Speech of the Week #7

Hey guys, welcome to a new column here on YDKS Movies entitled Speech of the Week! For now on, every Monday I will post a new scene from a movie that features a speech of some sort being given. After all, there are a lot of famous scenes in film where characters give an influential speech of some sort. Then again, there are also a lot of scenes where characters give a speech and it just comes off cheesy and lame. In this section, you will see both kinds. That's right, people, I'm giving you the good and bad of film speeches all wrapped up in one great big package. I hope you all enjoy.

This week's speech comes from my favorite horror movie of all time: Halloween. We had our John Carpenter Double Feature Night this past week (featuring a showing of Christine and The Thing with trailers for other Carpenter films in between) and, because of that, I've kind of been in a horror film kind of mood. After the double feature, I decided to revisit Rob Zombie's very flawed but ulimately underrated remake of Halloween (if you want the extent of my feelings of this film and how it compares to Carpenter's original classic, read this article here). While re-watching this movie, I thought of this speech from Carpenter's original version of Halloween and just how scary it was.

For me, the scariest things in horror films are not the gore or the kills- it is what is implied or talked about. For example, for me (and many others), the scariest scene in Jaws was not any of the shark attacks but Quint's incredibly disturbing speech about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the shark attacks that followed on the survivors. While the following speech by Dr. Loomis about Michael Myers may not be the scariest scene in Halloween, it's definitely one of the creepiest.

There's really something admirable about the character of Dr. Sam Loomis and actor Donald Pleasance for that matter. Loomis and his obsession with containing Michael Myers and his evil was something that was unending, much like Pleasance's instance to stick around and play the character through Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers despite the quality of the films dropping off the stratosphere.

Anyways, in this scene you get to see the true motivation behind Loomis' obsession with stopping Michael Myers and just how evil he believes the young man really is. After all, he had the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes...

Yeah, that's some creepy stuff. Pleasance sells it like only he could do. It's a shame he is no longer with us.