Short Round: Halloween (1978) ****/*****

The music of Halloween is so good that it would be entertaining just spending an hour listening to the soundtrack. That you actually get some moving pictures and a chilling little story alongside the iconic jams is the icing on the cake. You could have made a movie about a puppy that killed people with cuteness, and if it was set to this score it would have still been chilling. When you take into account that John Carpenter wrote the tunes himself, while at the same time writing and directing the movie, it’s not too hard to understand how he became an icon in the 80s.

This movie is good at building tension too. After it came out it became pretty much the prototype for a million different slasher movies in the 80s, but none of them would ever quite live up to what Halloween was able to accomplish. It’s subtle for a horror movie, it’s a slow burn. For most of the movie we don’t see more than brief glimpses of Michael Meyers, so quick that you’re not even sure if he was really there or not. Instead of watching him dispatch a bunch of nobodies in the first half of the film, we spend the first two acts really getting to know a smaller number of characters, and then when Meyers does start putting people under the knife in the third act it’s all the more effective because we’ve come to appreciate them as people. The kills here aren’t nearly as inventive as slasher kills would eventually become over the years, but this is one of the first in the genre. You’ve got to start somewhere.