Analysis of ‘Halloween’

Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by him and producer Debra Hill (he also composed the film’s music). It stars Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut, with PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis.

Grossing $70 million, Halloween became one of the most profitable independent films of all time. Carpenter’s direction and score were particularly praised. The film, along with Psycho and Black Christmas, helped establish the slasher film genre; it’s considered one of the best horror movies ever made.

The franchise that resulted from the 1978 film is made up of thirteen films whose extensive backstory for antagonist Michael Myers sometimes diverges from previous installments. There are also a novelization, a video game, and comics based on Halloween.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Carpenter’s score is indeed an achievement in its own right. Apart from the eerie, atmospheric main theme in 5/4 time, subdivided into eighth notes of 3+3+2+2 and played mainly on the piano, we often hear tense minor seconds and parallelism in the harmonic progressions. Not bad for a filmmaker who dabbles in music and, by his own admission, can’t read music.

We hear the main theme as the credits are shown with a jack-o’-lantern. What must be remembered about the origins of Halloween is that there was a belief that during Samhain, on which Halloween was based, evil spirits walked the Earth, and such things as jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, and the wearing of scary costumes were meant to ward off ghosts. Today, these things are done only for fun and so we can see in the film that the people in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois are not protected from evil spirits.

Yes, an evil spirit is how we should conceive of The Shape (played by Nick Castle), that is, the shape that the evil spirit takes in the body of Michael Myers. Carpenter himself has described the killer as “almost a supernatural force…an evil force” that is “unkillable.” For me, that’s close enough to Myers being possessed by an evil spirit.

Halloween was strongly influenced by Bob Clark‘s Black Christmas, by the idea of a serial killer acting without any apparent motive. In fact, Carpenter’s film is almost a sequel to Clark’s film, since Carpenter asked Clark what he would do if he were to make a sequel to Black Christmas. Clark had no intention whatsoever of continuing that story, but he said that if he did, Billy would have escaped from the mental institution he’d inevitably have been locked up in, he’d have returned to the neighbourhood that he’d originally terrorized, and he’d have resumed the killing…but on Halloween instead of Christmas.

We should keep the relationship between these two films in mind when we watch the opening shot of Halloween, with the camera approaching the white Myers’s house on Halloween night in 1963. Similar shots are seen at the beginning of Black Christmas, with the POV of Billy coming to the house of the sorority where he’ll enter through the attic window and begin killing the girls living there.

The shot of Billy’s POV is somewhat shaky, suggesting his body movements; but the camera approaching the Myers’s house, being as I imagine it to represent the POV of a disembodied spirit, moves more or less smoothly for that very reason. The evil spirit enters the house, reminiscent of Billy’s bodily entrance, and once inside, a light is turned on in a dark room, presumably little Michael’s doing, and we see his hand go into a kitchen drawer and pull out a knife. At this point, I’d say the evil spirit has just entered his body.

For this reason, I’d insist that possessed Michael is otherwise an innocent six-year-old boy. Seriously, there’s no reason for him to pick up a knife and stab his naked older sister, Judith, to death. Why would a boy so young have already developed such extreme, violent, psychopathic traits? Though Michael is generally expressionless, when we see his father remove the mask on the boy’s face, he seems remorsefully sad over the murder he’s been forced to commit.

To get back to his expressionlessness, though, we learn from Dr. Samuel Loomis (Pleasance) that Myers hasn’t spoken a word since that night. His face is devoid of any human feeling. Of course: what emotions would an evil spirit have?

Now, this lack of the use of language, combined with his relentless killing and the trauma that it causes the survivors, makes Myers the very personification of Lacan‘s notion of the Real. It’s a traumatic, undifferentiated world that cannot be verbalized; recall that Myers generally kills only at night, when the differentiation between things is obscured under the cover of darkness.

Some imagine that, because Myers’s victims tend to indulge in such naughty pleasures as marijuana and premarital sex, that Halloween, like the Friday the 13th movies, is a kind of puritanical morality play (one might recall that scene in Scream when Randy Meeks [played by Jamie Kennedy] insists that one mustn’t sin if one is to survive a slasher movie). Carpenter has strenuously denied any attempt to moralize against the partying of teens, and I agree.

Myers is “purely and simply…evil,” according to Dr. Loomis. If so, why would he kill sinning kids in a ‘morality play’? Laurie Strode (Curtis) smokes pot in one scene: shouldn’t she deserve to be killed, too, by Meeks’s analysis? And what sin does the German Shepherd commit (apart from some barking that annoys Annie Brackett [Nancy Loomis]) that it deserves to be killed no less than the teenagers? Myers kills because he is evil, not his victims.

