Unless I'm dressed as wisecracking dognapper Debi Mazar in Beethoven's 2nd, I find Halloween kind of a drag. It requires too much forethought and CVS shopping, and I'm at the age when I've probably had too many fun-size Snickers and popcorn orbs for a lifetime. But one spooky tradition of mine will never die, just like Michael Myers himself: I always watch Halloween on October 31, and not just because it's one of the three scariest movies I've seen (including Scream and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but because it actually captures the essence of the holiday itself: a drab, suburban, hokey affair with some seriously scary undertones. The day is stupid and cheesy, but it also feels like the wrong night to babysit. Particularly if you're a naughty babysitter who seems like an awful friend.
As a thriller, Halloween is slower than what we're used to now, but that just cements its towering legacy further. There will never be another movie like this, and that's why it qualifies for Best Movie Ever. Here are my other favorite reasons why.
1. There is only one Jamie Lee Curtis.
Try comparing Jamie Lee Curtis to anyone. Are you coming up with anything? Because it doesn't even seem right to compare her to her own mother, Janet Leigh. I hereby coin the term "ruggedly unassuming" to describe Curtis, who plays Halloween's central teen, the big-eyed, lank-haired Laurie Strode. Though the movie begins by showing us -- through the eyes of his clown mask -- young Michael Myers' murder of his sister Judith on Halloween 1963, the action of the story zaps us to Halloween 1978, when Laurie is supposed to babysit by the same Haddonfield, IL house where the infamous killing took place.
Her bratty friends (P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis) are babysitting nearby, and none of them knows that a terrified psychiatrist named Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is roaming the area searching for his patient Michael, who escaped from the funny farm and might be destined to kill again. Do you need more plot? Because the rest of what's in store is just unadulterated terror and Jamie Lee's shruggy gauntness. She's like a young Charlotte Gainsbourg who lives in a cul de sac and wears only faint green and beige.
And make no mistake: This is both an iconic role and a great performance. Curtis' level of terror rises to unexpected levels, and she is commanding and convincing whether she's yelling "Do as I say!" at the clueless kids she's babysitting or limping away from the Boogey Man himself. She embodies the virginal qualities of horror movie heroines we'd see time and again in years to come, but I think it's easy to believe her humanity here. The last person you'll think of when watching Jamie Lee Curtis is Jennifer Love Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer, if that's any help.
2. Dr. Loomis: stalwart, serious, and seeeeeexy.
You have to love a man in control -- particularly one who seeks justice, operates based on instinct alone, and shoots a gun sometimes. Dr. Loomis, the bald, trench-coated pillar of goodness that he is, happens to be way sexier than any of us give him credit for. Donald Pleasance's long stares and Ustinov-ian facial hair are classically debonair, and I like to think of him as the original Keith Mars, a.k.a. Enrico Colantoni, the sexy patriarch on Veronica Mars.
3. The daytime scenes are just as scary as the nighttime ones.
As I emphasized in my Mysterious Skin review, I love when movies get the feel of a small town right. Halloween's afternoon-set scenes, when Michael tracks down Laurie and her gal pals as they walk home from school, are just as horrifying as the shadowy bloodshed that later occurs, and it's because Haddonfield's pleasant, nondescript suburbanness is being corrupted in broad daylight by the darkest force imaginable. There's Michael standing in your backyard! There's Michael perched outside the school! There's Michael turning cartwheels in the pumpkin patch! By the way, in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! when Linus watches Snoopy rise in a giant shadow, it's Halloween-level scary. Same pacing and everything.
Naturally it's the later scenes that truly haunt us forever, when Michael systematically kills Laurie's friends (including P.J. Soles, whose areolas are admittedly darling) after minutes upon minutes of anticipation. I think the scariest moment may be when Annie (Nancy Loomis) meets her death as she's turning the ignition to start a car. We see wandering back and forth from the garage, through the house, and back to the car before Michael dices her. God! It's unbearable. And still it's nothing compared to...
4. You're given no indiciation of how freaky the climax will be.
For the first 80 minutes of Halloween, you're scared, but you're not sure whether the level of terror will escalate into something operatically shrill. And that's probably Halloween's greatest gift: Because it's a subtle movie, and almost as unassuming as its own heroine, you have no idea that the forthcoming finale is a traumatizing gauntlet of freaky visual and aural stimuli, one that doesn't skip a beat or let up until the film's over. The perfect timing of Laurie's discovery of the bodies, her palpable shock, Michael's first lunge at her, and the chase that leads them back home where Dr. Loomis finally barges in is only watchable in one sustained breath.
There's no time to exhale when Laurie, hiding behind a living room couch, can still hear Michael's breathing in the room. You keep waiting for him to emerge again, and that's when the movie's key line hits you: "You can't kill the Boogey Man." Even if he's just a lunatic in a painted-over William Shatner mask (which he is), the Boogey Man is immortal and inescapable. Spring for heavier closet doors next time, Laurie.
5. The theme.
There are certain simple songs that deserve millions of dollars in royalties per day, and director John Carpenter's eerie piano theme is up there with "Stand By Me" and the Jeopardy! theme music for me. It's got the same starkness and weirdness of, say, an early Kraftwerk hit, but it immediately ensconces you into a world of despair, terror and helplessness. It is essential to this movie's success, and to this date no other film has matched it. Bernard Herrmann would be reduced to shivers. Then he'd go to study it, try to recreate its formula, but find that its essence had already escaped out the back window like Michael himself.
Will you watch Halloween on the big day? Or will you assuage your Jamie Lee Curtis fix with something more along the lines of Freaky Friday?
