Halloween Anaylsis

Halloween (1978)

Halloween is an American slasher film directed by John Carpenter in 1978, with an unknown actress making her debut as their lead, this movie plummeted Jamie Lee Curtis into her successful movie career. The film is set on Halloween in 1963 in a fictional remote town in Illinois, the movie starts with a POV shot of someone peering through windows and then entering a house and getting a knife out of the kitchen draw, when then follow this character as they hide from the young adult couple fooling around and then going into the bedroom, the boy is then seen leaving when the POV character then going upstairs and selecting clown costume pieces such as a mask, we then see the women naked on her dressing table when this character we are following stabs her to death, the person then goes outside and is confronted by his parents- at this point we learn that this murderer is 6 year old Michael Myers, the film then skips to 15 years later when he escapes from a mental asylum and returns to his home town and proceeds to stalks our main character Laurie Strode and her friends- going on to kill all of her friends and tries to kill Laurie who fights back and survives, at the same time Michael’s psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis is tracking down Michael as he knows what he is capable of and is scared for the safety of others as he says in the film “I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realised that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.”

This film briefly follows the Todrov’s classic narrative structure, with a brief equilibrium at the start and a hard choice on which is the actual event of the film either when Michael kills his sister or when he escapes the mental asylum, in my opinion the event is when Michael kills his sister however others believe the event is when he escapes.

This film supports the ‘Final girl theory’ with Laurie not being like her friends who end up being killed- she dresses like a 30 year old woman, she doesn’t wear makeup, doesn’t go out, doesn’t have sex or even want to go to a dance with a boy and most importantly fights the serial killer and wins- she is boyish and a virgin supporting this theory and also makes her androgynous. This film also has a ‘reactionary sexual agenda’ meaning if you have sex, take drugs or drink alcohol you die, however our ‘final girl’ Laurie is seen doing drugs previously in the film which challenges this but the fact that her friends die whilst having sex supports this. This film follows the male gaze theory in a way as one of the female characters who dies is naked, she is sexually objectified and then killed (also supporting the final girl theory).

This movie created the ‘slasher’ film trend- a sub-genre of the horror genre, a horror film that is about a serial killer, Friday the 13^th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Hell night as well as many others followed, this was because they were cheap to make and didn’t need known actors and people enjoyed them- Halloween grossing $47 million at the box office and $70 million worldwide an equivalent to $250 million as of 2014, a lot considering the film had a budget of $300,000 which was considered a lot at the time, Halloween is one of the most profitable independent films.

The four plot rules of a slasher film which Halloween began are, a traumatic event in the past which creates a psychopathic killer, the killer then returns to the site of the event-usually a specific date, the killer stalks a group of teenagers and kills them and then the final girl survives. This film’s iconography is innocence- right from the start as the killer Michael is only a small child and he is dressed up for Halloween as a clown and Laurie being a virgin.

I didn’t like this film that much as I didn’t really understand the concept of Michael creeping on this particular group and then killing them yet not dying himself, I did like the jumps cares however the storyline didn’t really do much for me in my opinion.