It’s my favorite time of year once again, and I thought I’d celebrate by sharing some of my favorite scary movies. These are the ones that got under my skin and haunted my dreams. You’ll recognize some of them; some of them might be more obscure. But if you’re looking to be genuinely creeped out this Halloween, permit me to suggest the following:
We’ll start with the obvious: John Carpenter’s classic Halloween.
Though made on a shoestring budget, it became such a spectacular success that it kicked off a tsunami of cheap slasher flicks in the 80’s. Before Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, kids, there was Michael Myers. But despite the bloody excesses of its many imitators, the original Halloween was not a gorefest. It was instead a highly suspenseful film, expertly blending Hitchcockian technique with a smart script and a simple but unforgettably haunting score.
A lot of horror movies wink at their audiences, privileging humor and cleverness over genuine scares. Scream–which, like so many others, owes a huge debt to John Carpenter–comes to mind as a film that’s too clever by half. Not so Halloween. The brilliant opening sequence, shot from the killer’s point of view until he is unmasked, serves as a declaration of intent: this movie wants to scare the shit out of you. No, this isn’t going to be fun. It’s going to be terrifying.
Michael Myers was the first Unkillable Bad Guy, and still the best. As The Dark Knight did with the Joker, Halloween never makes any attempt to explain its villain (though subsequent films in the series made the mistake of doing so), and this made him all the more frightening. Michael Myers isn’t an abused child. He isn’t a lonely outcast. He isn’t misunderstood. He simply is.
He’s not even human. His psychiatrist, played by Donald Pleasence, correctly refers to him as it. Michael Myers is a malevolent force of nature. And he’s out there right now. And he’s coming for you.
“It was the boogeyman,” Jamie Lee Curtis says at film’s end.
“As a matter of fact,” Pleasence replies, “it was.”
Yeah. It really was.
