Halloween
Not even Dante himself could have devised a more devious Hell than that which is fashioned for Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise. Michael Myers is the Sisyphus of slasher villains: his eternal punishment is a mission to annihilate his last remaining relative before that relative dies accidentally between sequels while he’s “dead” or in a coma. He never manages to kill this relative; he only manages to kill, in greater or lesser degrees of comprehensiveness, everyone else. Then he is neutralized or supposedly killed, and after a dormant period, he returns to kill that relative again; or, in some sequels, an entirely new relative that the old relative spawned behind his back. Things are much simpler in Halloween, in which Michael doesn’t appear to be after any relative specifically, and kills a good number of other people even if he is. Halloween opens in Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween Night in 1963. Michael watches his sister Judith and her boyfriend make out on the couch from an outside window. The boyfriend puts on a clown mask and kisses her with it, and then they decide to go upstairs to have sex. I have the feeling that they have been making out for a long time and it was the clown mask that finally persuaded Judith to try out one last kink before she dumps him. Michael waits for the lights to go out, then goes into the house, grabs a butcher knife from the kitchen, and approaches the stairs to Judith’s bedroom. Then the boyfriend comes downstairs. They have only been in her bedroom for about a minute, which means they have been having sex for about thirty seconds, minus the time it took them to get upstairs, take their clothes off, and the time it took the boyfriend to put his clothes back on and go downstairs – apparently without any goodbyes. If they can have sex so quickly they might as well have stayed on the couch, since Michael surely wouldn’t have been able to see anything even mildly erotic in sex at that crazed a speed. Before he goes into his sister’s bedroom Michael finds his clown mask and puts it on. The boyfriend must have taken it off before going into the bedroom, or perhaps it was blown out by the torque from the blitzkrieg fucking they were doing. His sister is naked and brushing her hair, and when she sees Michael she scolds him and covers her breasts. As Michael stabs her, he watches his arm come down as it thrusts the knife into her at a no doubt slower speed than she is used to being penetrated. It is as if this murder is a great condescension on Michael’s part and he wants to lose as little face in doing it as he can. The next scene opens in Smith’s Grove, Illinois, on October 30, 1978. A man named Dr. Loomis and a nurse are on their way to a maximum-security mental institution. When they arrive there are several patients wandering around behind the gate. There was apparently a riot inside that flooded out the inmates whose mental disorders prevent them from participating. Loomis gets out of the car and jogs to the entrance, then Michael jumps on top of car and smashes his hand through the passenger window. The nurse runs out of the car, which Michael gets in and drives off. One of the more noticeable plot holes in this movie, and no one can pretend to solve things of this nature with absolute success, is how Michael ever learned to drive a car. I want to know if he let all of the other inmates out as a smokescreen for his escape. The next scene is back in Haddonfield. A girl named Laurie leaves her house to go to school and a boy named Tommy walks with her. Laurie will be babysitting him later that night. One of her co-dependent friends, Annie, will exploit Laurie’s babysitting situation so she can have sex with her boyfriend, a manipulation that ultimately makes her death much more enjoyable because all of her cunning only makes it easier for Michael to kill her. They pass the Myers’s house on the way, which looks run down and menaced. Michael is behind the screen to the front door and watches Laurie and Tommy. He is wearing the gas-station attendant uniform he will sport throughout the series, perhaps because he wasn’t happy with the white robes he was wearing when he escaped, although they complement the Captain Kirk mask and fit the Halloween theme much better. Laurie is in English class a little later. She looks out the window and sees a station wagon that looks like the one Michael stole from Loomis, which should also have an All-Points Bulletin on it and would be especially conspicuous in Haddonfield. After Laurie spots the car, Michael steals another one. This car has a label on the door that says “For official use only”, which means it will be missed no matter how official Michael thinks his business is. Meanwhile, Loomis is at a payphone at an intersection somewhere between Smith’s Grove and Haddonfield. When he hangs up he notices a truck on the side of the road with the door open. I don’t see why Michael would take precious time to force a truck off the road, kill the driver and then steal his clothes, only to get back in the station wagon and not steal the truck instead. But it appears he did just that. I have an alternate theory, however, that isn’t quite so stupid: Michael could have stolen the truck and abandoned the station wagon, but then he looked in the rearview mirror and saw another station wagon that looked exactly like the one he just abandoned, and, assuming that Loomis and the nurse had resumed chasing him in it, he decided to steal it back. After murdering the poor man