The suburbs ARE the horror

Rating: 9/10 (19 November 2005)

We who grew up "different" in the suburbs always knew there was something, some ineffable thing, that was dead wrong with our environment. Halloween, like Blue Velvet (1986) vindicates that feeling. While "the city" is typically cast in pop culture as the setting for rampant immorality, murder and general debauchery, "The Suburbs" are the REAL creepy, borderline psychotic, and all too often death-dealing American institution.
The news media is littered with daily stories of ax murderers, serial rapists, gun freak vigilantes, and other barely-human opportunists who are either products of, or thrive in, the suburban environment.
Halloween brings exactly that creepiness to the fore. And made a mint doing it, because as everyone in America knows: the suburbs breed DEATH. Don't believe me? Just put "Dr. Ossian Sweet Detroit" in a search engine, see what I mean. The very thing you're running away from is right in your face. In fact, it's you, because you also thrive in it, and allow it to persist.
Halloween never tells us what made 6 year old Michael snap, we're left to guess whether nature or nurture (or both). My guess: nurture. That is what makes Halloween so disturbing. Halloween, while routinely compared to Psycho and other Hitchcock thrillers can also be viewed as a throwback to The Bad Seed (1956), which no doubt served to reassure middle class white suburban parents that sociopath child murderers are the product of nature, and all the middlebrow breeding in the world can't alter that.
Halloween is also one of those movies like Birth of A Nation or Gone With the Wind, in which it's impossible to approach the movie with any kind of objectivity. Sorry, this is what happens when you grow up in LA suburbs and remember the constant news reports of celebrity sickos at the time Halloween (and its imitators and followups) was released and made it big: the Hillside Strangler, Patty Hearst, Manson family, and Night Stalker Samhain aficionado, Richard Ramirez...incompetent Christian rightwing hysterics about "backward masking" and hidden messages in rock and roll songs by Abba (no joke), (sub)urban legends about razor-laced apples and poisoned mini-Snickers...did art imitate life in late 70s Los Angeles, or not? Nature or nurture or not? Yeah yeah, the sexually active teens get hacked to death, but not even dorked-out asexual babysitters are safe.
They never were. Michael doesn't like them much, either. Or you and your posh lawns, family cars and fancy brand name cookware.
That sad fact is what makes Halloween so effective, still, in 2005.