SHOCKTOBER: Halloween (1978)
Leap into the abyss with John Carpenter’s iconic slasher. Plus: The Tenant (1976).
It’s spooky season. Every year, my wife and I spend October exploring the cinematic eerie, macabre, and downright frightening in an annual tradition we call SHOCKTOBER. I’ll be posting weekly write-ups for this year’s selections here at Discontent Dispatch.
Halloween (1978)
There are many different ways to make music. You can assemble a 100-piece symphony orchestra and perform pieces of astonishing complexity. You can expand the sonically possible in a jazz quintet, soloing your way to enlightenment with nothing but the backbeat to guide you. You can make the studio your instrument, layering tracks on tracks until you’ve produced a wall of sound, Phil Spector-style. You can play prog rock, math rock, trip hop, or Dad rock. Pretty much anything goes.
You can also make music alone. One person, one instrument, two or three chords – with a good enough musician or a good enough song, you can do the work of an orchestra. The fundamentals are all you need.
Halloween is a testament to the importance of the fundamentals. It’s a simple film in every aspect – from the concept and style down to writer-director John Carpenter’s chilling piano score – and a clear, unmitigated success, just as haunting now as upon its release. No wonder it created a genre.
The story feels familiar, especially now that thousands of slashers have taken it as a template. The film opens on 9-year-old Michael Myers (Will Sandin) stabbing his sister to death on Halloween night, 1963. Cut to fifteen years later. After escaping from a state institution, the now-adult Michael (the enormous and faceless Tony Moran) returns to his old house in Haddonfield, Illinois, where he begins stalking high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Meanwhile, Michael’s doctor, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), frantically searches for Michael, hoping to stop him before he kills again. Michael shadows Laurie and her friends, stabs a few people to death, and is driven away by Laurie and Loomis. That’s it.
But simplicity shouldn’t be confused for lack of depth. Carpenter’s style may be workmanlike, but it has elegance. He returns to the same tricks again and again, with enough variation to keep things fresh. Appropriate, I think, for a film thematically preoccupied with returning – which is to say, haunting.
Halloween, in many ways, is a ghost story. Haddonfield is haunted by Michael Myers. The old Myers house has been boarded up since Judith Myers’ murder; never sold or refurbished, it sits neglected. Local kids in search of a scare dare one another to sneak inside. And the ghosts haunting Haddonfield don’t confine themselves to the Myers house: a creeping unease radiates through the entire town. Halloween is very effective at making the suburbs alienating.
Michael’s return makes this idea – of Haddonfield’s past coming back to haunt it – terrifyingly literal. Carpenter often makes Michael clearly visible, placing him nearly out in the open (or at least prominently in the frame), even in broad daylight. But, even when he’s absent, it’s clear something is very wrong in the Haddonfield suburbs. The colors are too plain; the people are too quiet. Everything feels huge and empty. When Michael places Judith’s tombstone at the head of one of his victims, he’s only concretizing a feeling that’s always been there.
Michael Myers is the Haddonfield boogeyman. And, as Laurie’s ward Tommy says, “You can’t kill the boogeyman.”
Then there’s Laurie Strode. Bookish and somewhat buttoned up – at one point she refers to herself as “the old Girl Scout” – she’s perennially uncomfortable with the idea of leaving her comfort zone. She doesn’t party, outside of the occasional joint with her friends Annie and Lynda (Nancy Kyes and P.J. Soles, respectively); nor does she date, telling Annie boys aren’t interested because she’s “too smart.” She acts as if this isn’t by choice, but, when Annie tries to set her up with a crush, Laurie is embarrassed and horrified. In truth, she’s more at home with the children she babysits than with people her own age. She’s comfortable remaining on the margins.
To some degree, the alienation the film conveys so vividly is the alienation Laurie feels. If she moves through Haddonfield with a sense of detachment, it’s not because she’s flighty. It’s because she’s accustomed to not being seen. Always on the outside, she’s used to being an observer. Her antennae are up because they have to be.
This sensitivity, this awareness that comes from being socially marginal, allows her to detect something wrong long before anyone else. Only Loomis is comparably alert to the existence of a threat, even if Laurie is necessarily ignorant of its nature. But the fact of Laurie’s alienation – her distance from whatever the center of attention might be in 1970s suburban Illinois – is also what makes her a target.
Michael chooses his victims essentially at random. He spends Halloween stalking Laurie not for any reason related to her specifically, but because she happened to drop by his house. Normally, there’d be no reason for her to be there. It’s just that, this Halloween, her realtor father, who’s trying to sell the old Myers place, asked her to drop off the house key, and Michael just happened to be there to see her when she did. That’s all. Everything that happens in Halloween – to Laurie, her friends, the children they’re babysitting, everyone – happens for no other reason than this. It’s a matter of chance; all surface and entirely shallow.
This last point is crucial, because it conveys the essential fact of Michael Myers: he has no depth. He’s the void. Everything about him is unremarkable: the white mask, the blue mechanic’s jumpsuit, even the knives and cords he employs as weapons. He never speaks, and he has no personality to speak of. His only real characteristics are his Anton Chigurh-like ability both to kill and avoid being killed. Remember: “You can’t kill the boogeyman.”
It’s easy to try and pin Michael down as an allegory of something or other. Is he the personification of misogyny? A stand-in for the cultural currents driving some then-ascendant political movement? A spirit seeking vengeance for his dispossessed fellow mental patients, maybe?
Yes to all – to a point. He’s all of these things and none of them. Michael Myers is the dark undercurrent that haunts American life, a revenant of violence that can manifest at any time and for no real reason. Whatever specific impulse he speaks to in a given moment is only part of that larger whole.
That “American” is important, by the way. The horror of Halloween is a distinctly American horror. And Michael’s crimes are specifically American crimes. Haddonfield, Illinois, after all, stands in for every American town, and as the graveyard keeper tells Loomis in reference to the killing of Judith Myers, “Every town has something like this happen.” Michael’s suburban reign of terror could only happen here – and, the film suggest, horrors like these are happening here. Everywhere. All the time. All around us.
Few cinematic killers are as quintessentially American as Michael Myers. He gets at the abyss of the American soul.
The Tenant (1976)
This one has been on my list for a while, but I’ve been putting it off. No real reason – we all have those movies. But when my friend Brett recently recommended the novel to me, I took this as a sign it was finally time to watch it.
The Tenant, as you might expect, revolves around an apartment. At the film’s opening, Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski, poster child for separating art from artist, who also directs and co-writes) inquires after a Paris apartment. The concierge (Shelley Winters) informs him that the previous tenant attempted suicide; when Trelkovsky goes to visit this tenant in the hospital, he meets her friend, the alluring Stella (Isabelle Adjani). They bond. She gives him a hand job while they watch Enter the Dragon. You probably know the type.
At the apartment, strange happenings ensue. The neighbors are constantly at odds, lodging noise complaints and signing petitions against one another. Trelkovsky discovers a tooth hidden in a hole in the wall. In the bathroom across the courtyard, other tenants stand and stare for hours. Trelkovsky watches them through his window – and they watch him in turn. Overall, the atmosphere is oppressive. Impressively so.
All this builds and builds over the course of The Tenant’s runtime until the film becomes a high-wire act of cinematic paranoia. Suffice to say, it ventures into the strange and unexpected – and, surprisingly, the French. I’d never found Paris horrifying or strange until watching The Tenant. I guess it brought out the Texan in me.