KRR: So, Happy 'Halloween'!

 

Well, it's Halloween, so you know what that means! Time to revisit the most classic slasher flick of all time, John Carpenter's indie-turned-blockbuster terror, Halloween. This movie, though well over forty years old, still scares to this day no matter how many times you've seen it or it's been remade. It made immortal our favorite yogurt woman, Jamie Lee Curtis, and her stalker - the babysitter killer, the Shape, the Boogieman - Michael Myers. 

So to honor the end of Spooktober, we're gonna go through Halloween and break down all the things that make this movie such a classic. And, because I can't help myself, we're gonna ask about 400 questions this movie raises, 'cause while this movie undeniably slaps, it's also 90 minutes of egregious plot holes. That's all to come. But first - a spooky trailer!

-SPOILERS AHEAD-

Let's start all the way at the beginning, when little six year old Michael kills his older sister in 1963. It's the first scene of the movie, a two-minute heart-pounder shot - for some reason - in first person. Now, at the time I'm sure this went over really well. Nowadays, it's so cheesy it's almost unbearable. Why did Carpenter decide to do this? WHY!! The arms look way too long to be those of a six year old because it's shot like this. If they wanted first-person they should've just shot the movie over his shoulder, instead of through his eyes. Shooting a movie from the eyes of a character is never a good idea. Ever.

That being said, it's an iconic opening and it leads to an even more iconic title sequence. Halloween! As if you didn't already know from the trailer where they show the title card three different times. That's a bad trailer. Anyway, most of the movie takes place in 1978, in the small Illinois town of Haddonfield, Michael's hometown. But before we can go there, we have to talk about the exposition.

For reasons that are almost entirely unclear, Michael Myer's doctor, Dr. Loomis, is going to see Michael at the psychiatric hospital he's been in for the last 15 years in the middle of the night on October 30th. It's raining and he's travelling with a security guard who doesn't seem to be very good at her job. Again, it's not totally clear why they're going to see him during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, but because it's a horror film, we let it slide.

When they pull up to the gates of the facility though, they see the inmates wandering the fields behind the fence. "Since when do they let them wander around?" the driver asks. Kind of a silly question considering we know the answer is, "They don't"; and also because I had about seventeen other questions I would've asked the second I saw a whole bunch of psychiatric patients standing idly in a field in the middle of the night, including:

• What the fuck?
• Are those the patients??
• What happened?
• Where are literally all of the hospital staff?
• Why are they just standing in the rain? Like I know they're crazy but aren't they cold?
• Why is the fence only knee high?
• And finally, WHAT THE FUCK?!

Anyway, Dr. Loomis gets out of the car and tries to open the gate. While that happens, a patient - our beloved Michael Myers - hops on the car, shatters a window with the palm of his hand (realistic), throws the driver out, and escapes in the vehicle. While this is an absolutely thrilling scene, again, I have some questions:

• How.

That's it. That's the question. How did he know their car was gonna be there at that exact time that night? How did he break out of the institution and also set everyone else free? How did he smash the window with his palm? So, he steals the car and drives over a hundred miles to Haddonfield without any navigation or stopping for gas, really, how? And how in the fuck does a man who was incarcerated at the age of six know how to drive a car?!?! Mark that last question as a major plot hole.

Moving on to the real protagonists: Lindsey, Leslie, and Anna. Or maybe it's Lauren, Annie, and Lindsey. I watched this yesterday but damn is it difficult to remember these white-ass names. Hold on, lemme check IMDb. Okay, apparently it's Laurie, Annie, and Lynda. Regardless, these three teenage girls are the real focal point of the movie. Laurie is the virgin nerd, Lynda is - in the parlance of Mommy Ripley from The Cabin in the Woods - the cheerleading "whore," and Annie is the link between them. And all of them have big, big plans for Halloween night. Those plans include babysitting, fucking, and that's about it. Unfortunately for them Michael Myers has other plans.

