Day 31: Halloween [Horror Film Review]

Surprise, surprise.  Day 31 is Halloween.  But this shouldn't surprise anyone, because John Carpenter's Halloween really is the quintessential Halloween movie.  Not only is it the perfect movie to watch during the Halloween season, but it really is the movie that kicked off the whole slasher genre.

There were slasher films before Halloween (Black Christmas, Mario Bava's Bay of Blood, etc...), but Halloween is the first slasher film to feature a named killer with a mask.  Before that, slasher's were just normal people who at some point went crazy and started killing people.  Michael Myers is the first slasher who cannot be killed and wears a mask.  Of course, after Halloween movies like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, to name a few, came out, and they all had something in common; our masked killer now had an identity, and what made these people so terrifying is that they couldn't be killed.

An interesting fact about Halloween is that there is very little blood in the film.  Sure we see Michael Myers stab his victims to death, but if you watch closely, blood doesn't spurt from their wounds like we would see in the slasher films to come out after.  Also, when John Carpenter was showing the film to test audiences, they weren't scared.  It was after that poor screening when he added the famous soundtrack that made audiences crap their pants.

Halloween is a movie that will be shown on pretty much every channel at some point today.  It's a great horror film that inspired an entire sub-genre, and its influence can be seen is almost every horror/Halloween to come after it.  Whether you've seen Halloween once, or 100 times, watch it again, because nothing puts you in the Halloween spirit quite like Michael Myers.