Horror Review 31: Halloween

On the final night of my 31 days of horror reviews how can I not review Halloween? It’s the ultimate movie for tonight and the one I’ll be watching hopefully later.  This will not be a review of the remake of course even though I will probably reference and bitch about the remake later, even though I will admit that I did like it in its own “typical Rob Zombie Hillbilly horror feel” type thing.  Forgive me if this turns into a comparison between the two versions but it could happen, I shall train to control myself.

I’m sure anybody reading this knows the Halloween story by now but here goes anyway.  Michael Myers as a child kills his sister who has just had sex (yes, I know so stereotypical in horror but this IS one of the movie that started that stereotype you know).  He’s stuck in a mental institute for a few decades and manages to escape with his doctor hot on his trails desperate to stop him.  So, why is Michael going home and what is he going to do on Halloween? Watch the movie and you’ll find out.

So, what is it about this movie that makes it so special? It’s arguable that Michael Myers was the first “stalker killer” in horror history.  He came before Jason, he came before Freddy he was the spark in the imagination of horror movie makers that created a style of monster that has dominated horror movies ever since.  Michael is the unstoppable boogie man who lurks in the shadows until just the right moment, but instead of the quick death he takes his time and strikes with violence and menace.  He’s no Freddy Kruger with his wise cracks and he’s no Jason Voorhees killing off anybody who appears at his summer camp, Michael is just Michael.  In the first movie he’s just a man a psychotic man, but a human being.  He can be hurt but he always manages to get up and continue his one aim, which is to kill his victim that he has chosen.  This was the movie that also brought in the idea of the virgin survivor.  The one teenager in the movie that actually survives is Laurie, the virgin little miss perfect whose friends are whores and get butchered.

The acting in this movie is perfect for it really, there is no bad acting.  Donald Pleasance as Dr Loomis puts in a perfect performance but I’m yet to see a movie where Pleasance is not on form with his acting he was a true professional even in any of the bad movies he was in.  Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode was also good and this was the start of her becoming one of the “scream queens” a moniker inherited from her mother Janet Leigh for her role in Psycho.  She manages to play the virginal goody goody to almost annoying effect which is perfect as that’s the kind of role Laurie is meant to be.

So now this is where I start to bitch and complain about the remake.  Why was this movie even made? Yes, Rob Zombies version is a watchable and quite entertaining movie in itself but when you compare it to the original it has nothing on it, nothing at all.  It tries to show a back story to Michael to try and teach us why Michael became the fucked up mess he was.  I’d argue that we don’t need to see that.  Myers does not need a motive he’s just the bogeyman.  We don’t need to have a twisted version of him where he was put down by his step father and hated on by his sister which led to him killing them.  We don’t need to see that his mother killed herself over what he did.  We just need Michael.  In the original Michael was born into a normal family with no fuck ups like in the remake, they were just a family.  To me that makes the original Michael creepier.  The fact that he had no real reason in himself to turn him into the monster he became creates a more darker creature.  The remake gives us a reason to feel for Michael, to almost feel pity that this boy was so messed up by his family and in that we lose an element of Michael and we have an inferior movie and inferior monster.

So yeah, watch the original and if you want to be mildly entertained watch the remake too but I’m sure you will see the obvious difference in quality.  I won’t say I hate the remake because I quite like it but I will never like it over the original and I hope that people who see the remake and its sequel will make people want to see the original just to see how good it actually was.