driving the alternate station wagon, he dumped his body and the truck on the side of the road and drove off in a station wagon that is the spitting image of the one he escaped with. Meanwhile, Laurie is leaving school with one of her friends, Linda. Linda is a cheerleader and has a busy schedule: she has to learn three new cheers, then has a game tomorrow afternoon, then has to get her hair done at 5:00 p.m., and then a dance at 8:00 p.m. All of these are things Linda will never do, but I am glad she told Laurie about them so I know what a full life she was living before Michael takes it. They are met by Annie. Annie says that she’s “never smiling again” because her boyfriend Paul dragged her into the boy’s locker room. Laurie says that Paul was “exploring uncharted territory”, but Laurie should have thought for a second about where Paul dragged Annie and what was charted in that previously-uncharted territory that would make Annie vow never to smile again. Annie and Laurie discuss their plans for the evening. Annie will be babysitting the Lindsay Wallace. Tommy, whom Laurie is babysitting, lives three houses down from the Wallace’s. It’s almost as if the two families are friends, and it’s curious that these parents didn’t pool their kids together in one house with one babysitter. That would have saved lives, and although it might have resulted in the deaths of Lindsay and Tommy, their deaths might have made people take Halloween a bit more seriously in the sequels. Laurie goes home, and after she sees Michael by the clothesline, who then disappears, the phone rings; when she answers it the person on the other end doesn’t say anything. Laurie asks who called and then hangs up after a few seconds with a frustration equal to my own: now I want someone to die and I don’t even know who it is. When the phone rings again Annie is on the other end, having called the first time and wondering why Laurie hung up. It is no amazing thing that she did, since all Annie did was breath heavily. Meanwhile someone stole Judith Myer’s headstone at her grave. Michael stalks Laurie and Annie as they drive around sharing a joint. Annie wants Laurie to ask someone to the dance, but Laurie doesn’t think she can. She eventually admits that she would like to go to the dance with Ben Tramer, which makes Annie very happy. Michael is still following them, and will continue to follow them when the movie cuts to a scene later that night, which means that a lot weed-smoking and talking about Ben Tramer has been mercifully cut. I enjoy this because Michael has to suffer in a silent rage while following them and I get to enjoy all the suffering that rage will inflict without having to suffer myself. Annie drops Laurie off at the Doyle’s, then pulls into the house she is babysitting at across the street. Next Bracket and Loomis arrive at the Myers’s house. Once they go inside they notice a dead dog that Loomis thinks Michael ate because he was hungry. They go upstairs to Judith’s room, where Loomis explains to Bracket where she was sitting when Michael stabbed her to death, as well as where Michael was peeping out in the yard before he stabbed her. There is no way Loomis could know this, since Michael certainly didn’t tell him, unless someone else was peeping on Judith when Michael killed her and was later quoted as saying “She was sitting there brushing her hair all naked like, and then he went inside and popped out and stabbed her, much to my displeasure.” Loomis will stay at the Myers’s house until Michael comes back. Bracket wants to notify more authorities but Loomis says this will create a panic and stops him. Bracket says he’ll check back in an hour and leaves Loomis in the house. While Laurie is babysitting, Tommy asks “What’s the boogeyman?”, but the phone rings before Laurie answers. It’s Annie on the phone again, this time with “big, big news.” The “big, big news” is that Laurie is going to the Homecoming Dance with Ben Tramer. She took it upon herself to call him and tell him Laurie was attracted to him. Tommy grows bored and looks out the window. He sees Michael standing in the front yard, who must not realize there are people looking for him because committing a murder-spree in your hometown, in the same neighborhood no less, requires a bit more precaution than standing in open view for extended, pointless amounts of time. Laurie and Tommy watch The Thing. Tommy asks what the boogeyman is again and Laurie tells him “there’s no such thing”, and when Tommy insists that he saw the boogeyman outside Laurie backpedals and says the boogeyman can only come out on Halloween but she is there to protect him. Annie calls Paul, who tells Annie that his parents are gone and she thinks that is “fantastic” and wants him to come over. Then she makes a deal with Lindsay that she will drop her off at the Doyle’s so Lindsay can watch horror movies with Tommy while she goes to pick up Paul. Ironically, it is Annie and Paul’s inability to iron out their plans, and Annie’s abovementioned cunning to iron out Paul, that eventually kills Annie and saves Paul. They jog over to the Doyle’s house. When they pass the station wagon Michael parked on the side of the road, he stands up behind it. He must have been hiding or taking a shit from the dog he just ate. The human stomach can only handle so much dog meat. Laurie wants Annie to call Ben back and tell him she was just “fooling around”, and Annie says if that Laurie watches Lindsay she’ll consider talking to Ben in the morning. She then leaves and says she’ll call in an hour or