Halloween: Every Corner

Halloween didn't scare me when I first saw it at 13. I'd already seen Paul McCrane melt into a toxic sludge monster in Robocop when I was four. By 90s standards, surely there was nothing in this old movie that could shock me. It was made in the Seventies, after all, and the blood back then always looked too orange for this cynic. Just not real enough. 

What Halloween did do was fascinate me to no end and - okay - maybe a few of those shots of Michael lurking in the background got under my skin. Maybe I rewatched it the next day to be sure I knew exactly when he'd be around every corner. Maybe it put me a little on edge, but what fascinated me most was how a California-shot film so perfectly encaptured the essence of the season nationwide, for such a meager budget. With a few bags of dead leaves and maybe a bucket of blood, John Carpenter managed to articulate that which had become commonplace to my generation. Like his transmission from the nightmarish future in Prince of Darkness, he was broadcasting outward, pushing like the winds that once blew the brown material and dirt into mini whirlwinds in my high school hallways. It was something Paul Winfield would inflect into his narration of "City Confidential" on the old Arts & Entertainment network and countless episodes of "Dateline". It was innately understood: There's something wrong in the suburbs, something evil and omnipresent. 

It's no accident that my love for the picture only grew as I came to understand its historical place. Coupled with my passion for Oliver Stone's JFK and halfway through Jim Garrison's source material, I was well on my way to youthful obsessions about Watergate (I did set foot aboard Nixon's Air Force One shortly before they flew it out for his funeral). Watergate and its wake left the US in a glum state, the pardoning of the president was less a solution than was Jimmy Carter, whose campaign might best be remembered in Altman's Nashville hyperbole ("Hasn't Christmas always smelled like oranges to you?")  It may sound like a bizarre childhood, but the US '90s was as freewheelin' a period imaginable, with our happy, sexy, sax-playing, Democratic president making the office look cool for the first time again since Kennedy. A nostalgia for the 60s had brewed over. It would last about 5 years. 

Of course, to assume anything about Halloween is inherently political would be ludicrous. The film has about as much an ideology as its ill-fated teens. Instead, it's all in the vibes, the same way crystals were being hawked by sham mystics and self-help gurus up and down the coastline. It's a feeling - totally a feeling. All of Halloween, save for Loomis the straight man, is so carefree.  Annie and Linda are carefree. Even the local cop, Annie's dad, is letting loose. He ignores obvious weed smoke pouring from his daughter's car window and Loomis' legitimate concerns - hey, everyone's entitled to one good scare.  Their parents are otherwise absent save for a brief shot of Laurie's father leaving her with the dangerous chore of dropping the key at the Myers' place. One can easily assume they're headed to a key party thrown by Sigourney Weaver's character in The Ice Storm. 

It's Donald Pleasance's iconic turn as Loomis that became the heart of the franchise if there was any. The best visual representation of what the franchise truly became is that of the late Moustapha Akkad, killed in a suicide bomb in a hotel lobby in Jordan in 2005, greedily cradling a Michael Myers action figure. Loomis from the outset, though, is a very bad doctor. He makes it very clear that he all but abandoned Michael after only a few years of what appeared to be completely conventional treatment. At the very least, he's a doctor ill-equipped and understaffed. His staff couldn't be bothered, they let Michael wander the grounds and hardly question how he learned to drive a car. Totally careless. 

 

What is not carefree about Halloween is the camerawork, so masterfully controlled and composed. There's not a scene without Michael's presence felt or insinuated by Carpenter's haunting, dreadful keyboard. The suburbs were a place of menace, even without boogeymen like Myers. Beyond the upsetting racial history behind the founding of Levittown, New Jersey, there's a fascistic adherence to order still carried out today by homeowner's associations.  By my time in Tucson, that evil was represented by faux-adobe townhouses that all looked the same, with identical red pebble gardens out front. However, there was another, more tangible monster that came to visit. 

My town's boogeyman was named Charles Schmid and he was long before my time. Mr. Browning, my AP Government teacher, swore he'd come into his parent's shop on University Avenue, sporting his fake mole and boots packed with crushed soda cans to elevate his height.  Years later, my brother and I would find a spread on him in Life Magazine that detailed his crimes. The Pied Piper of Tucson murders is still of such notable scandal that just asking about it on a Facebook Group is only met with hushed, curt sadness and a polite "We don't like to talk about that here". Schmid's murders had apparently made some Tucsonan parents uncomfortable to learn of their teenager's nightly habits. The notion of a shared town trauma so clumsily introduced in David Gordon Green's recent trilogy has roots here. Halloween, though, never required a sequel, despite what box office demanded. Its blunt mic drop end is more than enough, because there's always going to be another, just waiting. 

While I lived there, just two hours North, another boogeyman would emerge. Bryan Patrick Miller, better known as The Zombie Hunter for his cosplay, would be later sentenced to death for the murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. 

Both of them were separated by decades and location, both of whose costumes played a crucial role in their M.O. The costume of a killer can be anything, but more often than not, it's a uniform. Michael Myers is that blank, white face upon which we can project anything. It could be something down the street, it could be something in your own home, it could just be the entire damn atmosphere of the country. He's the encroaching evil and cancer we allowed to fester and metastasize, no different from the hordes of the anonymous undead in Romero's film that came before or the First Blood for which veterans would soon bay.