| Halloween The Story... One Halloween night, young Michael Myers begins spying on his older sister and her boyfriend. Dressed in his Halloween costume, Michael stalks them from outside the house. Then, after the boyfriend leaves, he goes back into the house, grabs a kitchen knife, puts on his Halloween mask and kills his sister in cold blood� Flash forward to several years later, and Michael has been locked in a mental asylum, under the guard of psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis, who believes Michael to be the personification of pure evil! However, one rainy night, after years of staring into walls, Michael escapes from the asylum and heads to his home town of Haddonfield. Hotly pursued by Dr. Loomis, Michael becomes fixated on a girl - Laurie Strode � and her friends and begins his reign of terror by killing them one by one! He nearly succeeds, and is about to finish off Laurie, when Dr. Loomis intervenes and shoots him several times in the chest, sending him crashing over a balcony and landing with a thud on the back lawn. After a moment with Laurie, Dr. Loomis goes over to the balcony to see Michael�s corpse, but finds it has vanished� Reflection� Well, this is where the whole saga began! John Carpenter�s original is a horror classic. The movie may only have had a small budget, but this forced the director to rely more on his chilling premise and story, and use the camera itself as a character. The result was an incredibly intriguing and creepy experience. A lot of movies and directors claim to have started the trend for this kind of movie, but it was Halloween and director John Carpenter that began it all. Halloween scared people on two fronts � first, by making them jump with actual shocks, and second, with creepy camera angles & a chilling atmosphere. The subsequent sequels and whole wave of horror movies that followed relied more on the �shock and jump� technique, with the psychological scares going out of the window. But hey, it�s not to say those movies were bad (OK, some were!) they just took one element of what made Halloween successful and exploited, mutating into a new form of horror movie themselves and creating the whole 80�s horror culture. Now OK, some may argue that it wasn�t Halloween by itself that created this trend, and I agree, it didn�t, but it sure as hell contributed to it. Films such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street set new benchmarks, and also opened the way for a whole host of horror movies. Overall, if Halloween showed movie studio and audiences one thing, it was that as long as you have a decent script, and a unique movie style, you can create something truly chilling, despite your budget (Can anyone say Blair Witch?). |