Halloween is about the baby sister of a known serial killer, Michael Meyers, and her naivity to the story. In the film Michael Meyers murders his whole family with the exception of baby sister Laurie. Laurie grows up in an adopted family and spends her Halloween babysitting like the rest of her friends. Michael escapes from a sanitarium that night and stalks all the baby sitters killing them one by one until a final showdown with Laurie.
John Carpenter’s Halloween is an absolutely excellent horror film. It personifies evil in such a way that it is even more frightening after you leave the theatre. Carpenter imagines evil as Michael Meyers, and truly horrifies the audience by portraying true evil as something that cannot be run from, some faceless emotionless entity that secretly stalks you and prays when you’re least expecting. I still think about the scene where Michael kills Bob by pinning a knife into his chest against a door and just silently watches him dangle there. I believe this scene captures the essence of Michael, that his pure evil is a form of curiosity rather than a lust of blood, and that makes it more terrifying. The idea of evil for no reason other than to exist is a scary existential thought that Carpenter perfectly captured and still resonates with me today. I still remember seeing it as a 10 year old child , it was my first rated-R movie, and I constantly looked over my shoulder and out of windows for a good month horrified that I would see that emotionless white mask just waiting for me to drop my guard.
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