Why Halloween Still Gets Under My Skin After All This Time

What actually makes a horror film hold up for the best part of fifty years, when most of what scared us five years ago already looks a bit silly? I sat down and properly watched Halloween again this week, the whole thing, no phone in hand, and I came away thinking it should not still work as well as it does. It is older than the idea of streaming a film on a Tuesday night. And yet.

It never once rushes

The thing that gets me every time is how patient it is. Michael Myers does not run. He does not need to. He simply appears in the edge of a shot, standing somewhere he was not standing a moment ago, and the film trusts you to notice. Most horror films now would cut to a jump scare within about four seconds of that shot existing. This one just lets him stand there, and lets your own brain do the work of being frightened. That is a much harder trick to pull off than a loud noise, and it is the reason a mask, a boiler suit and a kitchen knife are somehow still one of the most effective things ever put in a horror film.

A theme tune that does half the job for free

John Carpenter wrote the score himself, and it is barely more than a simple, repeating piano line, but it does an enormous amount of quiet work. It tells you something is wrong before anything on screen confirms it. I would go as far as saying you could play the theme over a completely ordinary video of someone doing their washing up and it would still feel like the start of a horror film. That is the sort of thing you cannot fake with a bigger budget. It either works or it does not, and this one works.

The babysitter film everyone since has tried to copy

Laurie Strode is an ordinary teenager on an ordinary street, and that is precisely the point. The horror does not come from a haunted house or a curse, it comes from the idea that something can go badly wrong on the most unremarkable night in the most unremarkable neighbourhood, while you are meant to be doing something as dull as looking after the house next door. Every slasher film that came after this one borrowed that setup. Not many of them understood why it worked in the first place, which is probably why so many of them are forgettable and this one is not.

Worth having on the shelf properly

I have watched it through a slightly rough streaming copy before now, and it does the job, but a film built this much on shadow and framing deserves better than a compressed stream on a night when the picture keeps dropping at the worst moment. I have decided this is the year I actually own a proper copy instead of hunting for it every October, ideally a set with a clean transfer and enough extras to make it worth the space on the shelf Halloween (1978) Blu-ray box set.

So that is my case for it. Not the goriest film I own, not the most shocking, but forty-odd years on it is still one of the very few horror films that can make an empty hallway feel like a genuine threat. Tell me honestly, is this one already in your spooky season line-up, or have you never actually sat through the whole thing?

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