John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978) is a classic. It is the first horror film that I remember watching on WPIX Channel 11 in NYC as a child and remembering the plot, not just the monster. It led to an eternal love of Jamie Lee Curtis, horror films and Carpenter movies. I try to watch it annually, but I’m an adult so time does not permit. The original film starts on Halloween night in 1963 from the perspective of an unseen figure watching a teen couple make out from outside the house. This person enters through an open back door, turns on the kitchen light, pulls a chef’s knife from a drawer then goes upstairs, grabs the clown mask before entering her room. The girl, Judith, calls him “Michael,” covers her breasts before Michael stabs her. This scene echoes Death and the Maiden because she is combing her hair and looking in a mirror. He goes outside still wearing the mask and brandishing the knife before a man pulls the mask off and says, “Michael?” while Michael stands expressionless, and a woman stands with her hands in her pockets from a distance.
The camera pulls up then cuts to 15 years later, 1978, on a stormy Halloween eve night with Dr. Loomis and a nurse driving to an asylum to bring Michael to a trial to get him committed for life. They see inmates wandering outside the grounds. Michael steals the car and returns to his hometown, Haddonfield, Illinois. Dr. Loomis races to catch Michael before he can hurt anyone, but is always one step behind. While Dr. Loomis knows Michael well, he falls short on guessing what Michael will do next. Then we meet Laurie Strode and Tommy, the kid that she babysits, as they stand before Michael’s old house with Michael inside. Michael follows each of them throughout the day. he sheriff and Dr. Loomis separately and collectively find clues left behind like breadcrumbs from Michael’s journey, but they don’t tie them together. The three figures, Michael, Loomis and Laurie are in each other’s orbit but don’t converge until night falls.
The Halloween universe has two forks in the road. The first fork has Michael obsessed with killing Laurie because she is his sister, a theme which I prefer, but is not revealed until “Halloween II” (1981), which John Carpenter wrote. The second fork has Michael obsessed with Laurie for reasons. Maybe he is a completist. Who does not love Jamie Lee Curtis? During the original, either option can be used to analyze the film.
Dr. Loomis, though a scientific figure, is a bit hysterical and unprofessional in the way that he carries on about Michael being “The Evil” and “it,” but he is not wrong. (By referring to Michael as it, was it early inspiration for Stephen King’s It?) His scientific authority permits viewers to divorce Michael from any Biblical idea of evil and makes him an abstract personification of a force. “The Evil is gone!” Is Dr. Loomis’ assessment correct or is Michael a weird messed up person? Both. I always enjoyed the idea that Michael was just evil in a way that could not be rationalized as opposed to Rob Zombie’s Freudian take on the killer, but Michael does have characteristics. Carpenter and Hill, who cowrote the screenplay, are on the record stating that Michael is not the morality police, and Laurie’s power does not come from her virginity though perhaps a frustrated sexual energy. So what is going on?
Six-year-old Michael is salty because the teen couple used his forgotten mask in their foreplay and ruined his costume. He is the annoying little brother who does not want you to touch his things, but comes in your room. Like most killers, he derives sexual pleasure from voyeurism and killing so choosing his sister as his first victim suggests a weird incestuous subconscious drive. If you subscribe to the first theory, it explains his fixation on Laurie. If you subscribe to the second, Michael gets obsessed with Laurie and Tommy because they trespass on his house when Laurie’s adopted dad instructs her to leave the keys for buyers at 10:30 am. (Side note: what happens to the buyers? They may be alive because Michael leaves the home to follow Laurie after she follows her dad’s instructions.)
Michael gets a thrill from separating couples. He waits to kill Annie when she is finally going to be with Paul and has abandoned her babysitting duties. The saddest death in “Halloween” is Lynda because Lynda and Bob like each other and have a good relationship. When Michael kills Lynda, he disguises himself with two more costumes, Bob’s glasses and a sheet as a ghost so she may believe that Bob killed her after they had sex.
Six-year-old Michael and Judith are parallel to Tommy and Laurie. While the prior had a bad relationship, Tommy and Laurie have a great time together even when she is not on the clock. Michael may hate babysitters, but Laurie may be immune to his attacks because she is the best babysitter ever. Does Michael relate to Tommy and/or does he just use him to locate Laurie? He never tries to attack the children so I would go with the latter, especially since Tommy gets diluted with the presence of another child, Lindsay. These children could become Michael and not care about anyone around them, but they end up normal and intervening to help adults stay safe.
Laurie is a strange girl. After she leaves the keys at the Myers home, she sings, “I wish I had you alone. Just the two of us.” Does Michael hear this as an invitation? The entire movie toys with the idea that no guys are interested in Laurie because she is too smart or shy, but Michael is staring at her the entire time. Michael is unfortunately interested, but if Laurie is the mirror image of Michael, that song has a sinister meaning too. What would they do if they got the other alone? They agree on this point-try to kill each other.
