Halloween (1978): Into Your Own Personal Heart of Darkness

I can still remember when I heard it. I must have been very young, five years old maybe.

”Don’t go beyond the neighborhood into the woods there. They say the boogeyman lives there.”

The boogeyman? What…or who is that? I soon learned, as every young child probably learns sooner or later, that the boogeyman was a monstrous corruption of a man, a man who dealt in horror and death. And people, especially little people, should stay away from him, lest we be caught and subjected to some horrible fate.

As I…as we…got older, I learned that “There is no such thing as a boogeyman. People just make up stories like that to scare people.” So maybe the “boogeyman” wasn’t real after all. Maybe he was just something made up, like Santa Claus, but in this case he was made up to frighten little children. Or was he?

Horrible, monstrous people do indeed exist in the world. Psychopaths. Sociopaths. People who really do evil things. And perhaps the reason we fear the boogeyman the most is because down deep in our own inner psyche there lurks the demonic being our collective unconscious might transform our outer selves into being, given the wrong stresses and influences. People snap. We say they “go postal,” referring to postal workers, students, and others we have heard about who change from mild-mannered persons into killers if fear and anger take over the control of the mind. We hope to keep our own inner demons chained, and we shudder when we hear of others who have become the monster. So all through our lives we are haunted by the specter of the boogeyman we might one day encounter, be it external or the we might one day see in the mirror.

Halloween is the day when we have a look at the demon. We play-act by dressing up in costumes, whether in reality or perhaps in fantasy. It is a special little holiday where we confront our fantasies…and those of others. And just thinking about Halloween rekindles the thoughts of everything fantasy-wise from the harmless to the horrible. It is a night when we fear the darkness all over again.

Thus, the holiday of Halloween is the perfect time to confront the boogeyman, and to let our old deep fears come out. Make such a confrontation into a movie, with all the artifacts available, and in the right (wrong?) hands such a movie, if well-constructed, can scare the bejabbers out of us.

John Carpenter made such a movie back in 1978. It is indeed a scary tale to shake all your secure defenses if you have never seen it. And it is still scary when you go back and watch it again and again.

It is about “Evil Personified” in the form of a psychotic young man. At the start of the movie, a six-year-old boy murders his sister. He is institutionalized in a mental institution, because a six-year-old murderer is such an unthinkable thing that we know he must not be imprisoned, but “understood” and fixed. But little Michael Myers appears to be unfixable. Oh, a gifted psychiatrist works with him for seven years, trying to re-form him, but fails. So for the next eight years he is jailed in the mental institution. So now that makes him…let’s see..6+7+8 makes him twenty-one years old now. And then Michael Myers, the unfixed killer, escapes. And he goes back on Halloween to the same town where he killed his sister fifteen years ago. Why? As the local teenagers watch “The Thing” on TV, Michael has a plan. He wants to bring death and horror to his home town once again.

What follows is something I am not going to describe in detail. That would spoil the surprises to come. You will see gut-wrenching horrors that will knock your socks off, especially if you have never seen them. I am well aware that some people are repelled by bloody horror movies, and if you are among them, don’t see this one. There are many movies out there today that are under the grouping of bloody horror movies which I would never recommend to anyone- they revel in pain, torture, and death. And I would not recommend this one for sensitive people and small children. Some would say that “Halloween” crosses over the line into the “too shocking” ones, too. Yet for me, this movie has value in that it is in the twilight zone between gripping suspense and bloody exploitation, and yet there is an artfulness to it that is both shocking but entertaining. It takes us into that heart of darkness of our deepest fears, and doesn’t let us off the hook. It is a minor masterpiece and a litmus test of our psyches all in one.

Carpenter showed a skill in scaring us with outright violence in the film, certainly. But the majority of the horror in this film is not really in the explicit scenes, it lies in the shadows, the nuances, in the things not quite seen, the questions. In that sense, we are given unfinished patterns, and we must connect the dots. We willingly participate in the film and identify with the characters, even as we know what may certainly happen to them. Part of the ease we have in participating is because we know these people; they are simple, small-town young people like we have known, have been, or have seen before. Their world is one with which we can easily identify. The neighborhood is like that of where we have all been. And it all looks safe and cozy. And then a killer so unthinkable enters the scene that the nightmare becomes our own nightmare.

Jamie Lee Curtis is the sane counterpoint to the monster’s insanity that keeps us clinging to the edge of our seats all throughout the movie. Though she is an innocent young girl, she’s nobody’s fool. In fact, she is as tough, in her own way, as her adversary. Much like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, she improvises on the spur of the moment. We rally in our support for her as she confronts Michel Myers because secretly we are hoping for two things. First, we are hoping that if we ever confronted such a boogeyman, that we ourselves would not “choke” and be victimized, but that we would think and fight back. And secondly, we hope that with the skills and the intellect that we have developed as we have grown, that we may always be able to control whatever demons lie buried deep in our own well of inner psychic darkness.

I do not recommend the film to anyone who does not want to be scared out of their gourd. But, on the other hand, if you like to have a thrilling experience at times that will take you right to the edge, Halloween, the 1978 version, will indeed take you there.

The script, the lighting, the handheld camera shots, the acting, all contribute to a unique experience. And very importantly, the music- that stunning music- will mesmerize you. If you want to go where your demons dwell, and see a woman who keeps her head in such a place- then this is the movie. On the other hand, if confronting the boogeyman is not your thing, back off.

I won’t tell you about it, but there is a scene near the end where we are reminded that evil has a way of coming back on us, even when we think we have done it in. It is a reminder that we can never really rest easy when dealing with the demons. The battle is never really over. And if we think it is, we are only fooling ourselves. Eternal vigilance is the order of the day. Or, in this case, of the night.

Five Stars/ *****