Most of the movie is Halloween day, before the slaughter fest to come at night. During the day we see the following things happen:

1. Laurie leaves the key to the old Myer's house under the doormat 'cause her father is gonna sell the house, and we notice that Michael is watching her from inside.
2. Laurie notices Michael dressed in his now famous garb watching her through the school window. 
3. Laurie, Lynda, and Annie walk home together, allowing the movie to (barely) pass the Bechdel test and set up their very shaky plans for the night.
4. Little Tommy, who Laurie babysits, gets hella bullied and frightened of the concept of the Boogieman. Relatable.
5. Dr. Loomis, who knows Michael is gonna go home to Haddonfield, instead goes to the graveyard where his sister is buried, only to find that her headstone is missing. This part of the story makes literally no sense at all, since Doc is constantly saying, "He's come home" and is clearly aware that Michael has his old stomping grounds in mind. It makes zero sense why the only man apparently capable of tracking this psychopath would go a graveyard instead of his old house. Why did Dr. Loomis think that Michael even knew where his sister was buried? Better yet, how did Michael know where his sister is buried?? This whole plot raises a lot of questions.
6. Annie and Laurie go for a ride in Annie's mom's car, where they smoke a joint in the least cool fashion I've ever seen. Then they pull over to talk to Annie's dad, who happens to be the town sheriff, and they somehow DON'T get caught smoking. Also makes next-to-no sense. The car would reek. It's just generally a bad idea to hotbox your parents' car, especially if one of your parents is a fucking cop.
7. We see Michael multiple times driving around town in the government vehicle he stole, following Laurie and Annie. We also see Michael watching Laurie from every angle imaginable. He seems to have a full schedule of stalking on the books for Halloween day, which doesn't leave a lot of time for grave robbing and breaking into hardware stores - two things he clearly did in the plot of the movie.

Now, before we get to Halloween evening, you're probably wondering what exactly I do enjoy about this movie. Let me be frank: all of it. The performances are great. The pulsating score of this movie was ahead of its time and is still terrifying to this day. The concept of an unkillable murderer on the loose hunting babysitters for no real reason is one of the all-time greatest movie premises. I love it all. I'm picking it apart just to make it perfectly clear that this movie is incredible despite its flaws. 

Moving on to Halloween evening. This is an absolutely incredible part of the movie because of just how superficial all of it is. It revolves entirely around Annie and Laurie babysitting across the street from each other. Annie doesn't want to be babysitting and instead wants to be getting fucked by her boy Paul, while Laurie who may or may not want to be babysitting gets no say in the matter, because she's just stuck with little Tommy, and eventually Annie's kid too. This part of the movie oscillates between phone conversations between Annie and Laurie, and Michael Myers apparently walking back and forth between the houses to spy on them. It's a lot of spooky scares, setting up the night to come, and half-assed tactics to get characters naked. And it also leads to my biggest problem with the movie.

That feeling when you spill something on yourself so you have to get entirely naked in the kitchen of the little girl you're babysitting's house.

WHERE IS EVERYBODY!!!!

Where? Seriously. Why are all of the parents in this town gone all night?? Why are NO parents home on Halloween of all nights? My mom travelled quite a bit for work when I was growing up, but I don't remember a single year where she was gone on Halloween. She was always around to either take us trick-or-treating or hand out candy. What are the odds that two households on the same block would be without any adults for the entirety of Halloween night?? They must be astronomically low. They're probably negative. There's probably a negative chance that that would ever happen, especially in this little suburban town of Haddonfield. It's not like they're working night shifts at O'Hare. Where are they?! What kind of Twilight Zone hell is this where children don't have parents after the sun sets? I love that this movie is set on Halloween, but it's utterly fucking preposterous that there aren't any parents home at any point in this film.

Allow me a minute to digress, while we check in on our good friend Dr. Loomis. What's he up to this evening? Oh? Standing outside Michael Myers' old house in hopes of catching him? For hours? Alone? After insisting that the police don't make it public news there's a murderer on the loose, he's just gonna stand out in the open for hours on end? Okay. Cool.

Back to the babysitters. After Annie gets totally naked, she decides she needs to put her clothes in the wash in the back yard's laundry room. Now, I'm not gonna hop all over the fact that their laundry room is in a separate house out back. That's actually fairly common for 1970's suburbia. But what I don't understand is this: While she's in there washing her clothes, Michael comes up and shuts the door to scare her, and the door locks. It locks. She's locked in. Which means, this door to this laundry room is on backwards. It locks from the outside without a key. You'd need a key to get out of the laundry room from within it. What the fuck is that. Either the door is on backwards or Michael Myers has a skeleton key to every door in Haddonfield. (Honestly, I'm leaning towards that latter theory. Throughout the movie doors lock and unlock seemingly at random. If a victim needs a door that was just open unlocked, it'll be locked; but, if Michael needs a locked door unlocked, it'll be open. Maybe he picked up a skeleton key at the hardware store...)

