Halloween and Mental Illness: Pt 1 — History of Mentally Ill Villains
Criticism
As I mentioned in the Introduction to this set of essays, an “Honest Trailer” video for Halloween (2018) criticized the movie for its portrayal of mental illness, [1] and similar comments have at times been made about the original [2] [3]. But it’s not just this movie/series — the film industry in general has long been slammed for the way it portrays those with different mental conditions. [4] [5] [6]
In this first essay, I’ll look at the origins and history of the cliche of mentally ill villains. I’m certain we don’t need any research to tell us that Halloween 1978 was not the first movie to have this cliche, but I wanted to see where the movie fit in the history and what influence it may have had on other movies.
I think it’s debatable whether Michael Myers actually is mentally ill (we’ll get to that in future parts). But for now, let’s say that he is.
Definitions
As I started looking for examples of mentally ill characters, I quickly realized that I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. Was I looking for any mentally ill character? Or only ones who killed people? Or only ones who escaped from a mental institution? I then decided to create some categories, so I divided this cliche into a broad, general version, and a more specific version.
Broad Cliche:
“Crazy Villain” — The character is a criminal, villain, or dangerous/violent person who is mentally ill
Specific Cliche:
“Crazy Escaped Killer” — This has 3 components, which are all used in Halloween:
- The character kills someone (as opposed to merely attempting to kill someone, or just committing other types of crimes)
- The character is shown, or stated, to be mentally ill. — This one was the hardest to pin down. I found so many references to particular characters as “psychotic,” “insane,” “deranged,” etc even when the movie itself does not state or show this. If we’re going to say that any character who kills a lot of people is crazy, then we’ve gone into a black hole of circular logic (“It’s offensive to show mentally ill people as killers! But how do you know the character is mentally ill? Because they kill a bunch of people!”) So, to fit here, either a medical professional in the movie states that they are ill, or they are explicitly shown to have characteristics such as hallucinations, hearing voices, or delusional thinking. I of course haven’t seen every movie in this chart, so for some of them, I had to make my best guess based on reading multiple plot synopses.
- The character has escaped from a mental hospital or similar facility (this does NOT include characters who escaped from prison, or who were released from an institution after being judged to be sane)
Movie Data
I created a chart listing as many movies as I could find that feature a Crazy Villain, and noted whether they had any of the 3 components of Crazy Escaped Killer. Some of these movies came from an Appendix in the book Media Madness [7], which had a list of movies between 1985 and 1995 with a mentally ill character (whether they were a good guy or bad guy). I found some more movies in Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie [8], which analyzed 990 movies categorized as being in the “horror” genre between 1931 and 1984. I also did a lot of my own digging, including reading plot summaries on IMDB and Wikipedia.
I decided to look at how many films in both the broad and specific cliche were released before and after Halloween 1978. I located 20 movies prior to Halloween’s release that have a Crazy Villain, 5 of which (25%) have the three components of Crazy Escaped Killer. After Halloween’s release, I found 28 movies with a Crazy Villain, 15 of which (53%) met the criteria of Crazy Escaped Killer.
Urban Legend
Another example of these cliches can be found in the urban legend commonly called “The Hook”. In this story, which dates back to the 1950s [9], a young couple are in a parked car, making out. A radio broadcast then warns of an escaped killer, with a hook in place of one of his hands. The couple decides to quickly leave, and upon arriving at the home of one of them, a hook is found dangling from the passenger door, indicating that they got away just in time.
The killer’s mental state is not specifically referenced in any version, but he is described as either a convict (implying escape from prison) or as someone who escaped from a mental hospital/institution. I found the following examples, two of which use the “mental hospital” variation:
- A college student remembering a version she heard as a child in 1960 was quoted: “over the radio came an announcement that a crazed killer with a hook in place of a hand had escaped from the local insane asylum” [9]
- A letter in a “Dear Abby” column 1960 refers to the killer as an “escaped convict.” [10]
- A transcribed interview (from 1969) with a college student recounting the legend says, “a sex maniac has just escaped from the state insane asylum” [11]
- A 1982 book describes the legend, saying, “It seems that there had been a report about an escaped criminal in the area. He was supposed to be dangerous, a mad killer.” However, the book does not give any background information on when this particular version dates from, or if it was currently (at the time) circulating in this form. [12]
Discussion
I’m sure my chart is very incomplete, and does it really tell us anything if more movies of a certain type were released after 1978? It could mean that more movies in general were made then, and therefore there would be more movies among all categories. Probably the best way to handle it would be to look at the number of movies containing these cliches, as a percentage of the total number of movies released during that same time period. But I don’t really have the time, inclination, or brainpower to do such an analysis.
