This is several days late and at least one past All Hallow's Eve, but perhaps you can keep the spirit of the holiday alive and still find the fright from one of the best and most defining horror films of all time. John Carpenter has established himself as the Master of Horror; his film Halloween has set a bar in the horror genre that has remained relevant for thirty years, and for that reason he and his work must be taken seriously in discussion of cinema.
As a child, Michael Myers brutally killed his older sister and was institutionalized for the entirety of his adolescence. At the age of 21, though seeming tranquil enough, Michael makes his escape for which he has silently been planning with inhuman patience. Returning to his hometown, he terrorizes three girls on Halloween night while his doctor and the local sheriff try to hunt him down. His motives are unknown. As far as anyone can tell he attacks without any semblance of rhyme or reason, and is simply fueled by an unknown evil.
This sort of aimless violence, made very real by the lack of budget (everyone was asked to wear their own clothes), is what gives this film its power. When I think of slasher films there seems to be the common theme that a group of six or so teenagers of fairly one-dimensional characteristics happen upon a place which they should not have gone to or did not know that they should not have gone there. Often they receive some sort of warning from a local townsperson or sign trying to keep them away, but they either ignore it or press on to spite it. Then, in a very formulaic pattern they are picked off one by one in gruesome and mildly frightening ways. The realism has been drained out of any story they might have because the film follows conventions in order to achieve what producers know will bring in big box-office bucks. However most movie-goers will forget any of the cheap scares that they are tricked into by the time that they walk out of the theatre.
Where Halloween differs in both style and in content is that there is only one character that ever seems to have any sort of clue as to what is going on. I exclude the doctor and the sheriff, of course, because they are simply there to provide information about Michael Myers and to bring some sort of a conclusion to the film. Jamie Lee Curtis took up her first feature film as the lead character, Laurie. She sees Michael occasionally through the day from a distance, but really has no idea who or what he is about. By the evening she has completely forgotten about him, and although the boy she is babysitting is convinced that the Boogeyman is outside--which of course he is--she dismisses his fright and monster-movie mania.
There is really no collective recognition of the apparition that is Michael in the entirety of the movie. By the time Laurie realizes what is happening the film is almost over and all of her friends are dead. Right there is the lingering horror that has given Halloween and Michael Myers his power for so many decades. It is that subconscious, irrational fear when we enter a darkened house that there is someone else in there with us. We turn on the lights as fast as possible simply to prove our irrationality in the idea that a random murder has chosen our random house to kill us randomly. But what if there was someone there after all waiting for us to reach for the light switch...
Most of the spooky moments do not come from the killings, or even the moment before, but come from him watching these girls do what girls do. They drink, smoke, screw, try to earn some easy money, joke with each other, do laundry, and all the while the white mask of Michael hovers like an evil spirit just beyond a doorway. He has every possibility to kill them throughout, but it is the silent watching, the easy way in which he might be spotted if only they would turn around(!) that makes him so creepy. He stalks, and he is good at it.
As a child I watched the film When a Stranger Calls, and afterwards I could not go into my bathroom without checking behind the shower curtain. I was twelve and intellectually knew that there was no killer patiently waiting to catch me with my pants down, so to speak, but for literally months I had a ritual of checking. The day that I forcibly made myself enter the bathroom without checking was one of the scariest in my life. I obviously was not killed, but since I hadn't checked who's to say that somebody wasn't in there?
4/4
No comments:
Post a Comment