Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)Adam & Sam's take (starts at 49:38)This got off to a pretty great start, with that long PoV scene : tense, well-executed with a great twist to top it off. I thought I was in good hands.
And then the next hour happened. During that hour, basically every scene follows the same pattern : we have characters doing their things, that iconic music starts playing and we see something that's supposed to be scary : generally the villain just standing around in the background, but sometimes it's a corpse or a car following them. But... it's so on-the-nose, so in your face that it doesn't work at all for me. It's the cinematic equivalent of Carpenter shouting "HE'S GOING TO KILL THEM, SEE ?" for 60 minutes, and... I wasn't scared, I wasn't thrilled, I wasn't even tense, I was just bored and mildly amused at the dull repetition of it. Even the music, which I loved initially, got tiring as it went on. I'm not sure what it is exactly, because theoretically I'm fully on-board : building up a quiet sense of dread seems like the way to do it but... Carpenter either shows too much or not enough of the villain I think. There's no room for me to imagine anything super scary, and what I'm seeing isn't that scary by itself, it's just a guy.
In the middle of all that, we have the good ol' sex=death theme. I'm guessing Halloween is the template for future slasher movies in that regard, but that doesn't make it any better. It manages to be both puritanically patronizing (if you want to live, you should knit, care for children and never have sex because that's a woman's place) and shamelessly exploitative, because how can we enjoy the deaths if they don't see some boobies beforehand ? I say "boobies" because every sex scene appeared to have been written by a 10-year old, adding to the uncomfortableness of the whole sex=death thing.
And then the last 20 minutes or so happened. It wasn't quite enough to fully redeem the movie, but I got then why this movie became a cult classic. Once we get to a character who fights back, and the villain actually chases her rather than just standing creepily behind her 5 times before quickly stabbing/strangling his victim, the movie does get thrilling and suspenseful. The fantastical aspect of the bogeyman who can never die is also an interesting turn, and that series of shots of the different locations just after he disappears, implying that there are no safe places anymore, is chilling and effective. I just wish the film overall had more of that.
4/10