John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) gave an entire generation the fright of their lives, even as it invented a new genre: the slasher. While some of the slashers this movie inspired (most notably Friday the 13th) went on to have superior sequels, the first Halloween remains the best entry in this long-running franchise. If you want to remind yourself just how good this seminal slasher really is, just grab some of your favorite candy and stream this seasonal classic for free on Plex.
The plot of Halloween is as straight and to the point as its killer’s blade: years after he murdered his sister, a young man escapes the loony bin and begins stalking the suburban jungle. He fixates on a high-school senior who just wants to get high and vibe out with her friends. But unless this escaped killer’s obsessive psychiatrist can save the day, this girl will just be one of many to be murdered by the first official slasher of the silver screen.
Welcome To The Suburban Jungle
The first Halloween was a massive hit, and it invented the modern slasher genre as we know it. That success led to more films in this gory genre, including Friday the 13th, which was designed to take the Halloween formula (specifically, having a masked killer hunt down and murder young people) out of the suburbs and into the woods. In this way, it’s fair to say that Michael Myers is the blood-spattered patriarch of later slasher villains ranging from Ghostface to Art the Clown.
Of course, Halloween’s box office success (against a tiny budget of $325,000, the film earned $70 million) meant that it became a franchise that is thriving to this day. Unfortunately, it’s hard to follow this franchise from beginning to end because there are sequels, reboots, and multiple films that tell you to ignore almost all of what came before. Each film has its own bloody strengths and weaknesses, but all these decades later, John Carpenter’s first Halloween is still the best in the entire franchise.
A Perfect Cast, Director, and Villain
The first reason the original Halloween remains the superior film is that its Michael Myers is like rage personified, a force of nature as unknowable as he is vicious. Later movies piled more and more bizarre lore on Michael, giving him a surprise sister, a sad-sack backstory, and even connections to a freaky cult. The first Halloween is free of all that, and its iconic killer is infinitely more frightening when he can simply roam the suburbs as a mysterious, masked murderer.
The second reason the first Halloween movie is a cut above the others is that it has the perfect cast, especially Donald Pleasence as the crusading Billy Loomis and Jamie Lee Curtis as horror’s most iconic final girl. Both actors would reprise these roles to diminishing returns in later franchise entries, but none of those later films had the electric cast chemistry of the first. Rob Zombie’s films are particularly miscast, though even David Gordon Greene’s newer, better reboot has deeply uneven casting that often hampers its most dramatic moments
The third reason the original Halloween movie slashed its way to the top of the franchise is that director John Carpenter gives the movie a streamlined aesthetic that helps make Michael Myers so terrifying. Our crazed killer peering from the bushes, for example, feels like a profoundly intimate violation, with Myers forcing his way into the cozy spaces of a city that thought it was safe. Long before he started sliding his blade into hapless babysitters, he slid into our collective consciousness as a reminder that nowhere (even the coziest depths of suburbia) was ever truly safe from the most brutal depravities.
A Movie So Good It Hurt the Franchise
Ironically enough, the Halloween franchise is a victim of the first film’s success. Other movies in this series (most notably John Carpenter’s Halloween 2, H20, and the first David Gordon Green Halloween) are perfectly serviceable horror films with moments of subversive brilliance. But none of them ever really came close to the sublime appeal of the first film, a movie which created the world’s scariest killer and then put us in his shoes with pioneering POV shots.
It all holds up, too: if anything, Michael Myers’ first outing is more frightening than ever before. Carpenter uses a minimalistic approach that effectively showcases this villain as a larger-than-life invention of modern cinema. He’s a new kind of villain, but one who represents the modern fear of everyone in a small town: that the chaos and violence of city life cannot, and will not, be kept at bay forever.
Don’t believe that the first Halloween is the best in the franchise? Or maybe you just want to revisit the glory days of the modern slasher? Either way, it’s time to give yourself a very tricky treat and stream this John Carpenter classic for free on Plex.
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