so. Annie is one calculating harlot if she purposefully called Ben, or simply claimed that she did, in anticipation of needing to pick up Paul, which would require dumping Lindsay off with Laurie. Once back at Lindsay’s house, Annie gets in a car in the garage, where Michael is hiding in the backseat. He he slits her throat and then her head lands on the steering wheel. Her face presses on the horn, which honks endlessly. Later Tommy gets up and hides behind a curtain so he can scare Lindsay. While he is there he looks through the window, where he sees Michael carrying Annie’s dead body around the front yard. Tommy loses his composure completely and starts screaming about the boogeyman and scaring Lindsay, who would be far more frightened if she watched a man carry the limp body of her babysitter from the garage to the front door as Tommy just did. Dr. Loomis is still at the Myers house, where he is certain Michael will show up, although he doesn’t know that Michael has already killed a young woman and it might be many murders yet before he decides to come home. Bracket sneaks up behind him and puts his hand on Loomis’s shoulder, which startles him. Bracket says nothing is happening in Haddonfield except “kids playing pranks, trick-or-treating, parking, getting high”. Bracket saw all this in the length of time it took Michael to murder his daughter. He thinks Loomis is wrong about Michael, and goes on to say that Haddonfield, in case Loomis didn’t know, is composed of families “all lined up in rows up and down these streets. You’re telling me they’re lined up for a slaughterhouse.”. That implies the families are waiting in line to be killed without the knowledge that they are going to be killed beforehand, but are fully aware that, for some reason, they’re standing in line. I know Bracket did not use this metaphor on a spur without having seen such a thing first, and I have to see it now as well and thankfully know what state, town, and neighborhood to look in thanks to Halloween’s specific title cards. Meanwhile Linda and her boyfriend Bob arrive at the Doyle’s house. Linda has a plan: “First we go inside, right? Then we’ll just talk a little. Then Annie will distract Lindsay. That’s when we go upstairs to the first bedroom on the left, you got it?” Bob’s plan is a bit different: “First I rip your clothes off. Then you rip my clothes off, then we rip Lindsay’s clothes off. Yeah I think I got it.” Bob’s plan has the advantage of simplicity and not relying on a dead girl to facilitate it. They exit the van and go inside the house. Linda shouts for Annie, then calculates that Annie took Lindsay out. She decides to make out on the couch. The camera pans away and reveals Michael watching them inside the room, which means he must have seen them driving up while he was hiding Annie’s body and doesn’t mind staying at a house that keeps producing people for him to kill faster than he can dispose of the ones he already has. Linda calls Laurie after she and Bob have sex on the couch. Laurie tells Linda that Annie went to pick up Paul, and Linda tells Laurie that Annie’s “totally not here.” Everything is absolute with Linda. She doesn’t know that Michael killed Annie, but if she did she would be committing the fallacy of division: just because Annie “totally” isn’t there doesn’t mean parts of Annie might be there instead. Linda tells Bob that Lindsay is gone for the night, and Bob giggles. They’re counting on Lindsay’s parents staying gone as well, whose plans they know nothing about, and it would not be pleasant to be found in a house they have no connection with, without Annie or more importantly Lindsay anywhere in sight, with ripped clothes all over the floor and at least one dead body waiting to be found once the initial ruckus settles down. And, with Tommy constantly on the lookout for the boogeyman and Laurie able to rationalize the boogeyman away, I am sure it will take many more sightings of Michael moving around dead bodies before Laurie can no longer ignore the fact that there is a someone, boogeyman or not, over at the Doyle’s who was not invited and has no intentions of giving anyone a “good scare”. Laurie watches the Doyle’s house from a window, perhaps growing more suspicious because Annie has not yet returned with Paul. It shouldn’t have taken her long to pick him up because Annie doesn’t seem to be the sort to get involved in a long-distance relationship, even if that is the only way to date out of her father’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile Linda and Bob are having sex again and the phone rings, which puts them in a tight spot. If Linda answers it there is the possibility that Lindsay’s parents won’t recognize her voice and come back home; if she doesn’t answer it, her parents might assume something is wrong and come over anyway. Bob simplifies the problem and takes the phone off the hook once it stops ringing. Michael’s shadow passes across the room. Had Bob and Linda not been there, the phone problem would not have been quite so bad for Michael, who never talks but breathes heavily under his mask instead, which is how Annie normally starts conversations on the phone. Bob and Linda finish having sex quickly. She offers Bob a beer, then changes her mind and demands that Bob get one for her. Bob leaves, telling her not to get dressed. He goes downstairs and grabs two beers from the fridge. One of the double-doors in the living room creaks as it opens, drawing his attention. He opens a closet door and says “Come on out.”