Despite this movie having came out while I was in high school I do not think I have ever sat down and just watched it all the way through in one sitting. And I still haven’t.

Credited with kicking off the modern slasher film, though it owes quite a debt to both Psychoand Dementia 13, Halloweenpresents for the audience a rather simple premise. Michael Myers, who murdered his sister when he was just six years old, has escaped from a high security psychiatric hospital and with his doctor desperately trying to recapture him before it is too late, returns to his hometown on Halloween night intent on a rampage of murder. With a budget of $300,000 and a box office of 70 million dollars, Halloweencatapulted the careers of its director John Carpenter and its star Jamie Lee Curtis.

I watched it streaming from Shudder over two nights and while I had seen the entire movie in bits and pieces, a scene here, an act there, this was my first time just settling in to give it a proper screening. I believe what Carpenter was going for was a slow burn build up but for me the front two thirds of the film is mostly tedium and repetitive set-up. The characters and their interior lives are sketched at best, certainly not enough to draw me in emotionally and as such Michael’s mayhem lacks any real power of poignancy. The movies spawned by the success, Friday the 13thand such would skip much of the attempt at a slow burn, barely taking any time to establish the characters before unleashing the slaughter and thus failed emotionally in entirely the opposite direction, substituting sensationalism for story. I love a good slow burn horror film; both The Exorcistand The Witchtake their time getting to their frightening final acts but en route to those climaxes they present relatable, engaging characters.

There’s no doubt that I am out of step with the popular opinion about this movie, after all there have been something like nearly a dozen sequels and reboots with a fresh one hitting theaters this weekend, but I found myself mostly bored.