Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978)
For whatever reason, I’ve only seen four films in the Halloween franchise: the first three and the awkwardly named Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, which I only saw last year. I’ve never seen the sequels between Season of the Witch and H20 nor have I seen Halloween Resurrection. I’ve liked two of the three Rob Zombie films I’ve seen, but never saw his take on the series.
There’s really no excuse for not having seen them. I’ve seen every Friday the 13th film multiple times, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie at least once. I grew up watching VHS tapes of Jaws and its increasingly terrible sequels and love them all like you would an aging, incontinent dog. Last year I watched all of the Child’s Play series and genuinely liked them. I have also subjected myself to all ten entries in the Hellraiser franchise. That was a mistake. So, why not tackle Halloween on the fortieth anniversary of its release and while a new film is in theaters?
I hardly need introduce you to the 1978 film. Halloween is the classic slasher film. It built on the tropes laid out by Italian giallo and of earlier slashers like 1974’s Black Christmas, took the action to suburban America, and introduced an enduring archetype in The Shape as he’s called in the credits. His name is Michael Myers, but I think the backstory presented here and in later films detracts from his symbolic power as a white masked man with no stated motivation beyond murder and dominance. Without him, an entire class of cinematic antagonists would not exist, though none of them quite work on the level presented in this film.
Michael Myers at the age of six murdered his sister Judith on Halloween night in 1963. He has spent the intervening fifteen years in a borderline catatonic state at a mental facility under the care of his psychiatrist Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance). On the night of October 30, days before he is due to undergo a court hearing to determine whether he should remain under psychiatric care, he escapes [1] to wreak havoc on his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois.
We are then introduced to our actual protagonist, high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her friends Annie Brackett (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda van der Klok (P.J. Soles). They are ordinary, perfectly likeable teenage girls whose behavior in the film has contributed to a whole subset of film theory. Laurie’s a more attentive student than Lynda, for instance, and doesn’t have a boyfriend like her or Annie, but to hold her up as a paragon of moral virtue as the stereotypical “final girl” because of that is ridiculously unfair to the other two. Annie and Lynda don’t “deserve” to be victims either.
This is one of the things that irritates me about scholarly analyses of the slasher film genre, or at least a certain interpretation of it that’s become the commonly accepted way of looking at them. It presents these films as vehicles for misogyny and slutshaming, because the killer targets characters who have sex, while the virginal “final girl” survives. This rubric breaks down quickly when applied to any given film, but it also seems to forget that the psychopathic murderer is the villain. We’re not supposed to agree with their point of view! Even when the camera switches to a first person perspective as it often does in Halloween, it’s to create suspense and not so the audience can revel in their anti-sex ideology. For god’s sake, the entire reason the start of Halloween follows Michael Myers’s perspective is to set up the shocking reveal that a child committed murder. Yes, the genre is far from perfect with regard to representations of women, but shit, what media out there isn’t?
Before ending here, I would like to bring to attention the producer and co-screenwriter Debra Hill, whose contributions to the film often go either unnoticed or underappreciated. Hill worked with Carpenter on such films as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween II, The Fog, Escape from New York, and Escape from L.A. In addition, she had considerable success as a producer on her way, working on The Dead Zone, Clue, Adventures in Babysitting, and The Fisher King. I don’t think Halloween would be nearly as heralded without her. Imagine how much less believable the teenager girls in the film would be without her there [2]. There’s a tendency with auteur theory to overvalue directors, but there’s not an unimportant person on the set of a film, and Hill should be better acknowledged.
[1] By stealing a car, which shouldn’t make sense, but driving an automatic transmission when you’re not being tasked to parallel park is easy enough that I’m willing to excuse it.
[2] Not that men cannot write authentic female characters, but it’s been a pretty dismal record over the millennia.
October 22, 2018
oliveresque 