#168: Halloween

Halloween (1978)
Directed by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance and the best slasher killer in the history of slasher films!


When I was a kid I dressed up as a different ninja turtle for halloween three years in a row. Only Donatello never figured into the equation for whatever reason. After my run of portraying mutan turtles turned stale, I did what many a young child did. I became a vampire.

It was sweet. I had a cape, I greased my hair into a pseudo-widow's peak and put some uncomfortable plastic fangs in my mouth and fake blood ran down from the corners of my mouth.

As a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with horror movies and scary stories in general. I would get horror books from the library at school and scare myself senseless in the dark of night. Nightmares were plentiful. Anyone who says the boogeyman can't get you has either forgotten or has never had a bad dream.

Unsolved Mysteries is a pretty lame show in retrospect but when I was 10, it was eerie and creepy. Anything to do with alien abductions and I'd be there to squirm my way through it. It seems masochistic but there is a certain exhiliration and pleasure that comes from being scared or seeing something shocking and unbelievable. If you get to the point where you're vocally trying to convince yourself that it's not real...well you're hooked.

Halloween is the greatest of all childhood holidays. We looked forward to it every year because it's the only day where the scary monsters lose their shadowy mystique and become part of the norm. We as children -- and as adults, who am I kidding? -- entered the world of the darkness for but a night. As a vampire or a werewolf we embraced the horror.

There always is an air of safety surrounding Halloween. So for John Carpenter to make a movie about October 31 where the horror is real and not just make believe he created a new level in the genre. A lumbering, escaped mental patient in a William Shatner mask wielding a knife trying to exact revenge on those who did him wrong on halloween of all days. It packs a punch.

It paved the way for the Friday the 13th movies -- which paved the way for Sleepaway Camp and others -- but it wasn't as campy (sorry about that one). Halloween is still the most effective slasher film maybe because of the double reversal within the holiday from horror to safety and back again or maybe because John Carpenter knows horror better than any other filmmaker.

Halloween is still an annual treasure for my friends and I, although sometimes my creativity takes a backseat to procrastination. The last two years I've worn a suit and attached some accessory to that suit in order to call it a costume.

In 2007 it was a briefcase. Arlo was the devil and I was his attorney.

In 2008 I wrapped a noose around my neck. I was an investment banker. I stole that idea from Traer a few years earlier when he was an Enron executive.

One of these years I'll be more elaborate with my costume. We should all channel that fear and exhiliration at least once a year anyway.