Anyway, that's enough about Halloween evening. Let's get to the good part. The sun sets. The teenagers are out and tryna fuck. Laurie is stuck with two children trying to carve a pumpkin. All of the parents of Haddonfield have vanished. You know what that means. It's KILLING TIME.

Captain Kirk, you don't look so good!

This is the part of Halloween that made it a timeless classic. The relentless butchering of teenagers. The slow stroll of Michael across the street. The panic as Dr. Loomis as realizes that even though Michael "came home" he has no idea where he actually is. The completely unnecessary nudity. The fact that Bob and Lynda show up to the house that Annie is supposed to babysitting only to find it completely empty, then they proceed to go fuck in the master bedroom, where we as an audience get the pleasure of watching Bob get on top of Lynda, (apparently) slide into her with no hands, and then finish after precisely 22.7 seconds. I timed it. It's embarrassing. All of that is why this movie is a classic.

But does it have problems? Of course. First of all this happens:

Yeah, that's Bobby hanging off the ground, pinned to a cabinet with a kitchen knife. Eh. I'm calling bs. Don't think that's possible. Then this happens:

I'm thinking a  hundred times out of a hundred that phone cord snaps out of the receiver and she doesn't get strangled to death. And then my absolute favorite thing happens:

Annie is found with Judith Myers' tombstone at the head of the bed, which means that Mike was just lugging this monster-ass piece of granite around just so he could spruce up one of his kills later. Also, there's a Jack-o'-lantern in the bedroom. When has anyone ever put a lit Jack-o'-lantern in their bedroom? 

This all leads to the slow, yet wonderful climax of the movie: Michael vs. Laurie. Laurie goes through Michael's little haunted house, encountering the bodies of her best friends. Then she takes a tumble down a flight of stairs and escapes the house as Michael lumbers slowly after her. She then makes her way next door and starts screaming and banging on the neighbor's door. 

These fucking assholes turn on the porch light and look at this bleeding girl through the blinds but don't open the door. What the fuck goes on in Haddonfield that makes these people so scared or heartless as to not open the door for this poor girl?! Ninety-nine out of a hundred times someone is banging on my door and screaming, "Help!" I answer the door. That well exceeds 100% of the time if I notice it's a teenage girl covered in blood. These people are fucking monsters. They're the true villains of the film.

Because they don't answer, Laurie is forced to go back to Tommy's house and hide with the children. Of course, this is where she has like three separate fights with Myers. In the first she stabs him in the head with a sewing needle, apparently killing him. She takes his knife, then DROPS IT, and goes upstairs. But nope, he isn't dead. He follows her upstairs. Second showdown: She hides in a closet, pokes him with a clothes hanger (really?), which causes him to drop his knife. She picks it up and stabs in the throat. He collapses, apparently dead. Again, she climbs over his body and DROPS THE KNIFE. AGAIN. But nope, he isn't dead. Obviously. He sneaks up behind her and grabs her and just when we think it's all over, Dr. Loomis - who got wise to the fact the there was screaming a block over from where he was camped and also his stolen car was parked on the side of the street - flies up the stairs and puts six shots right in Mikey's chest. Michael tumbles off the balcony and falls to his death. Except, of course, he doesn't die. Dr. Loomis looks over the ledge and his body is nowhere to be seen. Michael lives. You can't kill the Boogieman. 

Sure, I could make a big deal out of the fact that Michael should've died ten times over, but I'm not gonna. This movie works so well because he can't die. I love that about this movie. It's the perfect Halloween movie because it's so terrifying and cheesy and rewatchable. That's what makes it a classic.

So, is Halloween a long string of plot holes? Yeah.

Is it also one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Fuck yeah. That's why we love it.

I hope Halloween lives on for as long as Michael Myers does. 

But please no more POV cinematography.

Halloween KRR: 7.4/10