. Then Michael pops out of this closet, grabs Bob by the throat and pushes him up against the closet door, gripping his throat so Bob can’t scream and alert a naked Linda Michael doesn’t want to see until he kills Bob. He lifts Bob up to the top of the door, and Bob looks worried that Linda has suddenly become much stronger than him and did not obey his orders about not getting dressed – defiantly so. Michael pulls out a knife and lets Bob get a good look at it before he stabs him with it. Michael stares at him for a few seconds, tilting his head to get a better grasp of how Bob last saw the world and will never see it again. Linda is upstairs filing her nails. The door opens and Michael stands there covered with a sheet and wearing Bob’s glasses. When she asks Michael if he got her a beer and he doesn’t reply, she shows him her breasts and asks him if he likes what he sees. That is a good question, but one not even Dr. Loomis might be able to answer because Michael only seems concerned about killing men and women and shows no preference for either as long as they’re dead. Linda continues to demand beer; Michael doesn’t respond so she gets out of bed and calls Laurie to find out where Paul and Annie are. Michael sneaks up behind her as the phone rings. As soon as Laurie answers, he grabs the phone cord and strangles Linda with it. For all Linda knows Bob has suddenly decided to murder her. Laurie can hear Linda moaning on the other end, which can only mean that Linda called her during sex that was apparently so good she had to know where Annie went immediately. Laurie, however, believes it is Annie prank calling her again. The moans become screams and Laurie begins to worry if Annie is all right. One of Laurie’s best friends is getting strangled by a man she believes is her boyfriend and won’t give her beer, and all she can do is worry about another friend who is already dead. Linda goes down on the floor, and right before she dies she pulls the sheet off Michael’s face and maybe sees him in the Captain Kirk mask, but this does not preclude the possibility that she died thinking Bob killed her wearing a generic costume over a specific costume he did not want her to see. Michael puts the phone to his ear and listens to Laurie scream at Annie for a few seconds and then hangs up. Laurie looks out the window and sees the lights go on at the Doyle’s house. Michael might be making up his mind whether he likes Linda’s breasts or not. The lights soon go off, so I guess he doesn’t. Laurie is upset, so she calls someone who doesn’t answer, but it doesn’t matter at this point who she calls because all of her friends are dead. The movie cuts to the Myer’s house where Loomis is still waiting for Michael. Loomis constantly complains about the lack of precautions that allowed Michael to escape without thinking that an equal lack of precautions will allow Michael to kill people. Thus, there is a situation in which Michael escaped because authority figures failed to listen to Loomis, followed by another situation in which Michael has killed people because authority figures did. He notices the car Michael stole, which is across the street and implies that, unless Michael moved it far from Tommy’s house before killing Annie, Bob, and Linda, he has been killing them less than a hundred feet from a house where Loomis is waiting for him to come home and kill no one. He jogs to the car, takes a short look at it, and then runs away. Laurie meanwhile has decided to take action. She goes downstairs and gets some keys out of her purse and heads over to the Doyle’s house. She rings the doorbell and waits outside. When no one answers she goes to the back of the house, where the door is still open. Michael, without perhaps realizing it, has lured Laurie over to the Doyle house in much the same manner he lured Bob over to the closet. She goes toward the living room, sneaking around as if to pull a prank on Linda and Bob, who both died believing a prank was being pulled on them. Once Laurie makes it upstairs she discovers something that must have taken Michael a while to set up: his sister’s tombstone is on the bed where I believe Linda and Bob were having sex, with Annie lying on top of the bed. I think Michael has also turned the jack-o-lantern on the nightstand towards Annie so it appears to be laughing at her. I have no idea whether Annie is supposed to represent Judith Myers, although I highly doubt Michael hauled his sister’s tombstone to his station wagon and then to the Doyle house for this specific reason. It is equally improbable he killed Annie only to have a body to place by the tombstone, when he necessarily had Judith’s right there at the grave. I know Dr. Loomis will never explain this, and it irks me that a killer who never says anything and has a very specific victim-selection process would get symbolic all the sudden. Laurie muffles a scream and leans against a closet, from which Bob – who is apparently hung upside down within it – swings out like a dangling Forrest Gump someone killed and put back in his leg braces. Then she backs into a cabinet where Linda is stuffed. She leans against an open door and Michael comes out slowly and tries to stab her in the back. He misses, and I am not impressed. Michael had the advantage of surprise, and Laurie the disadvantage of emotional turmoil (she was also right there beside him; he could have kissed her if he wanted to), and he misses all the same. However, Laurie tips over the stair rails and falls down, landing further down the stairs and sliding down them in obvious pain. Michael moves