Halloween (1978) - Having murdered his older sister on Halloween night in 1963, Michael Myers has been sitting in a mental institution, not saying a word for 15 years but staring blankly into a wall. Waiting ever so patiently for this night when he will return to Haddonfield to finish what he started.
Halloween set in motion what would become the formula duplicated to a fault in hundreds of movies to follow. There have been knife wielding killers before, even masked killers in many of the Italian giallo movies as a staple and in some American horror movies of old. But on this Halloween night in 1978, the American slasher as we know it was born; patiently stalking his would-be victims until the moment is just right and springing on them in a spree of bloody carnage.
Michael Myers is a mysterious character. Even though everybody by now knows who he is, the only thing known about him is that at the age of 6 he killed his sister, 15 years later he return to the same town to kill again, and yet nobody knows why. Perhaps Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) has the answer in referring to Michael Myers simply as evil. Evil simply does not need a reason to do what it does, and that may be key to why Halloween worked so well then and continues to work so well for new and old audiences alike.
Pumped up with a tempestuous soundtrack, Halloween works at various levels. The music claws at the chalkboard of your nerves to get your heart beating faster. Then it kicks into high gear to get your heart racing as the tension on the screen crawls up your neck. Composition of light, shadow and music combine with skillfully controlled direction, bringing naturally developed characters into the arms of a faceless evil while the timbre of the audience rises to a scream.
I give it 5 Daggers. Halloween is simply a classic with high rewatchability.
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