Re: Halloween

I agree about the original, but not about II. The original film plays a lot like a very dark, Hitchcock-inspired horror about a real possibility that could have happened. Donald Pleasence is brillant as Sam Loomis (that name obviously taken from the character who saves the day in Psycho) and John Carpenter’s direction speaks for itself and doesn’t need many words to explain itself either. One of Halloween’s greatest virtues is its utter simplicity. You don’t need to know any other extraneous information to understand what’s going on. What you see is what you get and anymore is a waste of space. It is not the kill that is ultimately scary; it is the anticipation.

Halloween II, on the other hand, trades its suspense and anticipation of the scare for pure gory gimmicks and cheap showmanship. The film has the unfortunate duty of having to extend a story from a film that needn’t a sequel (the original had a great ending– Myers is gone and no longer physical. He is now everywhere…) and to justify why Myers can’t die, which in the original was just done to add to the Boogeyman metaphor. In II, Myers is now some damned being that somehow knows what Samhain is and is after his sister instead of the idea of picking Laurie Strode at random. Ambiguity and less explanation to a killer’s motives are a lot scarier than knowing everything. Of course, horror like comedy is subjective, but this is an issue about cinematic technicality here. I agree with Debra Hill that Laurie is no longer a proactive character because she spends the whole film practically comatosed in bed while Loomis spends the whole film running around aimlessly whereas in the original he is just inches away to capturing his “fugitive.” Carpenter also said that the main thing that got him through writing this script was Budweiser. And finally, Rick Rosenthal (as seen again in Resurrection) only cares about vulgarities. He retroactively makes Myers’ killings more interesting than having sympathy for the victims. Guys slipping on blood drained from entire bodies and knocking themselves out, faces being burnt in hot water beyond recognition, and siringes stuck into people’s heads does not match the simple subtlety of the original’s acts of violence, which are emphasized more by the subtext into how sexual they are (more interesting to know that since that’s a common fantasy amongst serial killers). And if you were to watch I and II back to back, you would get a very structurally uneven story where suddenly Laurie does nothing in the second half and where we are stuck meeting people we don’t know, nor care about getting killed at a crappy looking hospital. I would conclude that the original started the Slasher trend, but II started the trend of recycling gore tactics.

I would rather watch III because at least Carpenter attempted to try something new (he didn’t want any more Myers considering he was written to be dead at the end of II) and worked with fame English writer Nigel Kneale of the classic 50’s Quatermass series to try to make a Twilight Zone like series with every next installment about a totally diferent story all relating to the lore and celebration of Halloween. Alas, pigeon-holing is still a common thing with audiences as well with H’wood execs. A series like that could have changed how the horror genre went. Missed potential.