The one murder we know of Myers committing in the daytime is of a mechanic, and he takes the man’s coveralls and wears them, along with a white, expressionless mask. Thus, he has his iconic look, his ‘Halloween costume,’ as it were.

Just as Black Christmas subverts and does evil parodies of Christmas traditions (see my analysis, link above), so does Halloween parody traditions of its holiday. As I mentioned above, the wearing of costumes was originally meant to ward off evil spirits; whereas Myers’s ‘costume’ seems to make him more complete as an evil spirit incarnate, and a killer. Recall six-year-old Myers’s clown costume when he killed his sister.

His mask is of particular interest. The one used for the film has the contours of the face of William Shatner, an actor known…and loved…for his, well, emotive performances, a quite ironic fact given that the mask renders Myers with a coldly emotionless face, one without any expression.

Though it’s just a mask, like the clown mask he wears as a little kid, one that by no means gives him any anonymity, it seems to give him a special power as a killer, a special evil, if only in a symbolic sense. When the mask comes off, as just before the six-year-old is to be sent to the sanitarium, and when Laurie takes it off his face, he seems to have lost his ability to kill. When it’s back on his face, though, and Loomis shoots him and he falls out the window and onto the lawn, he soon gets up, ready to kill again in the first sequel.

As when the mask is taken off the face of six-year-old Michael, when Laurie takes it off his face at the end of the movie, we see a sad expression on him, suggesting the real, remorseful Michael who is being forced to kill by the evil spirit possessing him. The power of the mask seems to come from how it hides feeling through its expressionlessness.

This understanding leads us to a discussion of where the evil in Halloween comes from. The mask’s lack of expression is linked to a general lack of social connection in Haddonfield. Myers always kills; he never talks, and we generally never see his face. As a personification of the inexpressible Real, Myers won’t enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, Lacan’s world of language, customs, and traditions…including those of Halloween.

Not to defend the superstitious beliefs surrounding Samhain and Halloween, but one virtue of tradition is that it has a way of binding communities together. The idea of warding off evil spirits, in the context of this film, can be seen to symbolize the more general idea of communities protecting each other. Older societies, though believing in a lot of religious nonsense, as well as bigoted, chauvinistic nonsense, at least had a basic sense of togetherness, motivating them to be more protective and loving towards each other.

In contrast, modern society, though better educated in scientific matters and thus more open-minded and freer–all undeniably good and indispensable advances–is nonetheless plagued by alienation and self-centeredness. As a result, we see in Haddonfield a number of examples of parental neglect–with babysitters looking after kids…and often enough, the babysitters themselves are neglectful of the kids.

Annie Brackett–with her wandering off to wash her clothes, and her plans to hook up with her boyfriend, Paul, leaving Lindsey Wallace (played by Kyle Richards), the little girl she’s supposed to be babysitting, alone to watch The Thing from Another World (a film Carpenter would do a remake of several years after Halloween) on TV–isn’t the only one neglectful babysitter of the movie. So was Judith, who instead of watching over her little brother was making love with her boyfriend just before she was murdered.

Laurie can be said to be the surviving babysitter for moral reasons in that she is the one babysitter who is properly doing her job–watching over little Tommy Doyle (played by Brian Andrews) as well as Lindsey. Note that Tommy correctly identifies Myers as “the bogeyman.” It’s fitting that one of the three boys who bully Tommy at school, mocking him for his fear of the bogeyman, runs into Myers immediately after. The bogeyman is believed to punish children for bad behaviour; those teen babysitters who neglect their work are also ‘punished’ by Myers.

The bullies, supposedly too old to have childish fears of things like the bogeyman, nonetheless go to the Myers’s house on Halloween night, one of them being dared to go inside. The notion that a house where a murder has been committed has become haunted with the ghosts of the victims is a popular belief in small towns like Haddonfield, hence its inclusion in the film. The three ‘tough’ little boys are easily scared away by Loomis’s imitation of an angry spook hiding behind a bush near the house.

Even with these three boys, though, why aren’t they at home? Why aren’t their parents watching out for them? It’s this kind of neglect that leads to so much family dysfunction, which in turn results in the traumatic basis for so many mental disorders, which in turn, often enough, results in criminally insane behaviour, such as what we see in Michael Myers. Hence the evil in Halloween is the result of societal neglect and alienation.

