John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween is one of the most important and beloved horror movies
ever made - and you can't overstate the impact of Michael Myers on the history of horror
cinema.
Nonetheless, Michael Myers isn't the scariest thing about Halloween…
Michael Myers is arguably one of the greatest figures in the history of horror cinema — and
absolutely one of the most influential.
The host of slasher killers that have followed in his wake are either directly inspired by
him or were created as a reaction to his presence.
The slasher sub-genre dominated horror in the '80s, and a large part of that trend was
the influence of Halloween in general - and Michael Myers specifically.
So what actually makes Myers so great?
Well, part of it is the look, which became instantly iconic when the movie debuted in
1978.
But the real crux of his appeal can be found in the name he's given in the credits of the
film: the Shape.
Michael is barely meant to be a human character; rather, he is a lurching, inexorable vessel
for evil who can never be stopped.
He's not a man, he's just a container for senseless and random violence.
That inscrutability is a big part of what makes Michael Myers so terrifying - the idea
that nobody can reach him or reason with him.
"What was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply… evil."
It doesn't help that a barrage of bullets to the chest can't stop him, either.
But he's not the scariest thing in Halloween.
Not by a long shot.
Halloween is generally regarded as the movie that kicked off the slasher fad that dominated
horror cinema from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, but it's pretty rare that a genre just emerges
out of nowhere.
There are plenty of forerunners to Halloween's success that some horror fans would point
to as earlier examples of the slasher genre.
The most obvious would be 1974's Black Christmas, which pioneered that classic slasher setup:
young women being killed in a place they had previously assumed to be safe.
Of course, the slasher genre would soon come to be more about the killer than their victims,
and in Black Christmas the killer is never even seen.
But 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre puts Leatherface front and center - as a hulking, masked killer,
just like Myers.
Even earlier, the Italian giallo genre had brought the world murder mystery films featuring
masked killers in urban settings.
Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood from 1971, for example, is generally considered to be a proto-slasher.
But these are more crime films than straightforward horror, and the victims are generally older
than the ones you'll find in classic slashers.
It was Halloween, then, that brought together all the elements people now expect from slasher
movies: a superhuman masked killer, creative killings, gory violence, teenage protagonists,
and - arguably most importantly - a suburban setting.
To understand how movies like Halloween helped contemporize modern horror by moving the setting
to the suburbs, you have to look at what horror looked like before the 1970s.
Picture a black and white horror movie you've seen.
Maybe it's Dracula or Frankenstein, or hey, maybe you're being extra fancy and picturing
1944's The Uninvited or something.
Get you.
Whatever it is, though, the chances are the movie you're thinking of is a part of the
gothic tradition that completely dominated horror movies for its earliest decades.
The gothic tradition goes back to 1764's The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.
As film academic Pat Gill lays out in his paper on the subject, the defining characteristics
of this sub-genre include:
"Defenseless heroines; suppressed passions; unspeakable desires; fearful landscapes and
haunted, uncanny interiors [...] and jarring juxtapositions of the moral and the monstrous,
the sexual and the grotesque, the virtuous and the violent."
While it's easy to draw a direct line from these elements to the modern slasher, this
description better fits those old black and white Universal films, with their creepy castles,
foggy moors, and beautiful, haunted victims.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of the gothic genre is the setting.
After all, it does share a name with an architectural style.
The first recognized work of gothic literature even has "castle" right in the title.
And it's that castle - or spooky old house, or whatever else you like - that sets the
foundation for the entire gothic genre.
"You mustn't go there.
We people of the mountains believe at the castle there are vampires."
The idea that a house or a castle can hold dark secrets was such a key trope in the development
of horror that the so-called Old Dark House actually emerged as its own subgenre.
This is best seen in movies such as 1926's The Bat, in which a masked killer picks off
guests in an isolated mansion one by one, and 1927's The Cat and the Canary, in which
a crazed killer escapes a mental institution and stalks a family through a creaky old mansion.
Then there's 1932's The Old Dark House, which doesn't really need much of an explanation.
The horror of these films came from the terrible secrets held by the houses and their histories.
But how do you make a movie scary when it's set in a house that has only just been built?
One of the key links between movies like The Bat and Halloween is Psycho, which, not incidentally,
is also a movie that deals heavily with the theme of modernization.
While Hitchcock's film is undeniably one of the most influential horror films of all time,
Halloween wears its love of Psycho on its sleeve.
Besides the fact that Halloween stars Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Psycho's Janet
Leigh, one of the main characters in Halloween is also named after a character from Psycho:
Dr. Samuel Loomis.
But the connection also goes much deeper than that.
Psycho is a movie that takes events that would earlier have been set in a castle or mansion
and moves them to a much more modern setting: a motel.
And in Psycho, the Bates Motel is itself the victim of modernization.
It has been more or less abandoned due to the development of the interstate highway
system, which isolates the motel and allows Norman to do his thing away from prying eyes.
