Halloween: Horror that just won’t die
A spoilery look back at one of Hollywood’s scariest franchises
An unplaceable feeling of dread that follows you through your day. The sound of a knife as it swings through the air. The feeling of being watched. Blood splashing over everything. The feeling of being followed. And a shape, standing in the shadows, watching and waiting.
Everyone has been scared of the boogeyman, at some point. And this October, he’s making a return to the big screen. Since Halloween’s release in 1978, Michael Myers has become an infamous name, almost synonymous with the slasher genre.
The Halloween series, since then, has been going on for quite some time. It’s gone through countless sequels and reboots. The continuity is messy, but the new film Halloween (2018) takes place directly after the first movie, scrapping everything else. If you’re going to see to see it in theaters this month, here’s a recap on what happened all those years ago.
Halloween 1963. A six-year-old child inexplicably stabs his older sister to death. His name is Michael Myers. He is condemned to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. Fifteen years later, Michael is to be taken before a judge. Dr. Samuel Loomis and Marion Chambers arrive to escort him. He steals their car, killing her.
Halloween 1978. Laurie Strode, the daughter of realty broker, drops a key off at a house for sale. A masked figure follows her from the abandoned house to school, home, and to her babysitting job. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis watches the house that Laurie visited earlier - Michael’s former home, in which he killed his sister until he discovers the stolen car and begins to search the streets.
Annie Brackett, one of Laurie’s friends, gets her to watch the girl she’s babysitting. After dropping off Lindsey, she gets into her car to go pick up her boyfriend. Waiting in the back is a masked figure. He strangles her and slits her throat.
Bob Simms and Lynda Van Der Klok, more friends of Laurie’s, visit the house that Annie was supposed to be babysitting in.
Bob goes downstairs to get his girlfriend a beer. He is pinned to a wall by a knife. A shape, covered by a bedsheet, and wearing Bob’s glasses, steps into the room where Lynda waits. After attempting to have a conversation, she calls Laurie and is strangled with the telephone cord.
Laurie can hear the sounds of Lynda’s death. Curious, she crosses the street and enters the house. She discovers their corpses, and begins to panic. Michael, lying in wait, resumes his attacks. He chases her through the house, until she escapes and returns back to the other house. She tells them to go upstairs and lock the door.
Michael has followed her, though. She stabs him in the throat with a knitting needle and hides upstairs. He finds her, but thinking quickly, Laurie crafts a weapon out of a coat hanger. Michael is stunned when she stabs him in the eye with it, and drops his knife. She shoves it into his chest, and he falls. Then, she tells the children to leave and get help.
Dr. Loomis, seeing the children leave, starts towards the house. Laurie is tired. She stands up, smiles, and begins walking downstairs. But then there are hands around her neck. They struggle. She pulls off his mask, but even with a person’s face, Michael still seems inhuman. It looks like she’s going to die, until a deafening explosion fills the room. Loomis has arrived just in time, and shoots Michael repetitively. The masked killer stumbles backwards, and falls off a two-story balcony. And then It’s over. It appears Michael Myers, The Shape, the boogeyman himself, is dead. Until Loomis looks over the balcony. Michael is gone.
It’s undeniable that Halloween had a massive impact on the world. If its many, many sequels don’t prove that people loved it, the culture that it cultivated certainly did. A lot of horror movies since its release have been love letters to the classic. It was a never-before-seen type of innovative film.
Halloween brought to the table creative camera work. Many scenes of the film are presented from the point of view of its villain. Usually, viewers are supposed to sympathize with the hero. This subversion has its watchers shifting uncomfortably in their seats already through the first scene, as it puts them in the shoes of six-year-old Michael Myers as he walks into his house, grabs a butcher’s knife, puts on a clown mask, and brutally kills his older sister.
The movie popularized the idea of the “final girls.” The trope is self-explanatory enough. The final girl is the last person to face down the killer. She proves to be more resourceful than anyone else she knows, and is fearless. Laurie is not scared to defend herself, and the children she’s watching over. We see this in nearly every movie now, but girls used to be disposable, and female protagonists were rare. Other final girls include Nancy from A Nightmare On Elm Street, Sally from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even Ripley from Alien.
It cultivated the slasher genre. Before it, there were films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, but Halloween acted as a major trendsetter. In fact, it wasn’t just the slasher genre that the film changed, but arguably, the entire horror industry. This is because it taught other horror movies how to make a truly effective villain.
Previous to 1978, most popular horror films were supernatural in nature. There was a suspension of disbelief. People had fun with movies such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) but no one there came a point where no one was scared of them. While people may have worried about ghosts late at night, those movies didn’t cause an active need to check over your shoulder.
Before the fateful release of Halloween, most people were already subconsciously scared of the boogeyman. The threat of the boogeyman was used to make children behave, or as tease on the schoolyard. Childhood and culture ingrained in humanity the fear of the boogeyman. It is a nebulous concept of terror, with no explanation behind what it does what it does.
This is perhaps what made a movie about the boogeyman so potent. Everyone knows what it is, and it’s not so dismissible as just a ghoul or a ghost. Every single person had those moments of fear in childhood, and even as an adult, where the shadows seemed longer and more person-shaped. With how Halloween presents it’s villain, it becomes less difficult to believe that those shadows at the edge of that room aren’t a person standing very, very still. Especially given how stealthy and quiet Michael Myers is. The boogeyman has no drive to what it does, and seemingly can be anywhere at anytime. The same goes for Michael - he has no motivation, and always seems to be around the corner.
It’s not that this conceptualization of Myers as the boogeyman is dismissed in the movie, either. The children that Laurie babysits claim that Myers is the boogeyman, though Laurie dismisses it. When Laurie is trying to comfort the children and get them out of the house, she believes she has killed Michael and says so. Tommy replies, “You can’t kill the boogeyman!” And even after the climax of the film, Laurie whispers, tears in her voice. “It was the boogeyman.” Dr. Loomis, her saviour, and the person with the rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this... six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and... the blackest eyes - the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.”
This quote is truly what drives home how terrifying Michael is, and solidifies him as both the embodiment of evil and the childish boogeyman. Loomis has been working with him for fifteen years, and never managed to get to him. He also mentions, later on, that Michael had not spoken in all of those fifteen years. There is no anger behind what Michael does, or desperation, or greed. This is what makes him so terrifying; his lack of motivation, yet willingness and dedication to slaughter.
Michael is scary because he is both mundane and supernatural. He is a person, but can take being stabbed in the neck, eyes, chest, being shot multiple times, and falling off a second-story balcony. He keeps coming, no matter what. Even though he seems to be invincible, he is still a believable villain, and that changed how horror creates it’s villains as a whole.
It’s undeniable that Halloween impacted horror as a whole, and changed our culture completely. Halloween (2018), taking place all this time after everything that Laurie Strode went through, is sure to return the just-barely fading fear of the boogeyman in full speed.