Thanks, I Hate It: Halloween

Halloween isn't a bad movie. It's pretty good, in fact, and in some ways it deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. In Jamie Lee Curtis it has one of the great -- if not the greatest -- scream queen performances of all time, and in its masked and implacable villain it has, if not a particularly creative monster, at least a memorable and frightening one. It has an ending that jabs a knife right into the idea that a woman's momentary safety means anything beyond just that, a score that skitters up and down the spine, and a premise that twists childish fun and games together with the murderously infantile misogynist anxiety we see so often in the dead-eyed faces of school shooters, incel hatemongers, and the other 

In other ways, though, in its Pasadena setting passed off unconvincingly as Illinois in autumn, in its bland psycho-babble and in actor Donald Pleasance's insufficiently nuanced performance as psychologist to escaped killer Michael Myers, it falls well short of the incisive brutality of Carpenter's best work. There's no image in Halloween to equal or even rival the clawed hand beyond the mirror in Prince of Darkness or the husky fleeing across a barren wasteland in The Thing. There's no location shot like the switchback stair leading down to the lighthouse in The Fog, no astounding matte paintings, no nastily brilliant special effects. Much of Carpenter's appeal lies in tradecraft and ingenuity, on which Halloween is woefully short.

The setting is one of the film's greatest obstacles. At no point does it successfully create the feeling of autumn, and Carpenter plays against and around his location in his attempt to locate and capture that sense. His brilliance for distance and monumental horror imagery is hampered by palm trees, hills, and obviously Californian streets. The flat emptiness of Illinois is a hard sell, but worse there's no redeeming character in the Pasadena sprawl to take the slack. What we get is an ironed-out picture of suburbia which, while lived-in and realistic, feels a little too affluent, a little too bright, a little too open. Carpenter's shots of Myers feel too summery and sweaty, and the lighting by night is over-bright with light pollution, hampering the effectiveness of those gorgeous streetlight-lit sequences.

Curtis is absolute dynamite as Laurie Strode, the role that launched her into stardom, but it's not enough to keep the movie going. By the same token the bland butchery and detective work of the film's first two acts can't hold a candle to the taut, terrifying intimacy of its final stretch and the excruciating horror of its ending. Carpenter has lightning in a bottle but nowhere to let it out, and his penchant for goofily didactic discussions of calamity -- think the computer simulation scene in The Thing -- hamstrings a lot of the earliest attempts at tension-building. Halloween is one third of a great movie jammed unsuccessfully into two thirds of a mostly fine one.