re: Am I missing something with the original Halloween?

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Holy wall of text Batman

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Michael was trying to one-up Jason

Jason GOAT

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Freddy is the GOAT.

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Are you really this stupid? Watch it at home. Turn out the lights, don’t start talking about your day or doing dishes Moron

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Or just go back to 1978, and watch it in any theater. They'll all be devoid of today's pr*cks that can't behave in public.

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Am I missing something with the original Halloween?

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No. It's not what you're missing, it's what you've seen. You've seen 40 years of slasher movies that came to be because of this movie. It's been done so many times that watching this now may not have as much of an impact.

I was in I think 3rd grade when I saw this for the first time. It was the first slasher movie I had ever seen. I had nightmares about the mask for awhile after I saw it. So it had a big impact on me.

At the time this was made, there wasn't anything like it out there. There was Psycho and Black Christmas, but this was the first time a true iconic killer was created. Leatherface is somewhat iconic, but TCM was a different kind of movie. Michael Myers was an unstoppable killing force that would not go down. He looked awesome with his white mask. He had immense strength and hid in the shadows. It was the first time a killer this cool had been created. He became iconic. And it was imitated to death after.

On top of this, it had a Halloween setting which had a lot of appeal. The target audience was teenagers and they related to it. A bad arse killer who escaped from a mental institution was going around killing baby sitters on Halloween lol. What's not to love with this movie?

So yeah, watching it now, it doesn't have that kind of impact. You'd have to erase 40 years of movie viewing for that to even come close to being possible. But it damn sure was something new and exciting at the time.

Halloween has a lot of things going for it. Great setting (middle upper class neighborhood during Halloween), believable (yet cliche) characters, small cast (works to the films advantage), and the most important factor...the tension build up and the audience knowing Michael is out there yet many times through out are just as clueless as the Laurie about where Michael could be hiding...the lighting inside the houses is amazing...so many shadows he could pop out at anytime from really keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The musical score. I watched the documentary about the making of this movie and ithe first run for an audience of critics was a chorus of bad reviews. It was shown without the music. Carpenter added the intense piano/ synthesizer as a last ditch effort to win approval and showed it again to the same audience. Everyone who lambasted it after the music less run claimed it scared the shite out of them after the score was added. It opened in a small amount of theatres and word of mouth made it a box office hit in short order. More than anything, the music score makes it the greatest of all time.

I havent watched Halloween in a few years, but because of the podcast, I decided to sit down and watch it last night with my girlfriend. She had never seen it, and she got up about a hour into it and said it was absolutely terrible. She also hated The Witch and It Follows, so no one should listen to her opinion on horror movies. She cant understand a slow burn or how music and shots are framed to create tension. No demons are jumping out and scaring you, so she cant comprehend something like that being scary.

My biggest complaint is how they had multiple instances of people sneaking up on each other as basically a greeting

Holy block of text, Batman.