31 Days of Halloween 2024: Halloween (1978)
We’ve arrived, and following yesterday’s penultimate post, we get to the final essay of my 31 Days of Halloween project.
It’s been a pleasure. I will be announcing some follow-up material to this soon, but in the meantime, you should go ahead and keep an eye on my new blog. I’ll be posting information there very soon.
For those of you who have taken the time to read along, I thank you for your support and feedback. It sustained me through this improvised gauntlet I took on at a whim.
As for our final film, it has to be Halloween (1978), doesn't it?
Anyway, let’s get into the final post. You can stream Halloween on Shudder.
31. Halloween (1978)
The amount of time in hours I have spent rewatching Halloween (1978) is hard to measure, but it is one of my most-watched films, in general. I watch it in October. You kind of have to, after all. But I also just watch it other times throughout the year because, in many ways, John Carpenter’s Halloween is a pretty close-to-perfect film. Free time to kill? Bored? Why not Halloween?
I have my share of critiques of the movie, but largely they don’t matter because the experience of watching it is one of consistent joy for me. it may be a horror film about a manifestation of evil in the unknowable form of The Shape, but damn if it doesn’t make me happy to watch it play out time and time again.
And, as a whole, I enjoy the larger franchise and successive films, often to increasingly diminishing results. I’ve seen them all a few times over, some more excitedly than others. I even greatly enjoy the odd-duck Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).
But as much as I love Halloween, both the first film and the larger series, if I had my druthers, I would never have allowed them to do another Michael Myers film. In my heart, I wish there was never a sequel to the night that evil returned to Haddonfield to terrorize Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Understanding Evil; or the Unknown ‘Why’ of Michael Myers
My main reason for wishing we never got Halloween II (1981), as much as I love it, and the successive sequels, is that the first film is a wonderful interrogation of the inscrutable nature of evil. True evil - an evil that has no moral calculus.
It just exists because evil has always existed.
Michael Myers is a primal force in the film — we get the narrative that establishes him as a murderer as a child, and then he spends two decades isolated and studied by Dr. Loomis (the iconic Donald Pleasance). But largely, we know nothing about him beyond that. The credits don’t even refer to him in Michael in his most cinematically powerful form of a jumpsuit and mask.
He is merely The Shape (as played by Nick Castle).
John Carpenter and Debra Hill draw an association between The Shape and the folkloric boogeyman, a mythic construct meant to caution and warn children. This is the same task that Michael Myers/The Shape is given in the screenplay, only the kids are older and the medium has changed. This isn’t the traditional bedtime story that established the boogeyman tradition centuries prior, but it is the update that society needed.
Michael Myers/The Shape operates as an extension of fairytale figures such as The Big Bad Wolf, a figure that is less an individual proper, but more an avatar by which to pin the evils of the world, a tulpa of sin and anxiety. Anxiety over the rotting out of American idealism, the harsh realities of how violent the world is, the continual cases of serialized slaughter, a lack of trustworthy authority figures — all of these things, and more, are under the mask of The Shape.
And yet, with The Shape representing all of these things, there is also a person under the mask; there is an individual whom we can see. We know of their past.
Yet, we can never truly understand Michael; that is what is most terrifyingly effective in the first film and why successive films actively work against this representation of unknowable evil.
An Inscrutable Shape
We even take the point-of-view of Michael as a child early in the film — one of cinema’s greatest and trickiest openings. We are unsettled as the mask is removed, and we see a wide-eyed child clutching that knife. We may think we know why Michael killed Judith. We see the incident framed in such a way that we might assume Michael is punishing her for some perceived lack of morals given her sexual conduct. But we never know. We are not meant to.
Audiences project theory onto the actions of the one later called The Shape. We may also know him as Michael, but do we really? He seeks out sexually active teens in the film, so that must be the motivation, right? But we also see these kids are also incredibly vulnerable. Maybe it has nothing to do with sex? Maybe audiences just read into it as such.
Another interpretation: Maybe he is looking to replace or relive his relationship with his sister. After all, Laurie enters the bedroom at the climax of the film and finds Annie’s body (Nancy Kyes) displayed beneath the stolen headstone of Judith Myers. But why her specifically? Why murder the others? Why go after Laurie?
Maybe Michael is just killing because he enjoys it. The chilling scene where he murders Bob (John Michael Graham) and pins him to the wall is particularly fascinating as we see a hint of an actual curiosity and personality from Michael. He stands in the kitchen, staring at the corpse, and tilts his head back and forth studying or admiring the result.
Maybe it is all of these. Maybe it is countless other reasons. Maybe there is no reason beyond just committing evil. That is where we lose the Michael of it all and how The Shape emerges. A shadow of a person that only aims to hurt, an Evil given a direct form.
At the end of the film, Laurie and Loomis triumph, momentarily, over The Shape. Evil is defeated but this does not last long. Michael’s body disappears and we sit with the unease that he could be anywhere, echoed by the series of establishing shots accompanied by John Carpenter’s iconic music and the heavy breathing of someone wearing a mask.
This is the reality of the world, evil exists and could be anywhere. There is an incredible power to this ending. Even more powerful is that it has no motive or reason.
The very nature of Halloween II undoes so much of this. Michael Myers is very much a scary figure and is beloved as a monster. There is no denying that. There is a reason he continues to haunt us.
But he was only ever The Shape in the original film, and he will never be The Shape again. We know too much and are poorer for it.