Luckily, I don’t have to do the work all by myself. The previously-mentioned book Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie by Andrew Tudor [7] analyzed 990 horror films, looking at trends and comparing plot and character elements. One analysis that Tudor conducted was to classify what type of “monster” appeared in each movie, such as zombies, demons, ghosts, etc. The monster category of “psychotics” led the rankings, with 271 cases in the analyzed movies. Tudor goes on to say that 90% of the movies in this category appeared after 1960 (pg 20), which he doesn’t specify, but I assume, is due to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. But he later (pg 68) goes on to say that about 80% of the category’s films came after Halloween.
Tudor later provides a definition of his “psychotics” category (pg 185), which again proves the difficulty of doing this kind of analysis:
In 270 of the films considered in this book, the principal threat is that posed by madness, most commonly homicidal psychosis. Unlike ‘mad’ scientists, however, horror-movie madmen are not visionary obsessives, glorying in scientific reason as they single-mindedly pursue their researches. They are, rather, victims of overpowering impulses that well up from within; monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason, not by its attractions. Horror-movie psychotics murder, terrorize, maim and rape because of some inner compulsion, because the psyche harbors the dangerous excesses of human passion.
I suppose it’s an accurate definition, but still a little vague. When watching a movie, you can’t always know for sure what’s going on inside a character’s mind, or what motivates each action they take. So we don’t know what criteria Tudor used to determine that these 270 movies fit in this category.
Conclusion
With the data from my chart, as well as the other sources, I probably still don’t have enough data to really make any firm conclusions. I suppose I could tentatively say that Halloween popularized the Crazy Escaped Killer cliche, and may have helped to popularize the Crazy Villain cliche, but that Psycho was more responsible for the latter.
So I can at least say that, if you want to criticize Halloween for having a mentally-ill villain, at definitely did not start this cliche.
Footnotes
[1]
“Honest Trailers — Halloween (2018)”
Screen Junkies YouTube Channel
Jan 15, 2019
Timestamp: 3:57
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJMPl4s0l00
[2]
“How Halloween stoked our fears and misunderstanding of mental illness”
by Frazer MacDonald
Little White Lies
October 12, 2018
https://lwlies.com/articles/halloween-michael-myers-mental-illness/
[3]
“Villainizing Bodies and Minds: Ableism in Horror Movies”
by Sarah Garcia
FEM
October 29, 2018
https://femmagazine.com/villainizing-bodies-and-minds-ableism-in-horror-movies/
[4]
“How the Stigma of Mental Health Is Spread by Mass Media”
by Naveed Saleh, MD, MS
VeryWellMind
June 24, 2019
https://www.verywellmind.com/mental-health-stigmas-in-mass-media-4153888
[5]
Media’s Damaging Depictions of Mental Illness
PsychCentral
By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
March 18th, 2019
https://psychcentral.com/lib/medias-damaging-depictions-of-mental-illness/
[6]
“Family views of stigma”
by Otto Wahl & Charles Harman
Schizophrenia Bulletin. 15. 131–139.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.898.6847&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[7]
Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness
by Otto F. Wahl, Phd
“Appendix A: Films About Mental Illness” — pg 169
1995
[8]
Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
by Andrew Tudor
1989
[9]
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
by Jan Harold Brunvand
Legend discussed on pg 49
1981
[10]
“Dear Abby”
Orlando Evening Star
November 8, 1960
Page 14
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/13696103/the_hook_urban_legend/
[11]
Folklore on the American Land
by Duncan Emrich
1972
Legend discussed on pages 332–333, 679
[12]
Hoosier Folk Legends
by Ronald Baker
Legend discussed on pg 201
1982
