Now It’s Dark
By: Rob Gonsalves
Tags: John Carpenter, Movies, Horror Movies, Halloween

Appreciating John Carpenter’s original Halloween

One hour and eight minutes. That’s how long it takes — more than two-thirds of the way through a 91-minute movie — before we finally get a clear, unobstructed view of the killer. He’s wearing a mask, of course, though that comes off near the very end, too — revealing not evil incarnate, not the boogeyman, but, as John Carpenter put it, “just a kid.”

That Carpenter gets by for so long on so little — a shadow here, a musical sting there, a tactful aesthetic that never shows blade entering flesh — is a testament to the skill and power of Halloween. Watching it again recently, I was amazed at how laid-back most of the movie feels (until it coils up in the last act and builds up stress). Carpenter grabs us early, with the celebrated (and much imitated) killer’s-POV murder sequence; after that, you can almost see him relaxing into the quietude of Haddonfield, taking time to give us a sense of the place, and a sense of dread. Halloween may look dated today, almost quaint, if only because it comes from a decade that still trusted its young audience to sit still and be told a story.

That story, by the way, is as simple and as complex as a fairy tale — Bruno Bettelheim would have known what Carpenter and cowriter Debra Hill were up to. In his superb work on horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King points out that the best horror films play out like selections from Grimm. King lists twenty movies that could be summed up that way, one of which may sound familiar: “Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night, and only one of them was still alive come All Saints Day.”

It’s partly this fairy-tale aspect — the big bad wolf coming after Little Red Riding Hood in the enchanted suburb, with Dr. Sam Loomis subbing for the woodsman who saves the girl at the last minute — that has kept Halloween alive all these years, a frightening story told and retold around the campfire (often retold badly, as anyone who’s sat through the sequels and rip-offs can attest). Among horror fans, Halloween has long been considered one of the Four Horsemen of ’70s horror films, the others being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, and Phantasm. I’ll go to the mat to defend the greatness of all four landmarks, particularly Chainsaw, but Halloween remains the only one to have crossed over in any big way, to the point that two of the stars of 1998’s lame Halloween H20 appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. The point is that a sequel to Halloween bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis was cover-story news — twenty years after the original movie was released. By contrast, Phantasm and Chainsaw have seen a variety of sequels, with little or no coverage outside the horror press. Few people aside from horror fans really get the other three movies; everyone gets Halloween.

The apparent, and deceptive, simplicity of Halloween sets it apart; like much of Carpenter’s other work, it has a cool purity. Even the goofiest of the Halloween sequels, which lacked that purity and flew off in ecstasies of needless exposition about Celtic ritual and the true motives for Michael’s murders, showed more imagination than, say, your average Friday the 13th potboiler. (Though some of the Halloween sequels — the unflushed toilet Halloween 5 being the series’ lowlight — played on about the same level as Friday the 13th, reducing Michael to a masked automaton like his imitator Jason.) There was no additional mythology for Jason, or even Freddy Krueger (well, aside from the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” thing). Carpenter and Hill created a strong spine to build later stories on, though in retrospect it was unwise to do so. Look at the Halloween series and you see what might have become of E.T. if it hadn’t been made by someone as powerful, and as adamant about forbidding a sequel, as Steven Spielberg.

You could also make a case for Michael Myers being the archetype for modern terrors, random death, the nut who comes after you and just ends you for no good reason. Michael, of course, comes from a long lineage, probably going all the way back to Grendel; and even in modern horror movies, Norman Bates and Leatherface were there first. But Norman and Leatherface are emblems of familial dysfunction; we can psychoanalyze them pretty well. Michael has his own family issues, but if we ignore (as we should) the facile psychobabble of Halloween II, which informed us that Michael was really after Laurie Strode because she was his sister, we’re left with what Coleridge described (referring to Iago) as “motiveless malignity.” Not even malignity, really, since that implies sadism. Like death itself, Michael is neither good nor evil. He’s a fact of life. He’s the cancer that decides to grow in your body, the car that happens to swerve your way, the blockage that gets comfortable in an artery and stops the blood flow to your heart or brain. You can’t do anything to stop these things, and your attempts to explain them afterward sound weak in the face of their power to destroy you.

I think that’s really what Halloween teaches us and why its appeal is so strong. Few people are genuinely, literally afraid of what David Cronenberg called “the man in the basement with the knife.” Well, yes, we’d be afraid if we actually met that man some night, but I don’t think anyone leaves the theater afraid that Michael Myers, or someone like him, will creep up the bedroom stairs. We fear what he represents — chaos, death. Laurie Strode’s biggest fear prior to Halloween night is the possible rejection by her crush Ben Tramer. “Death has come to your little town,” Dr. Loomis informs Sheriff Brackett, as if the sheriff had forgotten that Death came to this little town once before, fifteen years ago. Haddonfield is our neat, orderly life; Michael is the X factor, the unpredictable element bringing it all down.