Some of you guys really nailed my thoughts though, about this being a proto-horror or really a proto-slasher film. As SPX aptly pointed out, we don't see Michael claim his first human victim for almost an hour. It's even more intriguing to me that he's credited as The Shape, and not Michael Myers or Michael or something. It makes me wonder if they thought they were going to do more of these, or if they were going to go for that anthology and make it a different villain each time so the name does not matter as much.
The villain really fascinated me in this story, because his backstory is almost nonexistent. The beginning of the movie, we see a boy kill his sister with a knife while wearing a mask and clown suit, and don't make the connection until later that the little boy grew up and turned into that killer. He killed because...he wanted to, I guess. That was all we needed. He came back to his ancestral home to kill the people who took his old house over, and that's about it. We didn't have a chance to humanize him, or rationalize his killings, or even remotely root for him. He was the ultimate evil, and his silence and indestructible nature and unstoppable force said everything. He was in a way the perfect killing machine, in that he couldn't be stopped for long, and he could do whatever he needed to do to serve that singular purpose.
It's still strange seeing Jamie Lee Curtis in this, given that for the next 20+ years she barely aged at all. Other than her grey short cropped hair, she looks way younger than she is now (which is almost 60). She was actually a teenager in this, and it's amusing to hear how her voice basically hasn't changed at all either. I guess I should ask - is True Lies Jamie Lee Curtis the GOAT Jamie Lee Curtis? Or is it Fish Called Wanda JLC? Freaky Friday JLC? Something else?
Jamie Lee Curtis and her character Laurie really brought to the forefront the concept of the Final Girl in horror films. It would be the girl that is morally pure, sometimes virginal if that comes up (as it tends to in horror movies, as the couple that gets it on tends to die early on). She overcomes everything and changes to become a different person, much stronger and usually capable of performing the "killing" blow on the villain. As we know from these series however, the killing blow is usually just the blow that stops the villain for the time being, until they can come back surprisingly for a sequel. Sometimes, they even do perform the killing blow that no villain human, dead or undead, could possibly withstand, and then the supernatural stuff or otherwise groanworthy stuff happens. Without going into spoilers, at least one Friday the 13th sequel revives the villain with some more ridiculous means. By then, the series embraced the camp and it was all over (or perhaps it had just begun...?) The sequels have a strange effect on how you view the original film, and having finally seen every Halloween sequel last year, watching Halloween again with my knowledge of the character and their relationship and other dynamics, it made this one feel almost tame.
Retcons and the series itself deserve a small amount of discussion, not a lot though given that most of you probably haven't sat through all seven sequels and the remake and its sequel as well. They really tried to put a story around this, and no I won't touch the Rob Zombie remake and its sequel, they can stay away. The main series though, suffered a great deal of transformations including the "Laurie is Michael's sister" bit as well as Laurie getting killed and then not killed, and Michael getting his head chopped off but nope that was actually a retcon as well. They found they could keep churning these things out for 5 million bucks and make 20 out of them. It's kind of like the Friday the 13th series, and I had a whole bit ready in case we got into those, but nope.
Compared to other horror films, and the bloody rival series I keep mentioning, this film was relatively tame. A little nudity, some blood and stabs, and a whole lot of tension. It wasn't about seeing the brutality, it was about anticipating what was to come. It's why SPX's trivia piece about people seeing the face of Myers and freaking out despite it being just a normal looking guy, perceiving the character as a monster and seeing his monstrous appearance, makes so much sense. We have to remember, there were other significant horror/killer movies back in 78 for sure, like Texas Chainsaw, Psycho, and Black Christmas, but they hadn't yet experienced the explosion and oversaturation of all these pictures.
This film was terrifying for its audience, because it hadn't been pummeled with graphic murder and horror that has desensitized us today. Think of the worst of the worst horror films you've seen - the Salos, Serbians, Hostels and Auditions of the world, and how if those films were aired in the late 70s, they would have been shut down. We actually have an example in the one I mentioned, Salo, or the 120 days of Sodom. I believe it was nominated in the club but didn't win - it came out in 75. It had a limited release, but people were far and wide not ready for something like that, so it tanked. If it were to have come out now, it would have been just another odd foreign language torture porn that people would have compared to the latest Eli Roth grindhouse flick.
8/10. I wouldn't go so far to say it's a classic (although it wouldn't be a stretch) but it definitely could be considered as the beginning of the golden age of horror films.
