Every Friday night when I was about 10, my dad and I would watch “creature features,” as he referred to them, on TNT’s Monstervision, a weekly show presenting terrible commentary along with great horror classics like Friday the 13th, Motel Hell and Tremors.
By college, I’d started spending those hours reading commentary on horror-focused websites like The Terror Trap. My go-to films became realistic slash movies, like theFriday the 13th series.
I watch horror movies year-round, but they seem even more appropriate on Halloween. In honor of the holiday, 1978’s Halloween directed by John Carpenter is screening at Osio Theater at midnight Oct. 28-29 and at Century Cinemas Del Monte at 10:15pm Oct. 29.
Halloween was remade in 2007 by contemporary splatter master Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects, 31), but the remake didn’t hold up to the original due to too many obvious scares, too much blood on screen and cheesy acting. The genius of Carpenter’s film is its simplicity.
The plot is easy: After escaping from a mental hospital, a deranged Michael Myers (actor Nick Castle is listed in the credits as “The Shape”) returns to his hometown to stalk helpless babysitters, one of whom is played by a young Jamie Lee Curtis, on Halloween night. The film’s score, also done by Carpenter, is even simpler than the plot, sounding off a series of low-end piano melodies, at some points even hitting loud single notes as Myers slow-chases one teenager with a large butcher knife.
The budget for the film was a mere $300,000, and it’s grossed $47 million in the United States and $70 million worldwide, becoming one of the most profitable independent films.
Halloween, and other older classics like 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, continue to hold their own by frightening their audiences without the use of gore; the human mind runs wilder with anticipation and fear that way. If a tease is done right, our imagination will do the rest, like hearing a thud on the window in the middle of the night and thinking it’s a murderer.
Both Halloween and TCM use perceived scares, like a shadowy figure in the hallway that the character thinks is there, only to turn around and find themselves staring right at a masked figure with a sharp blade.
I’ll be watching the movie, probably alone in the dark with bad popcorn – my annual tradition. And I’ll still be jumping at the scary parts even though I’ve seen the movie too many times to count.
HALLOWEEN • Directed by John Carpenter •Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Nick Castle • Rated R • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Osio Theater