30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. HALLOWEEN
DAY 7
Halloween (1979)
A movie that started a movement. Carpenter made a film that resonated with audiences back in the late 70’s and sparked the ‘slasher-film’ craze. The idea of an invincible evil force coming for a young girl in a secluded, and possibly very safe, neighborhood was really scary for people living in suburban america.
Micheal Myers represents something coming to kill the American dream, which many people felt it was under real peril at the time.
Many horror films have represented ideas floating around the political world. Critics have argued that the movie ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (which came out the year before ‘Halloween’) represented the red communist scare. So the thought of a horror movie dealing with a notion that’s inherently scary to the American people is not that strange. But is that the only thing that makes this film special? I don’t think so.
Having a finger in the pulse of the culture is important, but I believe that Carpenter does much more here. For those have not seen it, here’s a brief summary of the movie:
“On a cold Halloween night in 1963, six-year-old Michael Myers brutally murdered his 17-year-old sister, Judith. He was sentenced and locked away for 15 years. But on October 30, 1978, while being transferred for a court date, a 21-year-old Michael Myers steals a car and escapes Smith’s Grove. He returns to his quiet hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, where he looks for his next victims.”
In this movie, Carpenter creates a slow-burn, tension-filled horror piece that I feel still holds up to this day. What makes this movie work? Easy answer, it’s the ‘monster’ (or more specifically) how its portrayed.
The opening POV scene “decorporalizes” the evil. The haunting movements of the floating camera puts us behind the eyes of the monster and hides his identity form us. The white mask conceals any form of emotion but is still vaguely human. His huge frame is imposing and his clothes are almost non-descriptive, but what I find more telling about how Carpenter approached Myers is the way the psychiatrist talks about him, he calls him an “it” or “the evil”. What is Micheal Myers?
Myers is not a human being in this film, is the depository of everything evil contained in a human body. It doesn’t run, it doesn’t flinch, it doesn’t stop. It is simply coming to get whatever it wants.
Setting the story during a holiday where people disguise themselves is a great idea, this way the creators can have Myers walk around the town during daylight at it doesn’t seem that strange or alarming to the people of the town. It’s just an eerie presence walking among them.
Either due to the small budget (or because Carpenter is a really smart man), he set many of the scenes with Myers during the day. Myers just watches and stalks from afar, but this tells the audience that daylight is not safe either. A lot of films, especially modern ones, have this problem were daylight feels like a safe place from the horror that awaits the characters. In this film, the threat is ever-present.
Is also worth mentioning that even though Myers is almost a force of nature, he is also corporeal. I think that this might be even scarier than a ghost, at least to people who don’t believe in the supernatural.
Myers stays in the border between human and phantom, scaring us from deep inside the uncanny valley.
Tomorrow: DON’T BREATHE (2016)
Yesterday: JU-ON (2002)
