Nitpicking Halloween 1978 (for fun)

Michael-Myers.net General Discussion
1

As great as this movie is, it’s fun to nitpick certain things about it. We all love the original, we’ve seen it so many times, so it’s nice to have a sense of humor about it, because after all, no movie is perfect. I’m watching it right now, really critiquing it like cinemasins would do, and here’s just a few things I’ve noticed so far.

-That’s like the fastest time for sex I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, Judith and her bf get done in like 2 minutes. And he seems pretty happy about it when he leaves (look at that fucking smile as he leaves the house lol). So maybe…he just sucks, doesn’t realize it, and she never says anything to him? Very odd, the whole situation.

-No way Michael is actually stabbing Judith. The whole angle of the camera when he stabs her is just…weird.

-Why does Michael’s parents just stand there looking at him holding a bloody knife? It’s as if they’re waiting for “CUT!” the entire time. It’s pretty funny if you watch his parents the whole time the camera zooms out. They’re literally just standing there.

-The Michael that escapes from Smith’s Grove looks, acts and moves nothing like the Michael from the rest of the movie. He just looks like a regular skinny dude, not threatening at all, and that “palm into the car window” moment looks old school even for 1978. In fact that whole scene is kind of…weird, isn’t it? It’s paced so oddly and doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie.

-HE WAS DOING VERY WELL LAST NIGHT!!! (best line in the movie, Loomis is gold)

-Does Tommy not realize that there’s a car that slows down almost to a full stop next to him with a guy in a creepy ass white mask looking directly at him? I mean it’s literally like 10 feet close to him.

-In that same scene…in 1978 did people think of the camera angle as “there’s a guy in the back seat holding a camera”? Or did they not think of it as a person and bought into the “movie” aspect of it just being a camera angle? Because all I can think about when I watch that scene is that Michael is filming his adventure and his assistant is in the back seat filming everything.

-In the scene where Laurie, Annie and Linda are walking home from school, the part where Laurie sees Michael in the car, Linda is talking about the books that she forgets or something, and it’s clearly obvious that when the music picks up and the scene focuses on only Myers, that Linda’s lines are just filler dialogue that you’re not meant to hear “like my chemistry book, my math book, I mean who needs books anyway, they’re just books” (or something like that). It sounds like a line that they came up with to fill the background with chatter, because it sounds like she’s talking about nothing and that there’s no point to it, even in casual conversation. Even the way she says the lines, it’s like no effort.

-When Laurie and Annie are smoking weed in the car, Annie tells Laurie to stop coughing so that her dad doesn’t know they smoked it. And then seconds later they pull up to him and he sticks his head down in front of the passenger window. Um…wouldn’t he smell it? Actually yes he would. I know for a 100% fact that he would.

-In that same scene Annie’s dad mentions that the “thief” stole “A mask, some rope, and a couple of knives…probably just a halloween prank”. Yeah…a halloween prank involving a mask, rope, and some knives. No big deal. Lol.


Feel free to come up with your own!

2

Different times, and a lot of it is being read into too much

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It’s just for fun man. I’m having a good time with this. I’ve seen this movie so many times, it’s definitely a classic, I’m just having a good time by pointing out some humor in it. Can’t we all have some fun?

4

does anyone know what Michael did with the rope

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Didn’t Linda’s dead body have it when Laurie sees her? Or was it someone else’s body? Maybe Bob’s? Annie’s?

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I was thinking it may be Bob as he was hanging from the ceiling, but I wasn’t sure.

7

How about Michael having the foresight to prop a friggin rake of all things against the outside of the back door so Laurie couldn’t escape the home lol. That’s the one that always got me, even as a kid

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The only one that has ever really stood out bad to me is when Laurie and Annie are smoking weed in the car. She flips out about her dad finding out and then drives right up to him. It’s not like he was out in the street patrolling looking for her to drive by. They coulda drove right past and he woulda never even known they were there.


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Cinemasins actually did one for the original Halloween. It’s pretty amusing.

Honestly the thing I don’t understand now is how he got caught after the ending. Like he disappears and then he just magically gets caught and put into captivity for 40 years now?

10

Many of those things you listed have been mentioned many times over the years, but just wanted to address a couple of them. First, when Michael steals the station wagon, you say he looks skinny and not intimidating. The reason in reality is because that was Nick Castle, who was skinny at the time, but more importantly, that’s part of the genius of Michael in the first 2 movies. He doesn’t look like a huge 7 foot tall beast like Jason. He’s not supposed to. He just looks like any other average guy would, which is FAR more terrifying because think about it…if you walk down the street on Halloween and pass by an average sized guy dressed in coveralls and a mask, you think nothing of it, but if you pass by a 7 foot tall guy in the same outfit, you take notice, but only because of his size. What you don’t know however, is that when you walked past that average sized guy, you just walked past pure evil incarnate…but no one would be the wiser to that…again, infinitely more terrifying than a lumbering brute would ever be.

