Thomas’s review published on Letterboxd:
Finally, I found the time to watch this legendary horror movie, which is called one of the founders of the slasher genre (though this movie features more choking than slashing).
To quickly summarize the plot: Fifteen years after murdering his sister, Michael Myers escapes from the sanitarium and returns to his hometown Haddonfield, Illinois, where he starts a killing spree, targeting teenagers. The heroes of the story are teenage babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers´ psychiatrist Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who pursued the killer after his escape.
Positive points:
-one of the most iconic movie scores of all time
-great cinematography throughout the movie (especially during the first scene, which is shot from the first-person perspective of a six-years old Michael Myers)
-First appearance of Michael Myers, one of the most famous horror movie characters of all time. John Carpenter is not interested in the psychology of his antagonist. Michael Myers is pure evil. Because of his total lack of empathy, his muteness, his superhuman strength and endurance as well as his apparent ability to “teleport”, he seems more like a supernatural monster than a real human being and is certainly terrifying.
Negative points:
-much too slow for my taste. We have to wait roughly an hour until we see the first on-screen kill after Myers´ escape.
-this wouldn´t be so bad, if this long buildup would make me feel for the characters, but at least for me, this doesn´t happen. So, instead of getting scared, I watch teenagers that I don´t care about talk about things that don´t interest me. Therefore, I am also not emotionally moved, when they die.
-the kills themselves look more funny than terrifying.
While I certainly appreciate “Halloween” as a horror classic, it didn´t work for me in 2018. For the most part I was more bored than scared.
