“How could she know whether I could see them or not? I wondered. Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and duelling with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe she was right. Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like the midnight monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a deep sleep, my pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. How can you tell when someone is only imagining? I gazed out across the grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my hands for dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up in his arms. I could feel the cold of the outside world against his one-day growth of beard.”
In the introduction to his 1995 best seller The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan ponders the above when as a child he told his mom that he could see people across the ocean from his bedroom window. His mother quiets his youthful exuberance with facts, but it springs Sagan into contemplating if imagination can ever fully be ruled by the realities of the world.
Taking stock of the mid 90s hoopla surrounding spurious tabloid claims of life of Mars or the Moon or elsewhere, Sagan wonders if the world, particularly the United States, had become overwhelmed by pseudoscience – if the world of rationality have bent to the whims of the fantastical. Sagan was and is perhaps right that the marketplace of ideas has become marred by inadequacies, but what of the public consciousness? Rarely are people given more license, encouraged even to imagine “midnight monsters,” ghouls and goblins galore than on Halloween and with horror films.
In a world ruled by laws, rules, and science, horror films are the chaotic melting pot for our basest carnal desires. We, like Sagan, like to downplay our violent, senseless roots best typified in Kubrick's “Origin of Man” sequence from 2001, but as Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscience blogger, recently wrote, “Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/is-self-knowledge-overrated/). And while we hopefully eliminated the worst of our biological origins through the our throws of civility, our collective id is always lumbering and craving sustenance.
For many, one of the only places to release with unbridled enthusiasm our primordial schadenfreude is at the movies on Halloween. Stephen King in his well known essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” says as much: “It is true that the mythic 'fairy-tale' horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.” Like Sagan, King connects irrational imaginings with childlike wonder. It is children who are the most vulnerable to regression back to violence as a means of conflict resolution, whether as perpetrators or victims. Indeed, parents must civilize and protect the younger generation from the “cold of the outside world” that Sagan feared.
John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a fairy-tale – more a cautionary tale – of its own kind but at its heart it poses an intriguing question: What if the Boogey-Man were real? In a place already ripe with superstition and mythos and pseudoscience, what if the world was actually haunted by demons?
Sam Loomis is the film's hero. He is a doctor, a profession at its root that is driven by the scientific search for truth. As Sagan himself notes, “Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: 'Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. . .'' (8). But Loomis is not an ordinary doctor or an ordinary hero. He is not the strapping model, romantic interest leads that would later come to dominate the slasher genre opposite strong female survivors. He is a different archetype: the lone nut. Typically, the crazed old timer who knows the apocrypha of the killer or the killing fields is around just long enough to warn the headliners and simultaneously serve as a red herring for first time viewers before getting offed in rather gory fashion in the second or third reel.
But Loomis persists through the whole film as an apparent voice of reason. He is the only one who knows the truth about Michael Myers, and like the lone nut, he continually reminds everyone of the dire fate that awaits if they do not heed his Cassandran rants. Yet, the irony is that Loomis abandons his scientific grounding for fantastical theories. In his first scene, he nervously rides with a psychiatric nurse to the hospital where Michael has been held for the past 15 years. The nurse is apprehensive because of Loomis's ramblings about Michael's capacity for evil but Loomis is the one that succumbs to paranoia. He intentionally refers to Michael as “it,” not “he” as if characterizing a supernatural force. In a later monologue, he cautions the local sheriff to take Michael and the threat seriously because of his eyes – “the Devil's eyes” – and the darkness, the evil lurking behind them.
Loomis's embrace of folklore and superstition would ordinarily be at odds with his role are a man guided by science and rationality, but instead, it is evidence that he has been converted into this anti-faith (“atheism”) by witnessing first hand the purity of Michael's evil. If he were to be discarded as the lone nut, he would die prematurely or alternative authority figures would replace him. However, all of the other possibilities are underdeveloped or easily discarded. In fact, part of the cause (as opposed to the solution) for Michael's insane spree is the film's adults.
Continually, we see that parents are absent and babysitters or siblings are unattentive. In the film's opening scene, Judith Myers says to her boyfriend that her little brother Michael is “around here somewhere” and then she proceeds to make out and have sex with her boyfriend. Of course, we see and hear all of this through Michael's six year old perspective from outside voyeuristically looking through a window. Michael's parents only arrive after he has fatally stabbed his sister several times with a butcher's knife. Later, we see Tommy Doyle bullied at school and then walking home alone with no teachers or parents around; Michael Myers is the only adult to witness the neglect. Similarly, Annie's plan for her night of babysitting is to stick Lindsay in front of the television for hours while she has sex with her boyfriend like Michael's sister Judith. Lindsay's and Tommy's parents are both gone for the night on Halloween, unusually remiss considering Halloween is a holiday most commonly for kids to celebrate under the supervision of adults. Like Sagan and King both indicate, adults are the ones culturally and socially that are supposed to rein in the kids' delusions, but in Haddonfield, they are nowhere to be found. Even the film's other authority and adult figure, Sheriff Bracken, who casts reasonable doubt on Loomis's nightmarish tales, is no better, because as he mounts his sternest defense against the doctor midway through the film, he is unaware that his own daughter Annie has already been strangled by the very killer he can't find and doesn't believe exists.
