What's interesting is that HALLOWEEN is the point in movie history (at least in the popular sense) where a lot of little separate streams run together into one efficient vehicle, while specifically ditching certain elements to create an effective sub-genre (although not very, as I'll argue at the end of this typically long and overblown posting).
Part of the slasher model is derived from the Agatha Christie TEN LITTLE INDIANS murder mystery model wherein a large number of characters are killed in one place over a short period of time - of course, this was originally a tour de force for a detective to solve the crime while the crimes were ongoing, but as films like PSYCHO began to up the ante, the focus became less and less on the solving of the murder and more and more on the staging or the violence of the murder itself. This strand runs parallel with Hershel Gordon Lewis' gore films of the 60's wherein the focus is shamelessly on the death, and the PSYCHO offspring (HUSH, HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE, Hammer Films endless series of PSYCHO rip-offs and running into BLOOD AND BLACK LACE - Sei donne per l'assassino- and Italian giallo films etc.) wherein the motivation is provided by a mentally unhinged character, thus needing less "mystery story" justification/logical rationale for the killings (one interesting way this plays out is Mario Bava's 1971 film Ecologia del delitto - TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE/BAY OF BLOOD - where the pursuit of an inheritance is the reason for a cascading sequence of murder set-pieces wherein each killer is killed by the next killer, dead ending in an accidental killing by children.) So you have all these approaches to the material vieing with each other - is it a mystery, a series of violence spectacles, a police procedural, an out and out gore film? - and a whole bunch of movies rise up in a stew.
So along comes HALLOWEEN, refining approaches from a bunch of film currents preceding it (and especially refining the killer POV/slasher-on-a-holiday themes of BLACK CHRISTMAS - an especially worthwhile and unnerving movie). The killings occur in a specific locale (although not isolated, thus providing the small town charm and suburban frission - "if only someone would hear her screams!"), over a specific span of time (one or two evenings), on a holiday (thus justifying plot details like characters needing to be somewhere or others not being around - Carpenter's original screenplay was just called THE BABYSITTER MURDERS and was not set on the iconic holiday), in which the killings are being caused by a mentally unbalanced character (no real motivation needed beyond that, so the mystery aspect is jettisoned and no logical pattern expected) being investigated by police (something to cut away to and always good for the last minute save) who is very violent (it's worth noting that HALLOWEEN is not a very bloody movie. Much like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACARE - despite its reputation - what it does is effectively tweak everything else around the act, including building suspense, so that the violent act seems more violent than is actually shown. Michael's heavy breathing is just one great little detail).
And then Carpenter strips away all the detritus, gets the machine to run at top form, and plugs into a bunch of smaller points (I've always thought that Michael Meyers is very much Boo Radley from Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, just actually deserving of his scary reputation, and Sam Loomis is such a great noir-detective type, in his way, that it's easy to forget that he's a doctor and not a private eye/cop) and one bigger one - he makes Michael nigh-unstoppable. And the movie, while not being a logical mystery or detective film, plays off our unnerved feeling about what we're watching, whether it makes logical sense or is supernatural (and here's where being an audience member at that exact moment in movie history time probably helped explain why it was so effective)
I mean, he's a crazy guy, right? I mean, we saw him escape a mental asylum! He's big and strong, granted, but he drives a car and has to steal his tools. And yet - it's Halloween night, and Loomis keeps talking about how Michael is pure evil, and he does seem to be able to always be there and then not be there, and dammit, he just won't stay down! Get him with the knitting needle! Damn! Get him in the eye with the hangar! Damn! Yeah, stick the knife in him, yeah, that'll do it! Damn! And then, just to undermine it, he gets unmasked for half a second, and look, he IS just a guy, an average looking guy at that, not hideously scarred or a monster or anything, and then the mask goes back on and BAM! BAM! BAM! and, okay, now, of course, I mean, he's solid, he goes out the window, okay, now....
But then the girl is crying and Loomis goes back and, of course, he's not there. I've always loved how Laurie's crying intensifies as the audience sees what Loomis sees - there's no way she can know that Michael isn't there, but instinctually she KNOWS it, knows that evil is real, but she still has to ask Loomis, representative of logic and sanity and safety. And what's great is how Pleasance responds - not just the famous line itself but the delivery - as if, despite all his blithering about evil, all his panic throughout the film, he didn't actually believe it until it came to this, and still kind of can't believe it. And the masked breathing recedes into the Halloween night.
It's such a strong ending that it actually, immediately makes any sequel redundant and impotent. How can any further movie string us along like that again? We may not know specifically what Michael is, but we know his parameters, and any further explication is just adding detail that diminishes.
And the same is kind of true of the slasher films that followed in general. FRIDAY THE 13TH upped the violence ante, exploited the urban legend aspect and made a pathetic attempt at using the whodunit angle (pathetic because Mrs. Voorhees is never IN the damned movie until the end anyway), before having to resort to HALLOWEEN's unstoppability and, eventually, literalizing Jason as the undead. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET savvily kept the suburban setting and just went ahead and applied the supernatural/ghost concept to the slasher model immediately, creating a very smart concept that could be exploited in interesting ways. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE-type films are a related, but different, beast (as Kim Newman effectively argues in NIGHTMARE MOVIES, the best book on modern horror films I know). But most slasher films just copied the formula (they're amazingly cheap to make, of course, which was part of the popularity) without understanding it - bunch of people die (as the gore film raises its reductive head again), check. Killer is rarely/never detected for no good reason, check. Set it on a holiday or theme, check. Killer can take more punishment than a human should, check. And most floundered around from that point on - a lot went with the whodunit aspect when the killer wasn't unstoppable (it does automatically set up a big ending), some tried to exploit the urban legend/real world aspect of FT13TH (THE BURNING, HUMONGOUS) or embraced the follore magic aspect (MADMAN).
But none of them ever fused things as perfectly as HALLOWEEN did. It's a film that takes place *during* the slide from rational worldview to the irrational. And I could see why some people wouldn't like that or want that, or even *get* it without knowing the background, especially since so many films have tried to do the same thing, cheapening the tricks in the process.
But Halloween itself is fast approaching. Watch the film again, late one night, close to the holiday and then take a walk around your neighborhood in the dark and see if it doesn't work its magic, even a little.
(Now who wants to talk about how SAW is just a cynical reduction of the brilliant ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES/THEATER OF BLOOD model?
)
