Halloween

John Carpenter’s 91 minute film brings Michael Myers back to Haddonfield fifteen years after he killed his sister at six. The first murder is shot through the eye holes of a clown mask, and whose eyes they are stays hidden until the scene ends. Haddonfield is really South Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Hollywood, shot in twenty days in May 1978. Pumpkins were scarce in spring and the autumn leaves were artificial, swept up after each setup and reused. Michael wears a Captain Kirk mask bought for under two dollars, painted white with its eye holes cut wider. Carpenter wrote the score himself. A studio executive watched a cut without music and found it not frightening, so he composed the 5/4 theme in two weeks. That explains the mechanism: sound names the danger before the picture does, while Michael holds at the back of the shot, out of focus and still. It is Jamie Lee Curtis’s first feature; producer Irwin Yablans said her mother Janet Leigh’s role in Psycho was why she was cast. A good fit if you can wait while the threat stands at the back of the frame and the music, not the image, carries the fear. Not for you if you want wounds and blood: Carpenter keeps the violence just outside the cut.