quickly, perhaps inferring that if he doesn’t kill Laurie soon she might very well kill herself trying to get away from him. She runs to the back of the house, locks the kitchen door, and tries to get out through the back door, which Michael – I presume – has propped a rake against from outside. Meanwhile Michael tries to get in through the kitchen door, and until he does there is a brief but very entertaining span of time in which two people are trying to get through locked doors that each locked against the other. Michael gives up on using the doorknob and attempts to smash through the door, punching though the wood and then unlocking the doorknob. He comes after Laurie when he gets in, and she breaks the glass of a window on the back door and runs outside. Michael should not have assumed that houses, unlike mental institutions, don’t have unbreakable glass. Laurie goes to the neighbor’s house. Someone inside the house turns the lights for the porch on, look out the blinds, then shuts them after seeing her. She gives up on finding help after that and runs back to Tommy’s house, where the door is locked and she has somehow lost the keys. She bangs on the door and yells for Tommy, then she throws a potted plant at Tommy’s window, which smashes against the wall but manages to wake Tommy up after the banging and screaming did not. He opens the window and asks who’s there, then mumbles “Yeah … right.” and slinks out of sight while Laurie shouts at him to open the door. It was Laurie who played down his fear of a boogeyman he saw numerous times and only has herself to blame for his incredulous sloth now. Tommy opens the door and Laurie gets inside just before Michael is close enough to kill her. She tells Tommy to go upstairs and then locks the door although she just saw Michael punch through a door that cannot be so different that locking it would matter. Laurie is exhausted by this point and sits down by the couch, and Michael pops up from behind it as if he went to sleep somewhere else and woke up here inexplicably. He tries to stab Laurie, but misses again and hits the couch instead. Perhaps he is trying to wear her down with feigned attacks; otherwise, he shouldn’t have wasted his energy setting up the esoteric display with Annie and the tombstone. Laurie stabs him in the neck with a pin-cushion needle. He falls on the floor with a loud plop. Then Laurie pulls herself over the couch with the knife in her hand to take a look, and Michael is either passed out or dead, so she slumps onto the couch and tosses the knife aside. Meanwhile Dr. Loomis is strolling down the street. He looks back and forth at the front yards of the houses he passes. Bracket arrives, and I have to believe he was summoned as he has not been keen on reappearing since he made his slaughterhouse simile. Loomis tells Bracket to go “round the back of the houses, I’ll watch the front”. This would be a good plan if Michael was following Bracket’s slaughterhouse schematic instead of killing a group of people all collected in one house. Laurie limps upstairs to check on Tommy and Lindsay. They are quite safe, which cements Laurie’s status as the best babysitter in Haddonfield history while Annie will go down as the worst. As she explains to Tommy that the boogeyman won’t get him because she killed the boogeyman, Michael’s shadow appears on the wall behind her as he walks up the stairs. Tommy doesn’t see Michael until he is on the stair landing, but Laurie cannot see Michael at all, and so Tommy has the rare privilege of seeing what someone looks like who is lying to his face while the proof of that lies comes upstairs to kill the liar. Laurie herds him and Lindsay into a bedroom while Michael stands there looking confused. If only Laurie knew that she was adopted and that Michael only wants to kill her because she is his sister, she could have forgotten about tending to Tommy and Lindsay, whom Michael would have just tossed harmlessly over the stairs like so many human speedbumps he’s gone out of his way to encounter in his roundabout pursuit of her. She locks Tommy and Lindsay in a closet, then opens the door to a balcony and hides in another closet. Michael comes in the room and goes directly to the closet. He punches through the door again, then Laurie grabs a coat hanger and pokes Michael in the eye when he comes inside the closet. Michael drops his knife again; Laurie grabs it and stabs him in the gut. She lets Tommy and Lindsay out of the closet, then she sends them away to the Mackenzie’s house to call the police. Meanwhile Michael wakes up on the floor. He stands up at the same time Laurie does and walks up behind her, then tries to strangle her as she walks out of the room. Laurie fights back and manages to get his mask off. Michael comes at Laurie with a very angry look before Loomis, who has come inside on the sly, shoots him back into the room with a handgun his authority as a psychiatrist does not allow him to conceal. Loomis runs into the bedroom after Michael, who has put his mask back on. Loomis fires several more times and Michael staggers backwards, goes face-first off the balcony, and then falls to the ground. Laurie cries with relief and asks Loomis “Was that the boogeyman?”. Loomis answers “As a matter of fact, it was.” Loomis walks out on the balcony and looks down, and of course Michael has disappeared. Laurie cries when the camera cuts back to her, as if she saw this and knows there is a sequel coming where bullets will not kill Michael and she has no friends to distract him with any longer. |