Ethan's Reviews > Halloween

Loomis looked at him with a directness that made Brackett extremely uncomfortable.
"I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring through the walls, if you can understand that, staring through the walls and seeing this night. He's waited for it, planned for it, focused his life on it. He's inhumanly patient. Hour after hour, day after day, waiting for some silent, invisible alarm to trigger him -- a voice to tell him the time has come, a gauge to tell him his blood has begun to boil. Death has arrived in your little town, Sheriff. You can ignore it, or you can help me stop it."

John Carpenter's classic 1978 film Halloween, is, simply put, the greatest horror movie ever made. It set the standard for all modern horror films, and holds up incredibly well even today as a wonderfully terrifying and atmospheric experience. I recently watched an episode of the Netflix series The Movies That Made Us on the background and making of this iconic film (Season 3, Episode 1, if you're interested), where I learned several interesting details about the movie that I didn't know, like how Donald Pleasence (what an incredible actor; may he rest in peace) hated that he had to be in the movie, and sometimes drank entire bottles of wine and showed up to shoot scenes for Carpenter in an inebriated state.

The film was made on an incredibly small budget of $300,000 USD, at a time when other higher profile films had budgets of $15 million and up, and none of the big film studios were interested in making it, resulting in it being independently produced and distributed. It went on to become an unexpected box office sensation, grossing $70 million and going on to spawn an entire franchise that will stand at thirteen films in 2022 when Halloween Ends is released.

The book, Halloween, is author Curtis Richards' 1979 novelization of the movie. It's become rare, and at the time of this writing online sellers are asking anywhere from $500 to over $1200 for a copy, which to me is absolutely crazy. If you can find a cheap copy of it, however, definitely pick it up, because it's an amazing book. Richards manages to brilliantly reconstruct the constant atmosphere of dread present in the movie. The insight into what is going on inside Michael Myers' head and the placement of the story into Michael Myers' perspective when he stalks his prey combine to add a chilling additional layer to the experience that you don't get from the film.

I also thought the main and secondary characters were all very well-developed, and particularly admired the excellent and thorough job Richards did of giving Laurie, Linda, and Annie their own unique quirks and personalities. I rarely see such great characterization in books of this brevity (it's only 168 pages long), and have not seen it before in any of the other movie novelizations I've read to date (though, admittedly, that's not very many).

You can definitely see how this film set the standard for horror movies that came after it, because all the old slasher movie tropes are here, and in abundance: the attractive, often helpless and dull-witted teenage slasher victims who try to have sex every chance they can, individuals leaving the group for one reason or another and getting killed, the seemingly invincible killer lurking in the shadows, seldom seen but slowly picking off the victims one by one. It's all here!

Though it may have set a standard for future films, I did find the sex-crazed-teenager thing to be wildly overdone in this book. I mean, did babysitting girls in 1970s Illinois really try to sneak their boyfriends into the houses of kids they were babysitting after the kids went to bed, every chance they got, so they could have sex while the children slept? That seems a little unlikely. All the teenagers in this book ever talk about, think about, and joke about is sex. Given that Haddonfield was otherwise painted by the author as a wholesome Midwestern American town, this level of debauchery felt a little incongruous.

The biggest highlight of this book, in my opinion, is the backstory provided to explain why Michael Myers is a murdering psychopath in the first place, which is not provided in the film. It permeates the novel, is wonderfully done, and provides a richer experience of the story.

If you see a cheap copy of this book in a shop somewhere, don't hesitate to pick it up; you'll likely never see another one. It's a phenomenal complement to and expansion of the film, a great horror novel in its own right, and well worth reading. It's one of the best books I've read this year.

Highly recommended!