Analysis: Opening of Halloween

Opening of Halloween

The film Halloween was made in 1978 directed by John Carpenter and its genre is horror.

It is set in the fictional suburban town of Haddonfield, Illinois USA on Halloween.

The plot is a psychotic murderer institutionalized since childhood escapes on a mindless rampage while his doctor chases him through the streets.

The film was made on a budget of $320,000 and grossed $47 million at the box office.

Critics credit the film as the first in a long line of slasher films inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).

Halloween the film contains little graphic violence and gore.

The Title colours are red with a black background, still on the title they start to change colour from red to orange to yellow that shows fire and that represents pain, suffering and because its Halloween pumpkins.

Still with a black background the titles continue but are now on the right side of the screen and they are fading in and then fading out. On the left side of the screen there is a pumpkin then the camera starts to forward track into the pumpkin until you can just see the right side of the pumpkin. the last title to come up is 'Directed by John Carpenter' on its own as he was the director. The music fades out as we move onto a caption screen of Haddonfield, Illinois and then shows another caption shot of Halloween night 1963.

During the caption screens there is a sound bridge of children singing a Halloween song. As that finishes there is an extreme long shot of a white house. The camera angle is a POV shot of somebody looking through the  window of the house watching the sister and her boyfriend inside as they head upstairs. During this time the sound is ambient with the sound of crickets. When the POV shot goes back to the front of the house and looks up at the bedroom window as the lights turn of there is a non-diegetic constant high pitch sound. The POV of the person we see goes into the house by the back door and get a knife out of the kitchen draw and then carries on to the stars but hides when the boyfriend comes back downstairs, after he leaves, the person carries on upstairs, finds a discarded clown mask he puts this on so all we can see now it what is through the 2 eye holes in the mask. As the person is walking up the stairs a clock starts to chime which could represent that someones time is running out. As the person walks into the bedroom where the sister is he turns to look at the bed which has ruffled bed sheets also that the sister is naked which shows that her and the boyfriend had sex. The person then goes up to the sister and repeatedly stabs her with the knife. The person then heads down the stairs and out the door to the car that pulls up to the drive and stop as they reach the people getting out the car. The man that gets out the car is the father of the girl, he walks up to the person with the knife and says the name Michael which we find to be the persons name, as the father takes of Michael's clown mask we find him to be a young boy about 10 years old and that also he is the brother of the girl he killed. There is a crane shot of the boy and his parents as its a twist as we think its a grown man that is the killer but we find that its not to finish the opening it cuts to black.