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This turns out to be the saving grace of one of the characters in the end of the film, but I’ll say no more. This is an intensely scary and highly entertaining horror film that proves the never-mindful rule that horror movies have to be gory to be scary wrong. It really is not that bloody, it only seems like it.
In the opening moments of the film, a little boy kills his sister and is sent away to an institution where he stays for fifteen years. His psychiatrist defines him as evil personified, a pure manic who needs no motive to do his dirty deeds, but does them only because he is evil. That same psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, is now looking for Michael Myers because he’s escaped the ground of the institution and headed back to Haddonfield where his lust for death began fifteen years earlier. Loomis is played by Donald Pleasance in a wonderful performance. Pleasance brings sophistication to the film that is lacked in the teenage characters who are all good, but inexperienced.
All the townspeople are perfectly normal. They all do everyday things like we do. They are human. And it’s that humanization that makes “Halloween” so scary. Carpenter makes the setting mercilessly real and them throws in a sick murderer. The thing about it is that Michael Myers is not a made up monster...he’s real.
Carpenter takes full advantage of his foreground/background. This is actually a sort of rule in horror filmmaking: to use one or the other to take our attention away from something. But Carpenter does it like a professional – and this is only his second feature. For those of you who frighten easily, keep in mind that the foreground is almost always a safe zone. The last act of the film encounters the most unexpected scares, and almost all of them happen in the background.
There are only select few films that can stay scary over a long period. “Halloween” is a film made by an army of people who were in career infancy, and it remains one of the best horror films of all times. This is truly scary. ****