Halloween: Restored Limited Edition starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence on DVD
Director: John Carpenter

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This key film in the slasher-film genre remains superior to its numerous sequels and clones. John Carpenter wrote and directed this story of a killer child who returns to his old neighborhood 15 years after committing a grisly murder on a Halloween night. Big ol' knife in hand, he's intent on doing in sexually-active teenagers and at least one (Jamie Lee Curtis) wallflower. The appealing thing about this scary movie is the way Carpenter has stripped the legacy of horror films to something essential. He takes the monstrosity of Norman Bates in Psycho and the determined invasiveness of the creature in Howard Hawks's The Thing and simply removes all complicating elements--until he's left with the pure vision of a masked madman striding along after his intended victim, both of whom are suggestively linked (by destiny? Coincidence? Psychological overlap?) by the camera frame. Sequels went out of their way to mess up this simple game plan. The DVD release has optional full-screen and widescreen presentations, though there isn't much point in seeing this in anything but the latter format.

Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby sitter is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho. In the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an uncannily frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget, the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more installments: 1981's dismal Halloween II, which picked up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally gripping Halloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after 20 years.

 

 

 

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