Halloween Week: Halloween (1978)

1 month ago

Halloween Week: Halloween (1978)

EVERYONE’S ENTITLED TO ONE GOOD SCARE

John Carpenter’s original Halloween is now best known as one of the most important early ‘slasher’ films, establishing tropes which are still reproduced and reworked in horror films today and most memorably pastiched in Scream and its sequels. The quick first death, and the tragic stupidity of the couples who go down together. The cars which never start on time, and the phone lines which alway go dead. You know the drill. But for me what sets Halloween apart from its countless imitators is Carpenter’s singular and much-imitated visual style, its unique and compelling focus on the experience of space and light in suburbia.

I’ve only been to America on a couple of occasions, both relatively brief, but what has always struck me is the endless miles of sprawling, low-rise buildings, a grid-system so often defined by miniature worlds wholly detached from one another. This couldn’t be more different from the classic British suburb, with its rows of semi-detached houses packed up tight against one another. Both often seem like quietly complacent zones of terrifying possibility, but while early British horror films like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom focused on more intimate zones — strangers thrown together in the darkened back rooms of shared pre-war housing — the contrast between the open expanses and the enclosed spaces of Halloween seems to invite a danger more abstract and less nuanced.

The first thing we see is a white house at night, an island of light floating in the darkness. As the camera pans unsteadily towards it, it somehow becomes clear that this is the point of view of someone who ought not to be there, and that they are going to do something very bad. From Citizen Kane onwards, films have used tracking shots to whisk the audience unseen into spaces, but here the camera/killer has a terrible presence within the house — we see, but we cannot risk being seen, and so what follows is not the guilty pleasure of the unseen voyeur but a disturbing, claustrophobic vision which begins as soon as the camera moves from the open air into the small rooms and tight corridors of the house itself. The audience becomes complicit in what follows, but again Carpenter refrains from giving us the gratuitous pay-off we’re expecting — the gore is minimal, and the end of this sequence is so absurd as to be bleakly comic.

When compared to the slasher films which followed it, several things might strike the modern audience as curious: the pacing is way off, for one thing. You could set your watch by the frequency of the murders in most generic horror movies, but the central part of Halloween is dedicated not to violence but to a slow turning of the screw. Carpenter takes Charles Dickens’ classic prelude to ‘The Haunted House’ as dictum: ‘I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect.’ We are in a bright and pleasantly anonymous suburb. It is a beautiful sunlit day. Laurie, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is leaving the house, going to school, talking to her friends. Myers is glimpsed many times from a distance, always suddenly and without warning and never by anyone else. Seeing him in stark black-and-white in the leafy green, accompanied by the strange throb and stab of the synthesized soundtrack, we know he wants nothing else but to kill her.

The teasing glimpses permitted of our killer are always framed in relation to the space around him. The first thing we see of the adult Myers is a blurry white shape in the night air, then a hand flailing at the window of a car, and throughout the film his presence is defined by this contrast of white-on-black: the sight of his expressionless white mask against shadow, complemented with the glint of a long knife. He resembles the classic portrait of death with hood and scythe, updated for an age more afraid of strange men in black boiler suits. Later he appears standing in Laurie’s garden, his mask/face hovering amongst her white laundry fluttering on the line. What were once safe places become so disrupted by his presence it’s as though he must be a rip in the fabric of time and space — or a joke. But in the dark, enclosed passages of the family home, the joke takes on a terrible reality. Carpenter reminds us that there is something very real at the heart of our Halloween festival: the holiday night becomes a ritualistic space within these suburban spaces for the fulfillment of our deepest desires and darkest fears.

Had the daytime visions of Myers preceded the initial murder, we might ask whether he was not just a product of Laurie’s over-active imagination. And perhaps Myers is her creation, to some extent — after all, this is a film deeply concerned with watching and being watched, the hinterland between consent and uncertainty. The other girls mock her for her sensitive attitude to the unwanted attention of boys, but her fears will be almost absurdly well-founded. Seen a certain way, Myers could be regarded as a psychological projection, a backlash against their bold intrusion into her secret life which soon comes back to haunt Laurie. Loomis and the Myers back-story could be read as a device similar to that frequently used by David Lynch: a deliberately absurd and exaggerated dream-narrative which the audience accepts as ‘real’, but is in fact invented by the central character in order to screen that which is too disturbing to be confronted directly.

Or perhaps not. The troublesome thing about Halloween is that it’s both very simple and very complicated; one could apply virtually any theory to this film and have it both confirmed and contradicted. Myers is a whale seen in a cloud, a face glimpsed in the wallpaper, and the film a Rorschach test for our own feelings. But of all the controversies still surrounding modern horror film, the misogynistic style of the slasher genre is still the hot topic. In her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover explained how films like Halloween use the trope of the ‘final girl’ — the sole female survivor of the killer, the one who begins as the shy, insecure smart girl and becomes the half-sexy, half-terrorised one who takes up arms against him — to invert any perverse pleasure the audience might feel at watching women suffer. Those who go in hoping to see gratuitous violence end up identifying across gender, rooting for the strong woman; Halloween ends with an inversion of the opening sequence, with the audience sympathetic to Laurie’s plight rather than in the mind of a killer. Of course, there are problems with Clover’s thesis — not least that the ‘final girl’ is rarely actually victorious on her own terms — but it makes for a useful addition to our toolkit when thinking about the modern slasher flick.

Still, there’s always the danger that we may be reading too much into films which essentially exploit our most primal fears. Horror will always court controversy because it’s the only genre which is regularly punished for doing its job too well. Comedies can get away with almost anything so long as they’re genuinely funny, but a horror film which is truly frightening and deeply disturbing can still be widely resented on other grounds — sometimes rightfully, sometimes not — but I suspect that our need to be frightened from time to time may be as deep-rooted as our need to laugh.