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In 1978, legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael reviewed John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. She didn’t like it."HALLOWEEN has a pitiful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that's about it. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness – when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) – it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do."
Eternal respect to Ms. Kael, but what she disdained more than 40 years ago are the very elements that have made this film endure for over four decades.
HALLOWEEN might not have resembled the “sophisticated” horror films of the 1970s, but the simplicity of the film’s story and production values allowed Carpenter to focus on staying one step ahead of the audience. From Dean Cundey's flowing, blue-hued photography to Carpenter's minimalist score to the blank, ominous mask of Michael Myers, nothing in this moody, terrifying film is misplaced.
Just as BLAZING SADDLES, DIE HARD, and THE MATRIX reinvigorated their genres by satisfying in “basic, childish ways,” Carpenter created a pitch-perfect prototype in HALLOWEEN that changed an entire genre forever.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
7601 S Staples Street, Corpus Christi, TX, United States, Texas 78413
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