While Loomis is Carpenter's sage, Laurie Strode is his moral compass and his scientist in waiting. She doesn't date; she's smarter than other girls and boys; she babysits responsibly; she does well in school; and she doesn't believe in superstition. She repeatedly sees Michael Myers throughout the day lurking in the shadows and at times in broad daylight, but she never subscribes to their validity. Again and again, she disregards these close encounters. Obviously, children are the ones most apt to jump to fantastic, sublime conclusions. The boys that harrass Tommy at school tease him with ghost stories of the Boogey Man coming out on Halloween. Smartly, we later see how the victims of such teasing become the instigators as Tommy does the same to Lindsay by hiding behind the curtain in the living room and whispering her name during the horror movie playing on TV.
However, while kids are obvious targets and purveyors, it is the adults that seem to thrive on perpetuating myths and tricks on each other and children and Laurie is the prime target. Twice, Annie calls Laurie only to ominously pause or pretend to be someone else hoping to elicit a scare or scream. Sheriff Bracken sneaks up on Laurie and later does the same to Loomis while he is decamped at the Myers' house. While not directed at Laurie, we even see Dr. Loomis, the supposed voice of reason, taking perverse pleasure in torturing the schoolyard bullies by whispering ominous menaces from the bushes. Moreover, because the adults are comfortable and practiced enough in the realm of youthful pranks, they do not hesitate to repeatedly express that it was “probably kids” that did a number of criminal acts around the town including robbing the hardware store, killing a dog, breaking into the Myer's house, and stealing a graveyard headstone when in actuality all of these were committed by Michael Myers. Their unreason has crippled their discerning ability to their own detriment.
In this sea of irrationality and hazing, Laurie is the objective observer. She is interested in the real and the physical, not the imaginary and the mystical. While others are quick to heighten fears and prolong agony, she shows maturity by quelling Tommy's fears about the Boogey Man. She discourages him from reading the comic books, (“Laser Man, Neutron Man, Tarantula Man”) a medium fraught with modern myth, and is the only adult telling him that the movies he's watching, the comics he's reading, and the ghost stories he's reading are make believe.
There's an obvious qualification to make though: When Tommy sees Michael Myers, who he believes to be the Boogey Man, Laurie is quick to dismiss that as make believe as well. Despite seeing the same looming “Shape” many times herself earlier in the day and during the night, she refuses to acknowledge that Tommy might actually be seeing a flesh and blood killer, which is what Michael Myers is, regardless of Loomis's disbeliefs. Even though the film flirts with the idea of the occult and the later sequels embrace this whole-heartedly, in the original film, Michael Myers is human, a possessed, depraved, inhuman, subhuman (but not superhuman), unstable, unstoppable force of nature, but a concrete individual that exists in the here and now.
By film's end though, Laurie's role has inverted. Whereas previously she is the children's sole protector, she now ventures forth into the night to confront the Boogey-Man. Tellingly, when attacked, she seeks refuge at the next door neighbor's house shouting, “Please! Help me!” only to be turned away. We see them turn on the lights and look out the window only to ignore her and mind their own business. You can imagine them suspicious and ignoring the interruption as “probably kids” playing a prank. Loomis arrives at just the right moment to empty his revolver into Michael Myers sending him careening from the second story to the ground below. Because Michael survives and escapes, Laurie, the actual voice of reason, is in shock. She cries out, “Was that the Boogey Man?” Loomis answers in the only way he knows how, “I believe it was." In the face of death and the unexplainable, she abandons her rationality, like her earlier forgotten chemistry book at school. The transformation is complete. The nonbeliever has become a believer of a world haunted by demons.
In one of the more famous reviews of Halloween by Richard T. Jameson, he argues that Carpenter is a mythological sadist by creating a world where his victims like Laurie and Loomis are unable to escape the fantastical world of superstition created by the trauma they have experienced: “Halloween toys with the possibility that 'His' mania might be catching, if only in that the experiences of this night may so traumatize the survivors that they could rehearse the mayhem forever, weird without end. This is less a serious threat or serious point than simply another angle from which to terrorize and tantalize us. John Carpenter doesn’t want this kind of cinematically invigorating evil to end; it’s intrinsic to a classical order he believes in” (http://parallax-view.org/2009/10/30/review-halloween/). Given, the self-conscious lecture in the classroom about whether or not fate is a spiritual or natural element in the world, Jameson's reading is certainly plausible. Perhaps though, Carpenter intended the film not as the first in a modern folk franchise, but as a singular trauma akin to the Boogey-Man campfire stories forced on Tommy by the bullies. After all, “it's Halloween; I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare.”