And for the next point I want to address, the camera in the back seat. In a commentary of the movie with Jamie Lee and John Carpenter, he mentioned that camera angle was very unusual for the time, and I think it not only looks very different (in a good way), but it also makes you feel like you are there in the car with them, which makes you feel more vulnerable along with with them. My point is this…nitpick Halloween 1978 all you want, but it is a brilliant film.
EDIT: I apologize for the “rant”, but I’m just so passionate about this film :laughing:

11

You can see a wrench in Michael’s hand when he breaks the window.
That one post about the rake was one of my thoughts as well…how does he sound like he’s upstairs, sneak down and put the rake there, and maybe come in through the front door? Just in time to hide in the hallway! Ha
The whole smoking scene was goofy like you guys said; I would’ve rolled the windows down well before I pulled up on him …it literally hit him in the face!
Then there is the door knob on Tommy’s door…it’s opposite from when she’s banging on the door to when he opens it.

It’s all good …love every minute of it anyhow

12

I’m pretty sure her dad knows her car lol. He definitely saw them. Yeah they could have driven by, but 17 year old girl’s mindset is “if I don’t say hi I’m gonna hear about it later”.

13

I was actually thinking about this too. When did he get captured? It feels like we’re missing a middle chapter in there somewhere. The only thing I can think of is that after Laurie got taken away by the ambulance, Michael probably went back to the Myers house, which is where they caught him.

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Introducing Michael’s assistant, Jason!

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regarding the parents standing there, Dave McRae explained it greatly, but it’s a film version of what’s done in theatre called a moment in time where the actors stand still and it’s like a snapshot of a moment. Where Michael stabs Judith, obviously it’s his point of view and it can be said that the motion of stabbing her is what excited him. Tommy not realizing is supposed to represent how Michael is like a shape, something you don’t notice and is hidden in plain sight. Regarding the weed part, that’s why Laurie says he could smell it. The last one I’ll answer is the Halloween prank one and the knives, well, how else are they supposed to cut the rope

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I always thought he used it to haul Judith’s gravestone. Also, I thought Linda’s body had rope on her in the closet. Idk

18

I googled the image of Lynda in the closet and I cannot see the rope, I think its very possible that he used it for the gravestone though.

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There’s a few more that I got from watching the rest of the movie.

-When Laurie is talking to Tommy about the comic books he reads, he said that he’s not allowed to readf them, and Laurie looks at them and says “Laser Man, Neutron Man, I can understand why”. Am I missing something? Are silly comic books like “Neutron Man” the type of thing that was considered innapropriate for 10 year old kids in 1978? It’s just an odd reaction.

  • Annie’s death scene…while it’s cool for being the first legit on screen kill from adult Myers in the movie, the look on her face when she dies is just terrible. Her eyes and her facial expression is pretty much laughable.

-Bob: “First I’ll take my clothes off, then we’ll take your clothes off, then we’ll take Lindsey’s clothes off”. Ummmm…was that “joke” considered funny in 1978? Because I’m hoping people were just as uncomfortable about pedophilia back then as they are now. To me that line is just creepy as hell, even if it’s just meant as a joke.


Now, since I’ve nitpicked this movie pretty much to death, I want to point out something that this movie got so right that no other films in the entire franchise can get right (yes, even the 2018 version). Keeping Michael as “The Shape”, an almost force of nature that stands or hangs around in different places, seemingly everywhere at the same time, not really doing a whole lot, but kind of just…there…and not there if that makes sense. You always see him in the background, close to the characters, only for him to disappear and to see him again further away from them in another shot, as if he’s a ghost or spirit, seemingly directionless. But always stalking, always waiting for the right moment to strike and kill.

Later movies in the franchise for some reason NEVER go back to this simple concept that worked so well the first time. I get wanting to increase the body count in the sequels, that’s kind of what needs to happen, it’s understandable. But you can do that and still keep Myers as this stalking type ghost with a blank face that stands patiently in the shadows. Now I love the 2018 movie, I think it’s fantastic, BUT the one major thing it gets wrong is this aspect of Myers. Trsut me, I like brutal Michael, I want to see Michael bust some heads into bathroom walls and carve some faces, I love all of that. Bugt you can have that and also keep that Halloween 1978 version of Michsel intact. Adding more brutality doesn’t have to negate everything else about him. I think the new movie did a fantastic job at showing just how intimidating Michael can be (something I think the original was kind of “meh” on actually), but they neglected his most important aspect…Michael isn’t supposed to be a “badass” that you root for while you watch him “get kills”. He’s not Jason. He’s a silent stalker, he stalks his victims, he toys with them, he watches them, he waits and waits for the right moment to strike. That’s what I feel like the 2018 movie was missing. I love the brutality of Michael in the new movie, but I think they showed him too much as “the star killer” instead of putting him in the shadows like the original did. I like how they made him so badass, but I think that a healthy medium can be reached in which we see him as both a badass, but also as thesilent stalker from the original. I think they need to find that happy medium. But something tells me because of how modern audiences need action on screen at all times, we’re never gonna get that 1978 Myers again. I still love the new Myers, but the OG is what Myers is at his core, and it hasn’t been done the same since.

I would like to see Myers do what he did in the original to a larger group of people, I think that would be a really cool dynamic. Because in the first one, he only really stalks Laurie, Annie, Linda and Bob. With a group of like 7, 8, or 9 kids, there’s a lot of potential there for some really cool scenes. If Michael kepts his brutality when he kills from the 2018 movie, but did his stalking thing from 1978, that would be the perfect Myers in my opinion.

20

Did anyone notice that Dr. Loomis is parked in a disable space? When he’s talking to Dr. Wynn about Michael driving a car (he was doing very well last night) scene.