Halloween 1978, possible Hitchcock connection

I saw a man who was not there.

He didn't know, man, which of those babysitters was his sister, or at least he wasn't sure.

So.

Nothing else to do about it, but kill them all.

Anyway.  Hitchcock references in the film come along, with the one that started me thinking this being "Rear Window", alluding to the James Stewart, Grace Kelly film.  In Halloween, Michael looks through the rear window, seeing the pants-less Nancy Loomis, and immediately, Nancy Loomis goes to that window, Michael disappeared, and she tries to climb out that window, getting stuck.

I think of a big moment of Bernard Hermann, in the music of the Hitchcock film "Vertigo", when Kim Novak suddenly looks like the long-gone Grace Kelly.  The scene is pivotal to the film, presenting, "rising action".  Well, we have several Vertigo moments in the film, blunt in the subtext, for instance, the topless babysitter talking to Michael(who is cloaked like a ghost).

"Got your ghost?"

Meanwhile, Michael takes his sister's tombstone and makes a bit of scenery of his own, putting the dead pants-less babysitter in the bed, with the tombstone at the headboard.

He was quite muddled.  And always acting as the "moral enforcer", at first being offended in the 60s by premarital sex, but then carrying it farther, to killing the woman as she tries to start her car, then killing another as she tries to call someone on the telephone.  Later, he is stabbed with a knitting needle, then pursues his remaining sister into a closet.

"You're a Great American, Michael."

Also, of the two "offed" babysitters, I note one has no pants, while the other is shown topless.  If you put them together, you have a full suit of clothes, again remembering the knitting needle stab and the closet scene, referencing clothing.

The ultimate Vertigo moment is when Michael is shot, falling off a balcony.  The "upper porch" is one thing, but the balcony is something that was once fairly common in theaters.  Its as of a viewer, as we see from Michael's POV in the beginning, is eventually "killed" while watching the movie.  Which reminds of the opening of Scream 2. 


With Jada taking the knife in the bathroom, with film, like society, having marched forward into time without all of its old dignity.

I'm far from a Hitchcock scholar, or even particularly interested in his work, but other possibilities of references are Hitchcock's film Strangers On A Train, The Stranger, and The 39 Steps.

It's like, one almost suspects Dr Loomis to look down at his supposedly dead patient and say, "remember, we're not the liberal media.  Let not your heart be troubled."

I told him, I said:
Hoary cripple, go, go away!
Heedless,  he came back
twice more that day.