Halloween
"Because I realised that what was living behind that boy's eyes was pure and simply... evil."
America. Illinois. Haddonfield. Halloween. Houses, streets, cars, people. Safety. A world that's never been touched by tragedy, or malice, or danger. That's suburbia. Rows and rows of houses, with orange, crunchy leaves on the floor and orange lights glowing out of the windows. It's cold, and dark, and the sun is setting. Everywhere is masked in a beautiful pinky-orange hue. The front room. The kitchen. The dining room. The bedroom. The bathroom. These are the places of John Carpenter's Halloween. These are the places of our lives, of everyone's lives.
Before 1978, horror films mostly took place in exquisite locations, and with well-spoken, well-equipped adults. Castles that occupied legendary monsters, old creaky town-houses that locked in the unthinkable, deathly destruction in the faraway lands of Europe. But in 1978, Carpenter brought horror home. He gave it to our teenaged daughters. Our helpless, young children. Our front rooms. Our isolated streets. Our small towns. He even brought it to daylight. This is the genius of Halloween, because it told audiences everywhere that horror can be anywhere, not just in abandoned factories and haunted houses. The haunting can come to you, you don't need to come to it.
And isn't that the point of Halloween? Michael Myers killed his sister when he was six years old. There was no reason, no motive. In fact, we know absolutely nothing about it, because he never spoke a word. He was a normal, cute kid, in a normal, well-adjusted life on a normal, well-adjusted street in a normal, well-adjusted town. He was not the product of anything. He's not stricken with PTSD, he's not got his Mother's corpse in his house. There's nothing to him. He was locked up, and then one night, he escapes and returns home. He's been looking through the wall onto this night for a long time, and now it's here. He's a vicious predator, an animal, keeping a keen eye on his victims, memorising their routines, deconstructing their social cliques and their routines. He knows everything he needs to know about them, and he knows how to take them all down.
Michael Myers takes them all down, but he does so with no urgency. He's slow. He's purposeful. He lets his presence be known. The chase is, perhaps, more important than the kill. He must have loved that Laurie fought back, mustn't he? Michael Myers, as he stands in this film, is one of the greatest movie monsters of all time. His callous, statue-still stares from the gardens and the streets are horrifying. The wide shots of the locations with Michael standing, somewhere, staring, are just terrifying. It's broad daylight, and Laurie is on the phone. She looks out of her window and sees Michael Myers, standing between some bedsheets in her garden. She looks again and he's gone, but he was definitely there, and he wanted her to know that. There are no shadows to hide inside, because Michael doesn't need it. This use of daylight and space that reverberates throughout Halloween is what makes it the best horror film ever made. Carpenter is taking everything that was safe to us, everything that horror had never touched before, and then he ripped it away from us. We all have daily routines. We go to work or school. We hang with friends. We go for drinks. We watch films at home. We drive around. These are all things that were safe to us, because horror is meant to be found, not given. Now, it's invading every orifice of safety we thought we had, and it's wearing a blank, expression-less mask, and it's relentless, and it breathes. It breathes loud.
When Halloween ends, and all the carnage has played out, Carpenter takes us on one last tour of all the locations of the film. The establishing shots of the various houses that we see throughout the film, each-time framed exactly the same but with different content: from a kid knocking on the door, to Michael carrying a body out the house, to kids screaming past it for help. The same frame, but a differnet story each time. And then we visit them again. The locations are empty, but there is destruction. Furniture is fallen, windows are smashed, there are knives and blood everywhere. And above it all, we can hear the breathing. Michael is everywhere. All of these places of our lives have Michael in them, at any moment. Pure evil isn't something that manifests in a body like Michael, it's an energy of the universe that exists in all these places, and sometimes, these places manifest as a Michael Myers. Carpenter is reminding us that we're never safe, not even at home.
Halloween is an artistic masterpiece. Sure, it now wears its own cliches on its sleeve, but we have to give it credit for creating those cliches. It's shot beautifully, with every shot purposefully composed and important. It's badly-acted, of course, but we can forgive that. It doesn't matter, it's not what's relevant. It's still scary as fuck, isn't it? I would be remiss if I didn't mention the score, but what can I say about one of the most unnerving and beautiful pieces of music ever composed that hasn't already been said? What can I say about the genius of Donald Pleasance's performance and the inherent philosophy of his perception of Michael Myers? What can we say about the perfect embodiment of the boogeyman that Michael Myers represents? What can we say about the nature of good and evil being tantalisingly sprinkled over the mundanity of suburban life? What can we say about the sheer terror of being stalked by an eyeless animal with a penchant for blood? Michael Myers is pure evil, and the film that houses him is pure cinema. The best horror film ever made.