Halloween

“I wish I had you all alone. Just the two of us…”** It’s funny. John Carpenter is a filmmaker who, when I think of him, I think of so much more than just Michael Myers and rather go to all of the masterful work he’d turn out in his wake. And Michael Myers has, in turn, become such a staple of Hollywood and mainstream franchise horror in a way that he has an entire other life outside of Carpenter’s Rolodex. So, in spite of it being an obvious fact of reality, I find myself often having to a bit of recontextualizing whenever I come back to Halloween, and remember how the two owe each other everything. And, honestly? I find Halloween to be more immensely more interesting when you examine as a part of Carpenter’s wider canon rather than the launching pad for a slasher franchise, because all of the man’s archetypal instincts are present here. Unspeaking, unfeeling evil that cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. A group of utterly normal people who are completely unprepared for it. A bleak ending that promises that the evil isn’t gone, not really. The warning signs were already there, of the coming of the Master. I’ve recently come to fall pretty passionately in love with Rob Zombie’s vision of these as an ultraviolent and ultra-profane and utterly raw, emotional open wound. I have a soft spot for the super glossy, nostalgic to a fault fanfare of David Gordon Green’s trilogy. I even have a place in my heart for the low stakes, blatantly commercial trashiness of stuff like Halloween 4. But there really just isn’t any outdoing the doer. Not a one of them really, truly evokes the simplicity of Carpenter’s original. It’s a ghost story, an All Hallow’s Eve fable about the man in the white face and the girl he’s closing in on. The way in which he makes Michael feel alarmingly mortal and yet like a creature of the night, an almost vampiric entity that disappears into the wind is something that no sequel or remake has ever really, truly captured. The way it achieves everything it’s setting out to do in the most simple of ways is so incredible. It’s just this collision of wicked evil and small town innocence, awash in a tidal wave of seasonal atmosphere, I love the intercutting between Laurie’s sweet little Halloween festivities with the kids she’s babysitting and her friends trying to sin and getting punished for it. The jump from Bob’s death, one of the great Michael moments that border on making him seem alien, to Laurie and the kids celebrating their Jack-O-Lantern tells you everything you need to know. Michael simply cannot have her, because she is a protector and she is inherently and fundamentally good. But just because he can’t have her doesn’t mean that she can escape him. That lighting bolt of anxiety always hits my spine when she’s desperately banging on the door, begging for Tommy to wake up while Michael stalks closer and closer to her across the street. The light cracking through the barely open doorway where her friends’ corpses are displayed. So many of the shots are like paintings. So many individual images live on as snapshots and frames in my head that when they live in vivid motion, it’s like connecting a puzzle piece in my head. Such beautiful uses of shadows and cold blues. Gives it the same feeling as a bad dream. There’s an innate sense of tragedy and quiet devastation that gently rides out the runtime. Donald Pleasance is so strangely softspoken and modest in comparison to his ravings in later installments, and I always get this profound sense of guilt and shame that he imbues Loomis with, as if he’s entirely to blame for what’s happening and what has been unleashed onto this sleepy little town. But I also like that he’s quietly batshit crazy, too. Laugh my ass off every time he scares Lonnie away from the Myers house and grins about it. I often find myself forgetting just how blatant a lot of this is, too. Michael is hiding from essentially everybody but Laurie. He makes sure that nobody sees him— nobody but her. Multiple moments where she’s explicitly aware of him and it very clearly upsets her. The way in which he spends the runtime isolating her and the kids and each of them are, at one point or another, aware that he’s there is genuinely frightening. I don’t think this has the same visceral, disgusting power as something like Texas Chain Saw but there is a certain voyeuristic, invasive quality about it that makes it rather eerie viewing with all the lights off. A beautiful little campfire tale. Feels apocalyptic, as is typical of so many of its brethren in Carpenter’s catalogue. Not nearly my favorite of his, not even my pick for his magnum opus. But one has to consider and ultimately concede that it’s still his major artistic and cultural achievement. Has there ever been a piece of piano music that’s ever been so easily identifiable? Those black, lifeless eyes feel like windows into oblivion and I’m always enchanted by what I see when I choose to stare into them. Happy Halloween. 🎃 “Don’t you think it would be better if you referred to it as him?” “If you say so.”