I’m a wimp when it comes to horror films, as anyone who has ever sat next to me in a cinema while I’ve been yelping my head off will tell you. I’ve forced myself to watch some of the classics, and I’ve loved some of the new ones such as Get Out and A Quiet Place. But I’ve succeeded in avoiding Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and the other slasher movies of the 1970s and 80s. And, until last week, I’d never seen the one which gets all the acclaim, Halloween. I knew it was important, of course. I’d spotted the references in everything from Scream to Baby Driver, and I’d heard of Rob Zombie’s remake, as well as David Gordon Green’s sequel. But whenever I thought about braving the 1978 original, which was directed by John Carpenter, I’d always leave my DVD in its shrink-wrapped box and pick up a romcom instead.
So here’s what surprised me about my long-overdue viewing: Halloween isn’t scary at all. It’s too clunky for that. It may terrify teenagers at a sleepover, but watching it in broad daylight in middle-age brings a sort of patronising respect for the plucky low-budget film-makers who managed to get 90 minutes out of a handful of actors, two clapboard houses and a wisp of plot.
You might admire Carpenter’s insistent 5/4 piano theme, the early twist that a homicidal maniac is actually a six-year-old boy, and the grownup Michael Myers’ gymnastic escape from an asylum on a dark and stormy night. You might appreciate the way the Steadicam prowls through a grid of all-American suburban streets, as if searching for victims. As for the victims, the only bearable one is Jamie Lee Curtis’s studious Laurie, a spiritual cousin of Sandy from Grease, which came out the same year. On that note, why do the main characters include Laurie, Loomis, Lynda, Lyndsey, Lonnie and Lester? What the L is going on?
What surprised me most about Halloween was how little it has to do with the 31 October Halloween. Carpenter scatters around a few references to pumpkins and trick-or-treaters, just as the set decorator scatters around a few brown leaves. (The film was shot in May, which explains why the neighbourhood’s trees are so lush and green.) But no one gets drowned while bobbing for apples, and the masked serial killer doesn’t hide among crowds of revellers in fancy dress. It could have been set on any night of the year. (An early draft of the script, I’ve since learned, had a more appropriate but less iconic title: The Babysitter Murders.)
The other big surprise was how ineffectual Myers is. His doctor (Donald Pleasence) keeps saying that he is evil incarnate. Dr Loomis made his diagnosis while the boy sat silently in a cell for 15 years, so he must be quite some psychiatrist. But the so-called figure of The Shape totters along so slowly that he would lose a race with any of George A Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead. And he should have cut wider eyeholes in his mask, because he repeatedly fails to stab Laurie at point-blank range. She, on the other hand, stabs him with a knitting needle, a coat hanger and a kitchen knife, so Carpenter and Hill missed a trick – or a treat – by not making her the villain in Halloween II.
Her stabbings don’t draw blood, though. The film is remarkably short of gore by today’s standards. And it’s light on sex and swearing. Perhaps it’s because we are living in a horror movie at the moment, but Halloween now seems sweetly innocent: a glimpse of a peaceful, naive America where a slowcoach in a boilersuit was the most frightening thing around.
