to do, Carpenter keeps Myers on the periphery. He is occasionally to be glimpsed behind a hedge, in between washing, in a distant window; but rarely up close.

5.   The lack of reason

Sequels and (sigh) remakes have all tried to find a reason for Michael's Octobery slaughterfest. Lost sisters, star signs, ancient cults... a host of reasons why the man in the white mask might have gone into the murder business rather than, say, IT support. All stupid, all diminishing the character. Michael is great because he really doesn't have a reason for what he's doing, at least, no reason fathomable to us.

One of the greatest sins of the remake is to recast the young Michael as an angry greaser child with abusive parents and a terrible home life. The minute this happens, Myers has a motivation and a context, and is thus potentially cureable or at least understandable. Carpenter has no time for such nonsense - his Michael is from a seemingly normal, well-to-do family, with no obvious motive for his subsequent love affair with screaming and blood. He remains inscrutable, and that is why he is scary.

So, there we are. Halloween. If you haven't watched it, you should. If you have watched it, you should do so again. If you are Rob Zombie, you should go have a long, hard think about what you have done.