My Favorite Films: Halloween (1978)

It has become something of a tradition between my brother and I to watch Halloween once a year, usually on October 31st. This might seem odd coming from a conservative Catholic. After all Halloween is, essentially, a movie about promiscuous teens being brutally murdered (this was essentially producer Moustapha Akkad's pitch for the film). Yet the film is remarkably restrained in regard to the sex and violence. It leaves much to the imagination that lesser horror films actively indulge in. 

John Carpenter once described Halloween as a film he "would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you." Though he may be selling himself short, Halloween is certainly all that. His direction of the film, aided in no small measure by Dean Cundey's cinematography, is nothing short of brilliant. The use of tracking shots and atmospheric lightning gives the film a palpable sense of dread, which is the essential quality of horror. One gets the feeling that danger is constantly stalking our main characters. Carpenter's iconic, minimalistic score for the film goes greatly aids this. Somehow, despite being shot in Southern California in the middle of the summer, perfectly evokes the feeling of being a young kid on Halloween. 

In many ways, Halloween is the perfect distillation, not only of the slasher genre it helped to create but of horror films more broadly. The genre had gone through dramatic changes since the 1960's. Whereas, before this, horror films tended to focus on fictional monsters like werewolves, vampires and aliens, Psycho had popularized films about serial killers while films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist led to something of a renaissance for supernatural horror. More and more, Hollywood seemed to focus on real-life horrors rather than fictional ones. Carpenter was able to distill both trends in this picture, and in doing so set the trajectory of the genre would take for the next decade. Micheal is a flesh and blood killer and, in the films iconic openig scene, a seemingly ordinary seven-year-old boy. Yet, unlike say Norman Bates who has a clearly defined physcology, Micheal has no discernible motive for his crimes. They are passionless and, seemingly, random. Without ever explicitly saying it, the film implies that there is something unnatural about him. It is this ambiguity that gives the character his menacing, preternatural presence. 

Many have remarked how, in slasher films, the protagonist (or final girl) tends to be a virgin. The origin of this idea can be traced back to Nosferatu, where the virtuous Ellen brings about the vampire's defeat through her selfless sacrifice. The idea can be traced back even farther to Bram Stoker's Dracula or even to the vestal virgins of ancient Rome, whose chastity was believed to have a direct connection to the health of the Roman state. For the slasher film however, it was John Carpenter's Halloween that set the pattern for all to follow. Carpenter and his fellow screenwriter Debra Hill, whether consciously or subconsciously, drew a connection between Laurie Strode's virtue and her survival at the end of the film and, conversely, between the vices of Micheal's victims and their ultimate demise.

This becomes apparent right from the start. Micheal's first murder, of his sister, occurs when he comes home from trick-or-treating and finds her fooling around with her boyfriend. Similarly, Annie Brackett's death occurs immediately after she receives a call from her boyfriend and prepares to leave for a rendezvous with him, saddling Laurie with Lindsey, who she is supposed to be babysitting. Lynda and Bob too, meet their end after a sleeping together. By contrast Laurie is a responsible, studious teenage girl who can't get a date because guys think she is "too smart." She displays the virtues of prudence and temperance throughout the film. When walking home with Annie and Lynda she contemplates returning to school for her missing chemistry book. She feels guilty for smoking pot in Annie's car. When she agrees to watch Lindsey for Annie she remarks "the old girl-scout comes through again." She also, unlike her friends, seems to sense that something is off. This is something she shares with Dr. Loomis (memorably potrayed by Donald Pleasence), whose conviction that something is uniquely wrong with Micheal is ignored by his collogues at the mental institution. In his dogged, almost maniacal determination to stop Micheal he displays the virtue of fortitude.  

I am not suggesting that Carpenter intended Halloween as some sort of morality play, but rather that his script recognizes, implicitly, that there is something disordered about fornication, and something noble about matronly virtue. This is something later sequels and imitators would lose sight of as the genre descended into sadism and exploitation. In my article on Nosferatu, I contrasted it with Halloween insofar as the former portrays an ultimate defeat of evil, while the latter offers only a momentary escape from it. This reveals a deeper truth: the practice of natural virtue can repel the demonic but only through supernatural means can we overcome them entirely. In an increasingly secular age, the horror genre, at its best, continues to witness to these truths.