This movie haunted me. Who had directed this master-piece? What else had he made? I had to find out!! I found out that the brain behind this masterpiece was called John Carpenter, a chain-smoking man with long hair, tied up in a pony-tail, with a love for Ennio Morricone, who’s scores were played at Carpenter’s wedding.Boy, this man was just the kind of guy I had expected to be behind Halloween, a real horror-director, well in my eyes I have always thought that those guys looked like that, not at all like Wes Craven, who looks so friendly and nice.

I discovered Carpenter had also made The Fog, another one of my favorites. A movie that scared my friend senseless the first time he saw it! The house was placed in a desolate area. No houses for miles around. And on top of it all the house was near the woods, and it was storming outside. That movie made him so scared , that he went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, and ran to his room where he locked himself in till his parents came home. That is how scared he got watching this movie!

But I wanted to tell you about Halloween.

Well the movie is about this killer who has killed his own sister when he was only 6 years old.

We now jump 15 years forward. To see him escape from an insane Asylum where he has been locked up, since he killed his sister, now heading back to the town Haddonfield where he once lived, and where he goes on a killer-rampage to exorcise the demons (teenagers who are having sex).

The heroine in the flick is Laurie Strode( played brilliantly by Jamie Lee Curtis)--she is intelligent and a virgin (i.e., innocent). Therefore, she is allowed to live and also the one who helps save the day together with the Shape’s psychiatrist Sam Loomis (D. Pleasence).

Well that is the story told told very crudely, but then again if you are one of them who has not seen it yet, welcome back from Mars!!!

John Carpenter has always been good at filling out the wide screen frame picture, he usually works in a ratio of 2.35:1.That is why many of his films are not at all the same experience in a cropped version, but truly great in letterbox.

And Halloween is his best to date--no doubt about that. He also uses shadows and light with an incredibly skill, to make you sense that the Shape is very near. One moment there is something and in the next nothing. Carpenter plays with you through the whole movie, like a cat with a mouse. All throughout, we get the feeling that the Shape is something supernatural; he is not. He bleeds when he gets stabbed or shot, but ultimately refuses to die in the end, because like Carpenter says: Evil still exists.

Many refer to the Shape’s immortality to Psycho, which was a huge influence on the film. By letting Norman Bates’ mother live on in the madness of her son, so is Carpenter letting the Shape live on, that is why the Shape is wearing a mask--he could be anybody, a hidden identity. That is why the mask is allegedly molded after William Shatner’s face—normally considered a good guy.

Because it could easily be your friendly neighbor next door. That is why the movie still has an incredibly impact on us. It holds the same current interest today as it was 20 years ago. Although many consider The Thing to be Carpenter’s most successful work, it is Halloween that he will be most remembered by, because he took the horror film a bit further than we were used to. A great inspiration for him to make this movie was his idol and friend Dario Argento, who has made his name immortal by making the super horror film of all time, namely Suspiria.

(Again there is a huge leap from The Thing to Halloween. Many consider The Thing to be a science fiction movie, and therefore does not count as a horror film. But the alien resembles so much the monsters described by H. P. Lovecraft, that you have to think of the movie as a horror film, no matter what. For shock special effects it still has yet to be surpassed. Never has Rob Bottin used his special effects more scarier than in The Thing, and the atmosphere in the movie is absolutely great. Truly a claustrophobic classic! John Carpenter himself thinks highly of The Thing, and if you are one of those who have the DVD version of The Thing, you can hear him almost admitting that this is his best work to date. I myself think very highly of the The Thing, but it was Halloween, that draw my attention to the man behind the movie.)

The plot in the film does not make any sense, but the style in which it is made is Fabulous. Never before did a horror film look that hip and cool!

If you have ever seen Halloween on cable you would have noticed that there are some scenes in it, that was not there in the theatrical version. That’s because a movie on television had to run 90 minutes, no more, no less. Thus, Carpenter was asked to insert some more footage. The trouble was that all the useable shot footage was used in the film—there were no original extra scenes, no cut sequences lying on the cutting room floor to be used. So he had to assemble the crew once again and film some additional footage, of which he never was very proud of.

When Halloween came out in a collector’s edition a few years ago on laserdisc, you could see that extra footage. One such scene is where Dr. Loomis is standing before a board of doctors trying to keep Michael Myers locked up. That is the only memorable scene in this added footage, the rest was truly bad.

But the video version has always been the real stuff, none of that added stuff. Watch them both and decide for yourself.