MAGNET’s Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
Halloween (1978, 91 minutes)
A jet-black screen is illuminated only by a bright orange, round-eyed jack-o-lantern on the left. The knife has slipped from carving the nose hole, leaving a slit down into a gap-toothed mouth. Director John Carpenter’s creepy two-fingered piano theme music begins to turn your brain into pumpkin mush as each credit changes from dull orange to blood red, and the jack-o-lantern gets larger and larger.
It’s Halloween, 1963 in Haddonfield, Ill. A couple of teenagers are seen through the eyes of a peeping tom, making out on a sofa. “We are alone, aren’t we?” asks the boy. “Michael’s around here some place,” answers the girl. “Let’s go upstairs,” urges the boy. The voyeur outside walks through the wide-open kitchen door, takes a large chef’s knife from a drawer and slips a mask over his face. Buttoning his shirt, the teenage boy slinks downstairs. “Will you call me tomorrow?” asks the girl. “Yeah, sure,” says the boy, opening the front door. “Michael!” shrieks the half-naked girl from her bedroom as the intruder raises the knife again and again. Mom and dad pull into the driveway to find a six-year-old boy in a clown suit and mask standing out front, holding a bloody knife. “Michael?” says his dad.
Seventeen years later, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and a nurse have driven to an Illinois mental institution on a rainy night to pick up Loomis’ patient, that same Michael Myers. “Try to understand what we’re dealing with here—don’t underestimate it,” warns Loomis. “Don’t you think we could refer to ‘it’ as ‘him?'” scolds the nurse. As Loomis opens the front gate, a white-gowned patient leaps onto the doctor’s station wagon, gets inside and drives off, leaving the nurse sprawled on the pavement. “He’s gone. The evil is gone!” moans Loomis.
“You’ve got to tell the Haddonfield police exactly who walked out of here last night and where he’s going,” screams Loomis the next morning at the hospital’s director. “Haddonfield is 150 miles away, Sam. For god’s sake, he can’t even drive a car!” reasons the director. “He was doing very well last night!” shouts Loomis. “Maybe someone around here gave him lessons.”
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a studious teenager, has been asked by her dad, a realtor, to hide the keys to the Meyers house under the door mat on her way to Haddonfield high school. He has a potential buyer for the long-abandoned property. As she ascends the porch steps, she fails to notice someone lurking inside the house.
Loomis and the groundskeeper of the Haddonfield cemetery are looking for a particular gravesite. “Judith Myers, row 18, plot 20,” mutters the attendant. “God damn kids! They’ll do anything for Halloween,” he complains, noticing Judith Myers’ headstone has disappeared. “He came home!” declares a thoroughly frightened Loomis.
