Tracing The Shape: 31 Days of Essays on John Carpenter's 'Halloween'

The image you see above is my favorite shot in all of horror cinema. I've done my homework, looked at all the other major contenders, and it's never gotten better or more atmospheric than this single image.

Despite how much I talk about and think about horror origin stories, I don't actually remember now what my first true horror film was, but I do remember the one that made the deepest impression. John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween, released in 1978, made a horror fan of me in ways no other film in those early days could. I obsessed over it, watched every special feature or making-of segment I could get my hands on, memorized all of its shadowy nooks and crannies.

And yet, the brilliant thing about Halloween is that there's always something more to learn.

When I launched this newsletter in August, I did with the knowledge that the Halloween season was fast approaching, and when I thought about what I wanted to do for October, I knew almost instantly that I was setting out on a deranged mission.

Beginning October 1, I will launch Tracing The Shape, a series of 31 daily essays, each focusing on a different aspect of the original Halloween film. Have I written all of these essays yet? Of course not! Will I make it all 31 days? Who knows!

What I will do, here at the outset, is lay out a few ground rules for myself:

1. These essays will only be about the original 1978 film, and will avoid discussions of sequels, novelizations, and any other added context. The text is the text.
2. These essays will not rely on the analysis already done by other excellent writers and film historians on the subject. Everything I'm doing here is off the dome and (hopefully) original.
3. They can be about whatever I want, and at any length I want, so long as I'm sticking to the 92 minutes of Halloween's runtime.

My goal here? Well, maybe at the end I'll have a tidy little essay collection that could become a short book, and of course I'm hoping that people catch on and read all of this, but mostly I'm just interested in immersing myself as deep as I possibly can in my favorite horror film of all time. In preparation for this project, I went back and looked at the film again last night, for what must be the hundredth time, and I found still more details, things I'd forgotten, things that could be entire essays unto themselves. It's the movie that just keeps gifting me new little horror miracles, and I'm going to try my best to honor that.

So, if you're a Halloween fan, a Carpenter fan, or you just want to read how I feel about things like that opening Steadicam shot, come back here on October 1! It's gonna be fun!