The contrast between the mundane setting of Norman's murders and the elaborate, gothic
settings of old is made evident by the juxtaposition of the motel itself and the Bates family home.
You see, there is actually a big spooky mansion in this movie, but it's long past its prime.
Instead, the real horror of Psycho lies within the walls of Norman's motel.
And with Psycho, the horror genre finally found its place in the modern world.
The 1970s saw horror move to the suburbs.
But now that the haunted house was out of the picture, how were you supposed to keep
things creepy?
Simple.
As in The Exorcist and Poltergeist, you just have the ghost haunt a person, rather than
a place.
Halloween dealt with this issue in a different way, however, by simply having Michael commit
his crimes in a place you'd otherwise think of as mundane.
The idyllic suburban environment of Haddonfield is where Michael was raised - and where he
first killed, too.
And sure, there are rumors in Haddonfield about the Myers home being a haunted house,
but it's not the same kind of haunted house that had provided the basis for the gothic
horror genre.
This house has only been empty for some 20 years, only enough for kids and teens to think
of as "old."
Other than that, Michael lived on a totally normal street - not a stately Victorian mansion
or Eastern European castle, but an ordinary corner of the suburbs, possibly just like
yours.
And now he was coming home.
Movies like Halloween shifting their settings to the suburbs helped keep horror relevant,
whilst making the fear more immediate and relatable.
To understand just why this was so scary to audiences at the time, however, you need to
look back at the history of suburbia itself.
Thanks to the economic boom in the U.S. following World War II, an increasing number of Americans
found themselves with the means to move away from cities and into the residential areas
that surrounded them.
They could now afford single-family homes and, thanks to the interstate highway system,
could also easily maintain a connection to the city by commuting to work.
While some Americans found themselves moving to the suburbs in order to escape the congestion
of the city, a very large number of affluent, white Americans moved out there for very different
reasons.
At the time, they might have said it was to be closer to nature, or to have room to stretch
your legs, or because suburban land was cheaper than urban real estate - but the fact is,
white Americans fled the city because they were afraid of the widespread crime and unrest
that they perceived as being a part of city life.
White Americans were afraid of the cities and the minority populations who inhabited
them, so they grabbed their children and ran away - because they believed it would protect
them.
This process is called "white flight," and it's the unspoken background radiation of
Halloween's story.
At one point in the film, Dr. Loomis warns the town sheriff about Michael Myers.
"Doctor, 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?"
"They could be."
And this is the imagery upon which Halloween is based.
While the suburbs were meant to be a place of safety and leisure for American families,
this movie suggests that they're simply the perfect staging ground for Michael's own unique
brand of trick or treating.
Moving out to the suburbs didn't do anything to protect the victims of Michael Myers that
night, and, in fact, they might well have been safer in a city, where a greater number
of people might have been around to help them - or at least call for help.
Here, the protection supposedly afforded by moving away from big cities actually ended
up backfiring on the families who lost their children during Michael's return home.
And worse, the negligence of these parents plays a considerable role in what goes down
that night.
Hey, speaking of which: Where are all the parents in this movie?
There are practically no adults in this film at all.
Dr. Loomis is there, plus a sheriff, and Laurie's dad for a hot second as he passes off some
of his responsibilities and promptly drives away.
But that's about it.
Where are the parents of all these children Laurie and her friends are babysitting?
They're nowhere to be seen.
This isn't an accident, though.
In fact, an entire generation of teenagers felt abandoned by their parents in the late
1970s.
Coming out of the Vietnam War, this was the generation who would have felt betrayed by
their parents, their communities, and most of all their government, who turned them into
cannon fodder in a war they had never had any interest in.
Like Myers, the war had been an uncontrollable source of violence that young people were
left to by absent, apathetic adults.
One of the most chilling images in the film comes when Laurie runs down the street banging
on doors for help - and no one will answer or even acknowledge her.
There's a lot to be said here about the individualism and selfishness of suburban life, and how
it causes people to insulate themselves from the violence committed against other people.
This scene is ultimately reflective of the selfishness implicit in white flight: If me
and mine are safe out here, who cares what happens elsewhere?
In life, however, that attitude never works out well anyone - and it doesn't in the movie,
either.
Thanks to Halloween, suburbia has become fully ingrained in the slasher sub-genre.
And that's the crux of this movie.
You're not supposed to be afraid so much of Michael Myers as what he represents: the idea
that leaving the city behind isn't going to be enough to protect your children.
You have to take an active role; you have to care… because danger could come from
anywhere, and you can't just run away from it or bury your head in the sand.
What's more, evil doesn't look like a minority community in a city.
It can be anything and look like anyone.
In fact, evil isn't even really a person - it's a Shape.
If you can't open up, engage with your community, and help each other, then you're not going
to be able to stop it.
And for some people, that's a pretty scary thing to think about.
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