Halloween. 1978.
As with most of these films, I’ve only seen them on VHS before. Man, the blu-ray transfers look fine. (And all of John Carpenter’s films seem to be available on blu-ray, which is pretty impressive (commercially) for a director.) The movie may have had a small budget, but Carpenter didn’t skimp on the film stock quality.
Aaaanyway. This is the film that started the slasher movie genre, I guess? All the tropes are here in the ur-text: If you have sex, you die; the unkillable semi-supernatural monster; the girl who survives. And the boobs, of course.
But what surprised me most here was how little I was affected. I scare easily, but long stretches of this I was just sitting here wondering why it’s not more scary. Part of the problem may be the sometimes totally cliched cinematography: The camera slides across the room and stops with the phone in the right-hand corner, and the phone then rings. It’s just kinda boring and “professional”.
This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.