The Beat of the Stalker's Gaze

Rating: 9/10 (31 October 2018)

Even for one who isn't a fan of the slasher sub-genre, I appreciate something as well made as this progenitor, "Halloween." Director, co-writer and scorer John Carpenter and team pay homage to some of the right horror films to precede it, too, including playing "The Thing from Another World" (1951), which Carpenter would remake a few years later, and "Forbidden Planet" (1956) on the TVs--two other monster movies of seemingly unstoppable evil creatures. Moreover, there's the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis in the central role (even though the doctor standing in for the detective part receives top billing), the daughter of Janet Leigh, the star of "Psycho" (1960), which is often cited as the first slasher film. Like Bernard Herrmann's score for "Psycho," Carpenter's one here has become one of the most iconic in horror film--or even general cinematic--history, and it's largely responsible for much of the picture's tension--beginning as the screen is black, even before the picture appears on screen.
The role of the camera in conjunction with the monstrous Michael Myers is remarkable, too. Usually in film studies classes when the "male gaze" is discussed, including in Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," it's illustrated by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, although probably most often with "Rear Window" (1954) and "Vertigo" (1958), but "Psycho" would work about as well with the peeping-Tom antics of Norman Bates and, perhaps, "Halloween" would be even better. Cinema is a voyeuristic art form, primarily concerned with the spectator's gaze upon its visuals, which consequently rely for their effect on the spectator's identification with the surrogate gaze of the camera, which in turn may be identified with the gaze of a certain character--in this case, mostly with the knife-wielding serial killer, Myers. Indeed, he's merely acting out what we voyeuristically came to the film to see: him terrifying and killing people. In the opening scene, the camera and the eyes of Myers are one in the form of an extended point-of-view shot. From there, he continues to stalk his prey--sharing with us the pleasure of watching them. Meanwhile, his face is mostly covered by a mask, which like the spectator, prevents the gaze of other characters upon him and, likewise, us.
Mulvey and her followers get into a lot of Freudian psychobabble, but there's undeniably a psycho-sexual element to the gaze of Myers. There's the by-now cliché plot of his killing promiscuous, mostly female teens--all of which seems to stem back to his simultaneous incestuous desire for and repulsion of his sister. I'm sure any Freudian would also say that the knife is a phallic object, penetrating the victims. Then, there's the virginal heroine, with the story spending quite a bit of time on establishing this fact, who, nonetheless, seems to be paying for the sins of her mother's character in "Psycho." More interesting than that, though, methinks, is the playing around with the thrill of voyeurism, via the gaze of Myers, while also experiencing the unease of being gazed upon, which is mostly associated with the Laurie character played by Curtis. One effect to come from these switches from identification with Michael to that of Laurie is the jump scare. If little else, subsequent slasher filmmakers grasped the effectiveness of this trick and, perhaps, too much so. But, it's effective here because it occupies that space between the pleasure and horror of the gaze, all of which is underscored by the terrific beat.