Further proof that Myers must be possessed of a demon is in his unexplained ability to drive a car. All that Loomis can jokingly say is that, maybe, someone in the mental hospital gave Myers driving lessons. Only an evil spirit, with its supernatural abilities, could steer a car in the body of someone locked away since he was six.

While it’s still light out, Myers is driving around the neighbourhood of his boyhood, surveying his prey in Annie, Lynda Van Der Klok (Soles), and especially Laurie, who is the most disturbed of them by the presence of the man in the white mask. She’ll see him briefly for one moment, look away in worry, then look back to see he’s gone. We see, in how this stalking leads to the murders, that it’s the alienation between Myers and the girls that is the basis of the evil.

Mute Myers can’t communicate with them, neither verbally nor in gestures, and that mask ensures no facial expression of feeling. He just stands and stares, with neither the ability nor the willingness to connect with others. Exiled from the social realm of the Symbolic, Myers can only wait for the night to obscure the distinction between things so he can embody the traumatizing, inexpressible Real, and kill people.

His one, concrete (pardon the pun) act of communication is to steal the headstone from Judith’s grave and to place it at the head of the bed on which he’s laid Annie’s corpse, to give Laurie an especially bad scare before he attacks her. In Halloween II, Carpenter ret-conned her character to be Judith’s and Michael’s younger sister, adopted into another family, hence her new surname, Strode. Carpenter would regret this change; Quentin Tarantino rejects it altogether.

The idea that Myers is obsessed with killing his sisters is rather absurd. He kills more or less indiscriminately, though there’s an emphasis on babysitters as victims (Judith, Annie, and Laurie; bear in mind that I have little interest in the contradictory sequels, and therefore their wider variety of victims) because, as I’ve argued above, Myers has found them to be negligent in caring for kids.

The evil spirit entering the body of little Michael can be seen to symbolize the violent effect of the childhood trauma of feeling neglected and abandoned, felt to be a kind of betrayal from not only his parents leaving him at home to have dinner (or whatever it was that they were doing instead of watching over him), but also from his older sister, who was more interested in making love with her boyfriend than in taking care of him.

This isn’t to say that parents are never to be allowed occasionally to leave their kids with a babysitter to enjoy an evening together as a couple; nor is it to say that babysitters can’t occasionally relax and do a few enjoyable things while minding the kids. And of course, I’m not saying that these people deserve to be murdered for negligence! I’m saying that the laxity we see in Myers’s parents and in his sister on that fateful Halloween night in 1963 is symbolic of the kind of neglect that can lead to trauma in children, which in turn can lead to mental illness and violence.

Laurie, as I said above, is the only babysitter showing a proper concern for others’ well-being, so she manages to survive. Myers, in the traumatic state he’s in, symbolized by the evil spirit possessing him, can’t distinguish between good and bad babysitters (or good and bad people in general), so he tries to kill her anyway.

The other one seriously concerned about human life, Dr. Loomis, tried for years to connect with expressionless Myers, but couldn’t get through, because the damage had already been done, symbolized by the demonic possession. Loomis saw “the devil’s eyes” in little Michael. This disturbing look on the boy’s face was inspired by Carpenter’s having visited a mental institution in Kentucky, where he saw, among the most extreme cases, an adolescent boy with a blank, “schizophrenic stare.” Hence, the evil in Myers represents extreme mental illness.

Note that not only were Myers’s parents and sister neglectful, nor was only Annie neglectful of little Lindsey, but also Annie’s father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett (played by Charles Cyphers), isn’t all that motivated to find and stop Myers. He doesn’t even seem to notice the marijuana smoke in his daughter’s car when she and Laurie have been smoking up in it. His lack of sufficient vigilance leads up to his daughter’s murder.

Myers’s being possessed by an evil spirit, as well as his ‘Halloween costume,’ can be seen to symbolize something else–his alienation from himself. Trauma changes us, it causes a distortion of what we originally, really were. Whether the demon entered little Michael’s body outside the house, with the boy standing there and looking through the windows before entering, or if it entered the house, found and entered his body in a dark room before he turned on the light and got the knife, ultimately doesn’t matter. A little boy was left alone in the dark, left uncared for, and in his sensitive state, he found it emotionally overwhelming. The resulting trauma made him take on a false persona, that of a costumed, possessed killer, and the real Michael has hidden behind that false self ever since.

