Halloween: An encounter with evil
John Carpenter's classic, Halloween, remains a masterful achievement about the inscrutability of evil.
Written by Bo Winegard
The slasher genre is not typically associated with elevated metaphysics or compelling analyses of evil. It is not even associated with art, but with exploitation. Low budgets and high body counts. Farcically stupid, sex-obsessed teenagers who utter the infamous phrase, “I’ll be right back” before meeting their grisly ends. Many of the genre’s most recognizable films justify these unflattering associations: Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler, The Maniac, Sleepaway Camp. Indeed, at the zenith of the slasher craze, virtually every obscure holiday had become a setting for the slaughter of lusty teenagers.
And yet, the genre’s seminal film, Halloween (1978), though not without some elements of exploitation, is a thoughtful, poetic, and artistically captivating exploration of evil.
One would not have predicted this from the film’s initial pitch. The producer Irwin Yablans asked a young director, John Carpenter, to make a film about a killer stalking babysitters on Halloween. Carpenter agreed, wrote a script with Deborah Hill, and shot the film in roughly 20 days on a budget of $300,000.
In 999 out of 1000 worlds, the resulting film would have been utterly forgettable. But in our world, it became a masterpiece. The artist’s vision triumphed over the limitations of time, money, and material to create an aesthetically compelling and existentially provocative slasher.
The masterful craftsmanship is immediately evident. Over the credits, we hear the creepy dissonance of an irregular 5/4 piano motif, a particularly effective example of John Carpenter’s minimalism. Then kids chanting in the darkness on Halloween (in 1963) to set the mood. We see a pale, eerily lit house draped in shadows with a jack-o’-lantern glowing on its porch. The camera moves leisurely toward the house in a disorienting point of view (POV) which will have a shocking payoff. The sequence is one long, bravura tracking shot modeled on the stunning opening of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil1.
After the POV character puts on a mask and kills a young, attractive girl, we follow him down the stairs and outside. His parents arrive, bewildered, and ask in perplexed voice, “Michael?” while pulling off his clown mask. The killer is revealed to be a young, almost angelic boy with a bemused look and vacant eyes clutching a large bloody knife. The camera pulls away slowly lingering upon the terrible tableau. We contemplate the horror, shocked and puzzled.
The exceptional opening is no fluke. Assisted by cinematographer Dean Cundey, Carpenter imbued the film with a classical, restrained style whose compositional elegance engenders both an appreciation of the beauty of good cinema and a sense of foreboding. An ominous shape appears and disappears. Was it a stalker or the imagination? Wide shots emphasize the eerie stillness of a small midwestern town (Haddonfield). Long before David Lynch and his legion of imitators were to expose the hidden horrors of quiet, languid towns across America, Halloween thoroughly explored it. As a character walks down a sidewalk with a few dead leaves blowing by, a disquieting piano repeats a two-note motif. Something terrible lurks in this apparently tranquil neighborhood.
The something terrible is Michael Myers, one of Carpenter’s transcendent creations and perhaps the single most powerful and poetic depiction of the inscrutability of evil in cinema. We meet him as a child when he inexplicably kills his sister after watching her bring a boyfriend upstairs for sex. He then escapes a mental hospital in which he has been immured for fifteen years and heads back to his childhood house in Haddonfield to stalk and kill.
Why? We don’t know. For we know nothing about his motives. Or his life. And what we are told about him from his psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, sounds supernatural:
I met him, 15 years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this... six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and... the blackest eyes - the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.
When Myers gets his mask, it is pale and expressionless. Like the white whale in Moby-Dick, Myers is both a physical presence and an inscrutable metaphysical force, his whiteness recalling the “heartless voids and immensities” of the universe that appalled Ishmail. But, like all great poetic characters, Myers is polysemic—he holds many meanings at once. At times, he is associated with fate.
In a scene early in the film, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) glances anxiously at Michael Myers standing outside her classroom window by a car, while inside, her teacher discusses the concept of fate, linking Myers to an inexorable force beyond human control:
Teacher: … and the book ends, but what Samuels is really talking about here is fate. You see, fate caught up with several lives here. No matter what course of action Collins took, he was destined to his own fate, his own day of reckoning with himself. The idea is that destiny is a very real, concrete thing that every person has to deal with. How does Samuels' view of fate differ from that of Costaine's? Laurie?
Laurie: M'am?
Teacher: Answer the question.
Laurie: Costaine wrote that fate was somehow related only to religion, where Samuels felt that, well, fate was like a natural element, like earth, air, fire and water.
