John Carpenter's Halloween was literally the only film to give me nightmares. The first time I saw it, sometime in 1981, was an HBO airing on a miniscule black and white Admiral Television. I watched with my sister Randee in a tiny Racine, Wisconsin apartment she shared with another sister, Dee. Imagine that, subscribing to HBO and watching it on a 9 inch black and white screen.
Scared the shits out of me nonetheless. And that is plural "shits".
The second time was on the floor of our family's Lichter Road homestead, lying terrified next to my sister Linda as my future brother-in-law whispered from the shadows that Haddonfield, Illinois was not far from Kenosha, Wisconsin.
To me, the original Halloween, (and I know I'm one of gajillions who think this way) is the epoch of horror, and the icing is its perfection in seasonal viewing at this time of year. It's tone personified. It's not gory, it's intense and just plain scary.
Everyone in the world should remember a bullet-riddled Michael Myers falling out of an upper middle class balcony in that Haddonfield, Illinois on October 31, 1978. Only to have gotten up and walked away as his demented psychiatrist looked on with an empty revolver. I was mortified.
After all, Illinois wasn't very far from Wisconsin, said my caffeine and sugar encased imagination. Don echoed that sentiment a short few months later from those affore-mentioned shadows.
Needless to say, I could not wait to find out what happened next. I needed to know.
So in the fall of 82, in a two page spread in the Spectrum guide, there it was. The featured film on the month. Halloween II!!
To this day, I love the film. I love how, taking a page from Bride of Frankenstein, it picks up immediately after the climax of the original...it gives it some air of intensity. Director Rick Rosenthal claims to this day that he wanted to keep the suspense and tone of the original going for the sequel, but it was Carpenter who did recuts to implement more gore and graphic violence into the film to keep pace with the nasty slashers that followed in the seminal film's wake and became box office gold.
I don't know if that's true or not, (I hope not) but I will admit the sequel has a mean-spiritedness that seems unneccesary. That needle in the eye! Lance Guest slipping in a pool of blood! Poor Alice! All she did was wonder what the hell Mrs. Elrod's problem was! What a random murder, Michael, geez.
All of this kind of caught me offguard as an 11 year old watching alone.
Anyhoo, the film affected me, just not as much as the first. Because It had things that bugged me, even as a kid. I thought the mask was weird and stupid until I learned years later that the mask was the original, worse for wear, from the first film and that I was actually stupid.
Myers walked in this one like he shit his pants. As a kid, I queried, Would Michael care if he shit his pants? Did he visit the bathroom? Was the toilet afraid? Now I'm thinking of Michael, Jason, and Freddy freshening up in front of a public bathroom mirror together.
I told you I was stupid.
40 years later Halloween is back on the big screen, with direct involvement from John Carpenter for the first time since Halloween III in 1982, and it is an amazing film. The new one skips Halloween II entirely and acts as a direct sequel to the first, but there's an extended sequence that is an obvious homage to it that should keep the fans happy, if their memories are sharp.
Ham anyone?
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