Mocking Halloween: Halloween

It was only a matter of time before I came around to talking about John Carpenter’s masterpiece horror film Halloween. It has stood the test of time and is considered to be the greatest Halloween film in history as well as one of the greatest horror movies of the past 50 years. It made history and it made its mark on cinema. The story is simple, an escaped psychopathic killer returns to his hometown to finish what he started when he was just a little boy. You see, as a kid he killed his sister with a knife and he was about to do the same to his baby sister until the cops intervened. Now, his baby sister is all grown up and is in high school and living with her foster parents… little does she know a hardened killer is after her. What can I possibly say about this movie? There is nothing bad to report on it. Everything about it is done so well and there is a strong sense of tension but… I often found myself asking the question: is this movie really that scary nowadays?

Sure, to most senior horror fans this movie will always be scary for them and while they are over their childhood fears they’ll always remember how freaked out they were when they saw Michael’s mask but that’s just it. The film is nowhere near as scary as it was when it first came out and probably rightfully so. To call is frightening is a huge stretch unless you are talking to a group of kids between the ages of 7 and 13. It’s rather sad but true. Kids these days are being exposed to so much more brutal things on the TV or on the Internet that they wouldn’t find Halloween to be scary at all but rather boring. I believe I am part of the last generation of kids that would truly find this movie frightening in all its aspects. Even though Zombie remade the film for modern audiences he completely bypassed everything else that was good about the original so for me, a true remake of the film has never been done.

I’m sure Halloween will continue to be classic in the film world as long as there are people who truly admire the film and/or were once afraid of the film. If that stays with it’s audience than we can be sure that Halloween will be popular in the many years to come. However, I believe that within the next 50 or so years, it will be seen as a campy movie (or a cult classic) than being just a classic. The film has a huge fanbase and those fans are introducing their kids to it as soon as possible and maybe that’s the way you preserve the film’s horrific beauty.

Yeah, it turned into a rant rather than mocking the movie. Oh well.