The Genius of Being Ordinary
One of the things that makes Halloween so fascinating is how ordinary everything looks.
Haddonfield doesn't look like a fantasy world.
It doesn't look like a haunted castle.
It doesn't look like a gothic European village.
It looks like your neighborhood.
There are houses.
There are sidewalks.
There are school buses.
There are teenagers.
There are babysitters.
And somewhere in the background is Michael Myers.
That made the movie considerably scarier than many of its contemporaries.
The horror wasn't happening somewhere else.
It could happen next door.
And Carpenter understood something that would influence decades of horror movies afterward:
You don't have to show the monster constantly to make people afraid of it.
Sometimes it's much scarier when he's barely there.
