31. oktober 19:00

Sted: Austmann Bryggeri & TapRoom

Engelsk tale, utekstet, 1t31m
Engelsk tale, utekstet, 1t32m

Billetter

The night HE came home!

October 31, 1963. Haddonfield, Illinois. Possessed by an unfathomable urge to kill, six-year-old Michael Myers butchers his older sister, Judith, on the night of Halloween. Precisely fifteen years later, on the anniversary of the brutal murder, Michael escapes from Smith's Grove Sanitarium, a mental health facility for the criminally insane, and returns home to pick up where he left off. Becoming fixated on the blissfully unsuspecting high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, Michael silently stalks the town, efficiently racking up victims. Meanwhile, Myers’s psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis (played with operatic brio by Donald Pleasence), and skeptical Sheriff Leigh Brackett diligently comb the town to ferret out the mentally unstable inmate. However, the shadows are thick, and the killer is always one step ahead of them. Can they stop him before it’s too late?

Produced independently on a shoestring budget, John Carpenter’s film defined the nascent slasher film, introducing tropes and narrative devices that would become synonymous with the genre, and becoming the blueprint for all slashers and the benchmark against which all subsequent films are judged. While earlier films like Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas (both 1974) certainly had elements of the slasher, Halloween would crystallize the formula, leading to a slew of imitators in the coming decades, including over a dozen entries in the Halloween franchise itself.

Carpenter also scored the film, initially out of necessity due to budget constraints, providing the film with a spare, eerie synthesizer motif recalling Bernard Herrmann’s famous screeching violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), another clear touchstone for the genre (and starring Curtis’s mother, Janet Leigh). While not in the director’s chair for the film’s sequel, Halloween II—again starring Curtis and Pleasence, written and scored by Carpenter, and picking up immediately where its predecessor left off—intentionally hews closely to the style and tone of the original.

In collaboration with Austmann Brewery & Tap Room, we’re throwing a Halloween party, screening both Halloween and its immediate follow-up, Halloween II, providing some pumpkin-spiced brewed specialties, and ending the night with a costume contest (with prizes!), so bring some popcorn and arrive in something spooky!

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