Halloween

Halloween is the most efficient horror film ever made and almost all of its effects are free.

Carpenter had three hundred thousand dollars and no stars, so he built the film out of things that cost nothing: a Panaglide camera that drifts, anamorphic widescreen with far too much empty space in it, a mask bought for a dollar and ninety-eight cents, and a score he wrote himself in three days because the first cut tested badly without one. The famous piano figure is in 5/4, which is why it never settles.

What the money bought is patience. Michael stands in frames for long stretches doing nothing — behind a hedge, at the end of a street, in a doorway Laurie has already looked at. The film trains the audience to search the background, and then puts him there, in focus, in the middle distance, with no sting on the soundtrack. Nothing in the subsequent forty years of slashers understood that the waiting was the mechanism.

The mask is the whole character

Carpenter's crew modified a Captain Kirk mask — widened the eyes, sprayed it white, teased the hair — and the result works because it is almost expressionless rather than frightening. It reads as a blank, and a blank is where an audience puts its own content. Michael has no dialogue, no motive the film endorses, and his face is seen for two seconds. Dr Loomis insists he is pure evil; the film declines to confirm or deny it.

Jamie Lee Curtis and the other thing people get wrong

Laurie Strode is not a passive victim. She fights, improvises, uses a knitting needle and a coat hanger, and gets her two charges out of the house. The genre's later habit of punishing its women is not in this film. What is in it, and has aged badly, is Loomis's psychiatry — the same problem Psycho has, played straighter.

Where it shows its budget

The Illinois autumn is visibly California. Some of the suburban extras are stiff. And the first act is slow in a way that modern audiences read as nothing happening, which is precisely the thing doing the work.

For the same patience without the franchise, It Follows is the direct inheritance; for the same shape with the opposite attitude, Scream is the film that took it apart.

The short answer: Michael is not killed. Laurie stabs him with a knitting needle, a coat hanger and a kitchen knife, and Loomis shoots him six times off a balcony. When Loomis looks down, the body is gone. The film closes on empty rooms — the Doyle house, the Wallace house, the street — over Michael's breathing, which is the only thing left on the soundtrack.

Why does Michael survive being shot six times?

The film offers no explanation and that is the choice. Loomis has spent the film insisting that Michael is not a man but something else, and the ending is the only evidence he ever gets. Carpenter has described it as leaving the question open rather than establishing a rule — the sequels invented the Thorn curse and the family mythology, none of which is in this film.

What do the final shots mean?

The closing montage shows the rooms Michael has been in, all empty, with his breathing over them. It relocates the threat from a person to a place: he is not in a specific room, he is in all of them, in the ordinary suburb the film has spent ninety minutes making unsafe. It is the most imitated ending in the genre and almost nobody matches its restraint.

Who is Michael Myers to Laurie?

In this film, nobody. They are not related. Laurie is simply the girl who dropped a key at his house that morning, and the film's logic is that his attention is arbitrary — which is far worse than a reason. The sibling relationship is invented by Halloween II in 1981 and has been retconned in and out ever since.

Why does Michael kill his sister at the start?

The film never says. The prologue is a single long Panaglide shot from his point of view: a six-year-old picks up a knife and kills his teenage sister, then stands in the drive while his parents remove the mask. No motive, no provocation, no trauma offered. Loomis's "pure evil" is a man failing to explain it, not the film explaining it.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Era bias 008 is deep analog — only 9 works score lower. Anamorphic 1978 Panavision, a synthesiser score recorded in days, and an autumn palette that is entirely practical.

Viscera 022 is very low — 21 works score lower. There is almost no blood in Halloween. Five deaths, most of them off-frame or bloodless, and the film that founded the slasher is one of the least explicit in the index.

Pace 052 sits just on the shock side, with 71 works slower — which misrepresents the structure. The first hour is almost entirely dread; the last thirty minutes are the chase.

The threat at 062 leans human. 83 works score lower. Michael is a man in a mask until the final minute, at which point the film quietly stops insisting on it.

Tone 030 is less bleak than the genre it created — 77 works score lower. Laurie lives, the children live, and the film is not interested in punishing anybody.

Reality anchor 020 is grounded — only 6 works score lower. One suburb, one night, one man walking.

On jump scares: three, and all of them earned — the closet, the shape sitting up, the hand.