Teacher: That's right, Samuels definitely personified fate. In Samuels’ writing fate is immovable like a mountain. It stands where man passes away. Fate never changes.
In another scene, Dr. Loomis, speaking on a payphone, warns an officer in Haddonfield about Michael Myers' imminent arrival. Ending the call abruptly with the ominous words, "If you don’t, it’s your funeral," Loomis walks toward a red truck, its door ajar. The horn of an approaching train swells as it barrels toward the camera. Like fate—like Michael Myers—marching inexorably to Haddonfield.
At other times, Michael Myers is associated with the boogeyman, a mythical creature generally used to scare and subdue otherwise incorrigible children—but also a personification of unkillable and inexplicable evil.
Lindsey: I’m scared!
Laurie: There’s nothing to be scared of.
Tommy: Are you sure?
[Laurie nods]
Tommy: How?
Laurie: “I killed him…”
Tommy: “But you can’t kill the boogeyman!
And the terrifying last lines of dialogue between Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode after Dr. Loomis has shot Michael six times:
Laurie: It was the boogeyman?
Dr. Loomis: As a matter of fact, it was.
If Myers is the white whale, then Dr. Loomis, played with panache by Donald Pleasance, is his Captain Ahab, a grizzled and obsessed seeker of the universe’s mysteries. He is the only person who seems fully to grasp the ungraspable truth about Myers: He (or should I say, “It”) is not human:
Dr. Loomis: Just try to understand what we are dealing with here. Don’t underestimate it.
Marion: Don’t you think we could refer to it as “him”?
Dr. Loomis: If you say so.
Marion: Your compassion is overwhelming doctor.
Loomis is a kind of a poet, seer, and theologian of the inscrutable, whose alarm about Michael is greeted with skepticism and whose florid musings are dismissed as “fancy talk”:
Brackett: I have a feeling you’re way off on this.
Dr. Loomis: You have the wrong feeling.
Brackett: You’re not doing very much to prove me wrong.
Dr. Loomis: What more do you need?
Brackett: Well, it’s going to take a lot more than fancy talk to keep me up all night crawling around these bushes.
Dr. Loomis: I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall; not seeing the wall, looking past the wall; looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now, you can either ignore it, or you can help me to stop it.
Brackett: More fancy talk.
For all his portentous speeches, Dr. Loomis is not without an impish sense of humor. While waiting behind bushes for Michael to come back to his house, Dr. Loomis has some fun at the expense of three boys. As one walks up to the house, Loomis in a gruff voice says, “Hey, Lonnie, get your ass away from there!” As the terrified boys run away, Loomis gloats as if he had just bamboozled the smartest kid in kindergarten out of his lunch money.
Even the most monomaniacal of seekers requires respite from time to time.
A compelling story about evil needs relatable and sympathetic victims. In Halloween these are the babysitters introduced by the producer Irwin Yablans and realized through the snappy (though sometimes cringey) dialogue of Deborah Hill and the solid performances of Nancy Kyes (Annie Brackett), P. J. Soles (Lynda van der Klok), and Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode). Subsequent slashers would turn their teenagers into empty husks to be mutilated by whatever loosed maniac was the actual star of the film, but Halloween gives us realistic and likable teenagers. They are not abnormally smart or clever or prudish or debauched. They are just, well, ordinary.
Much has been made of the supposedly “loose” sexual behavior of Annie and Lynda and the chastity of Laurie. In Scream, a movie that both admires and satirizes classic slasher films, Jamie Kennedy forwards the rules to surviving a horror movie, while Halloween plays on the television behind him:
That’s why she [Jamie Lee Curtis] always outsmarted the killer in the big chase scene at the end. Only virgins can do that. Don’t you know the rules?...There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one, you can never have sex.
And many critics have argued that Halloween, like other slasher films, has a conservative (even misogynistic) message because its sexually active teenagers die while its virginal teenager survives. Carpenter himself has weighed in numerous times on this controversy, often with contradictory opinions. In Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest, a documentary about the making of the movie, he contended:
The teenagers that were victims are the more sexually active, but that misses the essential point of the film. The movie’s about the revenge of the repressed, and Jamie Lee has a connection with the killer because she’s repressed too. To me these kids are just engaged in normal teenage behaviour. They get killed because they’re not paying attention, they’re involved with their boyfriends and they don’t think anything is going on…there’s no Christian Right morality.
While in another interview he claimed:
The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that's killed him. Not because she's a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy.