In Laurie’s case, it is self-defense, but ordinary people are not usually so good at killing people even when they are trained, and their lives are in jeopardy. With no training, Laurie kills Michael two times, stabs him in the neck with a knitting needle then in the eye with a hanger, and stuns him once by removing his mask. When she peers over the couch at his body and brandishes the knife, she resembles young Michael after his first murder.
During the final fifteen-minute denouement/confrontation between the two, Laurie learns from and is like Michael. When she falls from a staircase, she survives. Is her resilience genetic or are human bodies sturdier than we believe? When she tries to exit Lindsay’s house, Michael has blocked a glass door with a rake. He slams his hand against a door to break the wood and unlock the door. She imitates him and breaks the glass to dislodge the rake. While Laurie talking to herself can be a bit annoying (the sound quality is different than when she ordinarily talks), it also distinguishes her from his earlier victims who cannot fight back or talk because he is so overpowering. Even houses cannot stop Michael, but she does. When she is with the kids, he waits for her to put them away before resuming his attack. She takes his knife after each kill then discards it, which makes her vulnerable and probably revives him. When she embraces her homicidal side, she can survive. Dr. Loomis intervenes in the end, but he would not have the opportunity without her actions.
Laurie first notices Michael during a classroom literature lesson on fate as a natural element, not related to religion., which suggests that they are linked in some eternal way. She does not report him to the teacher, but when she looks over, he and the car soundlessly disappear. When she sees him again, Annie, Laurie’s friend, diverts Michael’s focus by shouting at him, “Speed kills!” He brakes the car. Michael is petty so it explains why he kills Annie first. Even on Halloween, it is strange for a grown man to be walking around with coveralls and a William Shatner mask staring at teenage girls. Carpenter makes his progression terrifying because he gets closer and appears more frequently so Laurie can’t rationalize that he is stalking her. Even though Annie witnesses the strangeness, she teases Laurie as crazy. The pacing of “Halloween” is a slow burn, and the majority of the action unfolds during the daytime.
Laurie talks to herself in the street, “Well, kiddo. I thought you outgrew superstition.” In her bedroom, “Calm down. This is ridiculous.” Why is Laurie more of a prude than her friends? Subconscious family trauma from her older sister’s fate or just being scared on Halloween like a kid? She does live in Haddonfield next to a murder house. Dr. Loomis finds one clue to Michael’s getaway, a red matchbook, but misses the body. The cemetery groundskeeper never finishes a story about a Russellville husband and father with a hacksaw that he is telling Dr. Loomis as he leads him to Judith’s vandalized grave missing a headstone. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays in Annie’s car as Michael, a new kind of reaper, follows them undetected in their car, but stops when they see Annie’s father, the sheriff, investigating a break in at a hardware store missing masks, rope and a couple of knives, which he does not connect to the asylum escapee. When they pull away, they miss Dr. Loomis’ arrival by seconds, and Michael drives past Dr. Loomis unseen. If there is a fate, it ties Dr. Loomis, Laurie and Michael together, but only Michael gets the complete story while Laurie and Dr. Loomis play catch up. The sheriff dismisses Dr. Loomis’ “fancy talk,” “Do you know what Haddonfield is: families, children all lined up in rows up and down these streets. You’re telling me they’re lined up for a slaughterhouse?” Afterwards Loomis notices the stolen car and has confirmation, not just suspicion, that Michael is there.
Carpenter equates Haddonfield as the slaughterhouse chute. Her dad puts Laurie in danger-an abusive or criminal act if she is adopted and thoughtless if she is not. When Laurie tries to escape Michael by banging on neighbor’s doors, the neighbors either dismiss her pleas as a prank and/or they don’t and don’t want to get involved even though Laurie is probably recognizable as the good, nerd girl in a small town. They turn on the porch light, look through the blinds, close them, then turn off the light. Losing Laurie is acceptable. Adults, her teacher, her neighbors and her father, treat Laurie different from how she is—as if she is forgetful, did not do her homework or is a prankster. In many ways, she is an other like Michael through no fault of her own. It echoes the chilling though fictional aspects of the Kitty Genovese murder. Haddonfield is complicit, but every town seems to have a Michael, an inexplicable evil person. A lot of these parents go on dates on Halloween as if it was Valentine’s Day.
Haddonfield’s parents and protectors are incompetent, negligent or actively harmful. Even fierce German shepherds don’t stand a chance. Laurie says, “The boogeyman can only come out on Halloween night, right? Well, I’m here tonight. I’m not about to let anything happen to you. Promise.” Laurie is the only protector, and she keeps her promises, “Nobody is getting anybody.” She is the only adult who can see Michael and takes him seriously other than Dr. Loomis, but unlike Dr. Loomis, she is Michael’s opposite. If he is the Boogeyman, the Reaper, Death, she is the counterforce sharing some of his characteristics, but only using them for good. Unlike Michael, who is mad by societal terms, but exhibits no emotion, Laurie is emotional, and violence affects her.
