Horror films are designed to make our skin crawl, to make us grab the covers and pull them up to our chin when we hear a routine noise somewhere in the house (usually a sound that’s been heard many times before), to make us jump and scream and laugh at ourselves for jumping and screaming. Prior to 1978, most horror movies (those suitable for Halloween) used a monster of some sort to give us the willies. But director John Carpenter introduced a new boogeyman to the genre and the holiday with … Halloween, of course.
When I first saw the movie I was in high school, and two of my classmates and I decided to have our own field trip to the movies one afternoon to see this movie that everyone had been talking about. Since it was a matinee, we were the only three people in the theater and while we had fun and no one to shush us, the usher decided to freak us out a little by throwing open the doors as the credits rolled and standing there, holding the doors open, blocking the exit in a standing spread eagle position. He thought he was scary; we thought he was just weird.
The biggest scare I have had in a theater came two years later on opening night of Friday the 13th. I went into this one pretty cold, not knowing much about it, and my boss and his wife were there as well. I wasn’t scared by all of the gruesome scenes of death that were pretty groundbreaking for the time, but the movie — which built on the foundation laid down by Carpenter in which sex is punishable by death — did one thing brilliantly by the end … it lulled the audience into a false sense of security.
When the killer of the camp counselors was revealed (and it’s not Jason Voorhees) and dispatched by Alice, the last, virtuous woman standing, we all thought it was over. The shot that followed the killer’s death was of Alice floating in a canoe on Camp Crystal Lake, languidly drawing her hand through the water, sweet, calming music playing. People actually started to get up and leave and then BAM! The disfigured Jason pops out of the lake, dragging poor Alice into the murky waters … and then it’s all a dream. But that one shock moment led to a collective scream from the audience that I had never heard before. It really was deafening; the people in the aisles with their backs to the screen only heard us scream and saw us jump. My boss’ wife literally climbed over the arm of her chair into his lap, I was clutching the sleeve of her shirt and I just remember seeing the ceiling of the theater as my chair back seemed to recline farther back than it should have. It was one of the best movie moments I had ever experienced up to that point.
Yes, the original Friday the 13th came out in May of 1980, so it doesn’t technically count as a Halloween movie, even though the original and its countless sequels seem to get perennial video releases in October and show up on various cable channels throughout the month, but the movie certainly established itself as a scary movie worthy of the holiday with the advent of the serial killer as a Halloween boogeyman. Halloween or not, this was one of the best scares I’ve ever had at the movies.
Clacked by Chuck Duncan 
on Oct 11, 2011 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