One must trust the story, not the storyteller. And in this case, the storyteller’s analysis is rather less interesting and more Freudian than the story itself2. Halloween is about the mystery of evil. And the teenagers, like Eve after eating the forbidden fruit, have awakened from innocence to knowledge. They participate in sin—in carnal lust and the desire for annihilation through drugs and alcohol. Even Laurie, the putatively pure, virginal final girl, thinks about sex and casually smokes marijuana. She is not entirely innocent. No adult is.
Only the children, Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, are free from the knowledge of sin. And though they fear the boogeyman, we never sense that they are in real peril. When Michael walks across the street into Tommy Doyle’s house, he stalks Laurie, not the kids, who eventually escape into the street screaming. Because they are innocent, they have only a vague presentiment of evil—they are afraid of Michael as they would be afraid of a spider or dark woods.
As the film reaches its denouement, the supernatural aspects of Michael Myers become more undeniable. After being pierced in the eye with a wire hanger and stabbed with a knife in the chest, Michael collapses. Laurie walks across the room and tells the kids to go to the Mackenzie’s house to call the police. We see Michael supine in the background of the shot. Suddenly, he sits up, inhumanly strong, and turns toward her. Perhaps he is as unstoppable as fate. And as implacable as evil.
He and Laurie struggle. She pulls off his mask. This distracts him and Dr. Loomis, having seen the children screaming as they ran from the house, walks up the stairs to confront him with his revolver. Six shots. Michael, absorbing each one, falls off the balcony to the knotty and blighted lawn below. Loomis answers Laurie that, yes, that was the boogeyman and looks down for Michael’s body. It is not there.
The unsettling 5/4 piano motif plays as Loomis looks out into the town pensively, knowingly. Evil does not die.
The slasher is an entertaining but trashy genre, full of grimy exploitation flicks. Halloween, the movie most responsible for the genre’s popularity, bears only superficial resemblance to its voluminous imitators. They are to it what a pedestrian fishing adventure is to Moby-Dick. Where they are clumsy and literal, Halloween is deft and poetic. Where they are full of titillating gore, Halloween is full of haunting dread. Where they grapple with the profane, Halloween wrestles with the metaphysical.
John Carpenter’s considerable gifts and singular vision elevated what could have been a fun but forgettable B-movie into a timeless masterpiece about the inscrutable reality of evil. That it still works after midnight with a bowl of popcorn should not blind us to its brilliance. It is a work of cinematic genius.
Bo Winegard is executive editor at Aporia.
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There are actually two hidden cuts. But it seems to be an unbroken tracking shot.
I do not subscribe entirely to the death of the author, whose stated intentions can be illuminating for interpretation. However, I also do not subscribe to the unlimited authority of the author. Sometimes authors are wrong or tendentious. They lie. They forget. They are waggish or perverse. When the story is more compelling than the author, we should defer to the story.
What a great review. Thank you for it. I consider John Carpenter a fantastic director, capturing the essence of things, including evil. Having seen everyone of his movies, some more than once, I think it is fair to say that most have a "Carpenteresque" ending. On some level, you know the ending before the ending because you know it will leave things hanging. Perhaps the classic examples of this are his next movies after this The Fog and The Thing.
A provocatively articulate piece that offers much food for thought. Many thanks.
My reservation would be that just as Halloween doesn't really pause to address the nature of evil, in your eagerness to praise the movie I'm not sure you do, either. The result is that you let Carpenter and his ilk (and clever as he is) get away murder, both literally and artistically. Subsequently, all that we, the audience, are bequeathed, as Michael Myers escapes and the movie's end credits roll, is a sense of bleak hopelessness, a moral blackness which, in our powerlessness to overturn it, discourages us from a belief in goodness, itself essential to our aspirations.
Conversely, I believe that all high art has a duty not just to present evil but to examine its causes. You might counter that evil has no cause. I would passionately demur.
Indeed, I doubt very much that evil is a primum mobile without cause. I suspect it can be traced back to some sort of fusion of vengeful anger with prolonged, unconscious humiliation (or some such). This seems to be the case when one looks at the personal history of serial killers.
This being the case, it seems to me to be highly reprehensible merely to celebrate the dynamic of murder and killing and profit from it financially and reputationally.
I don't doubt the cinematic skill involved in creating the atmosphere of Halloween - it scared the bejabbers off me when I saw it alone when it came out in '78 😂 -.... but emotional effect is not enough. A work of art must ultimately fight on the side of the angels, metaphorically speaking. It must build not destroy culture. Yes, by all means depict evil - but show us its counterpart in ultimate ascendance! Indeed, name me one real piece of high culture that doesn't do this and I'll buy you a metaphorical beer!