Of the many things that Friday the 13th ripped off from Halloween was making explicit what is implied in the latter and vastly superior film: negligent childcare leads to madness and murder. Unlike the Friday the 13th films, which are orgies of gore, Halloween shows next to no blood at all; the filmmakers wisely knew that the key to making a horror film genuinely scary is to maximize suspense and use lots of darkness and an eerie atmosphere (i.e., Carpenter’s music). [As a side note, I find it amusing that, though I originally intended to finish and publish this analysis just before Halloween, I ended up publishing it on Friday the 13th!]

Note how the two houses where the babysitting is going on, and where Myers is lurking, are facing each other across the street. The houses are like a head looking at itself in the mirror, and someone looking at himself in a mirror is in itself a Lacanian metaphor for the narcissist admiring himself and using others (metaphorical mirror reflections) as a means of furthering his self-interest, as Annie does when taking Lindsey Wallace across the road and having Laurie watch her while Annie drives off to get her boyfriend, Paul. Myers kills her in her car.

Similarly, Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob, arrive at the Wallace house expecting Annie and Paul to be there so all four of them can party there together. Finding themselves alone and not knowing that Annie’s just been murdered, Lynda and Bob make love and drink beer, them being no less self-centered than Annie.

Lynda is especially self-centered and narcissistic, wanting Bob to get her a beer from the fridge, then, after Myers has killed Bob and disguises himself as his victim with his glasses and a white sheet for a cheesy ghost costume, she flashes her breasts for ‘Bob.’ She expects him to mirror her narcissism back to her with a compliment on her beautiful body, and of course, Myers stays mute, because he personifies the non-verbal Real, while Lynda exemplifies the narcissistic, mirroring Imaginary.

There is a dangerous proximity between the trauma of the Real and the narcissism of the Imaginary, since the one dialectically phases into the other, as I see it. Narcissism is often a protective façade against the fragmentation that leads to psychotic breaks with reality. I suspect that six-year-old Michael was so neglected, so ignored by his family, that he traumatically found verbal communication to be pointless, and so he replaced it with ‘communicating’ through stabs of the knife, symbolically a kind of projective identification, in Bion‘s sense of primitive, pre-verbal communication, the stab wound being the yonic container (a receiving of Myers’s pain), and the knife being the phallic contained (the non-verbal expression and projection of his pain).

Since the Wallace house is where the narcissistic, self-centered behaviour occurs, this is also where the murders occur, for as I said above, traumatizing fragmentation (the Real) is dangerously close to narcissism (the Imaginary); it is only in the social, verbally-expressive realm of the Symbolic that mental health resides, hence Laurie is in the house across the street, the Doyle house, where responsible babysitting is going on. Unlike Annie and Lynda, Laurie is concerned for Others–not just one other person as a mirrored, narcissistic extension of herself. So when she hears Lynda dying on the phone, Laurie naturally wants to cross the street to find out what’s going on in the Wallace house.

She finds Annie’s corpse on the bed Lynda and Bob were making love in, with Judith’s headstone there, Myers’s way of telling Laurie that his sister is, if you will, the archetypal negligent caregiver. Jamie Lee Curtis demonstrates her scream-queen credentials here, and Laurie takes on the role of the final girl. Myers’s knife slash on her arm is, again, his non-verbal communication as projective identification, negative containment (Bion, pages 97-99), a kind of containment that does the opposite of soothing, resulting in a nameless dread. Six-year-old Myers, not having received the proper soothing of his anxieties because of negligent parenting, felt this nameless dread, an inexpressible fear of annihilation, and he has been trying to project that fear onto others in his murders.

All of Laurie’s and Dr. Loomis’s attempts to kill Myers fail because, apart from my interpretation that an evil spirit is animating his body regardless of how many bullet holes and stab wounds it has, evil never dies. Since Halloween is derived from Samhain, a festival when the souls of the dead come back to walk the Earth, it marks the beginning of winter, the darker half of the year, with the dying of the sun god, who will be reborn in midwinter.

Just as pagan myths of dying and resurrecting gods reflect such cycles as the changes of the seasons of the year, so does trauma have a way of being repressed and forgotten about temporarily, then returning, often in an unrecognized form. Myers killing his sister, being put away in the sanitarium, and “the night he came home” wearing a mask, can be seen to represent the original trauma, its repression, and its disguised return, just like the coming of fall, then winter, spring, summer,…and the return of the fall.

His obsessive, relentless killing can be seen as representative of Freud‘s notion of the death drive and the compulsion to repeat a traumatic experience. Hence, he personifies evil, which never dies.

…and an undying evil, as demonstrated in the inexplicable disappearance of Myers’s body on the lawn after having been shot point blank by Dr. Loomis, is what makes Halloween such a scary movie, even sans sang.