Michael, It's Time - Halloween 2018

I first saw John Carpenter's Halloween on its network TV premiere in 1981 and it scared me to death but I also loved every minute of it.  I slept on the couch for almost a week after watching that.  As I grew up we got a VCR and I discovered I love horror movies.  Anytime we went to the local video stores I would explore the horror section to see what new horror I could checkout and I also looked thru the older titles to see what I wanted to watch again.  Halloween was always one of those titles that got rented many times especially when I found a friend that had not seen it yet.  I have presented Halloween to many friends over the years.

Halloween became a bit of an obscure title in the mid 90s even though they were still churning out sequels but was difficult to find on VHS.  Luckily Blockbuster (R.I.P.) started putting out a line of movies for sale and they had the exclusive rights to Halloween so for ten bucks I could now watch it whenever I wanted and the movie collecting hobby-habit began.

 Now, this VHS copy of the movie looked awful even for VHS standards.  If I remember correctly it was recorded in EP mode and was still pan and scan like everything else back then but at least I had it.  Years later I started collected laser discs so I could watch movies in their proper aspect ratio and then Criterion dropped this bomb:

This was the holy grail of movies at the time as it was remastered and in widescreen so this got a lot of play.  I still have this disc(s) but no player though.  In the last twenty something years I have purchased any DVD or blu ray release of this and still enjoy it a couple of times a year including Halloween night.  

Tonight the sequel forty years in the making comes out and The Shape is back in Haddonfield.  It is directed by David Gordon Green who went to the same high school I did, he was a year behind me, and lived three streets over from me.  I did not know the guy but I recognized him from an article once he started making movies.  It is a small world sometimes.  Halloween 2018 has played a few festivals and the word is good.  I will be there tonight, will you?  See you at The Alamo.