Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [90]
Then there is the bravura opening tracking shot, the most influential in the history of the horror film. It begins outside, shaking, constantly on the move, and then goes around the side of the suburban house and inside where we see a teenage boy leaving in a hurry while his girlfriend is up in her room. They have clearly just had sex. The camera takes the perspective of an unseen character. He walks up the stairs into the bedroom. Sitting there naked, the girl turns her head. It’s clear from the look on her face that she knows the person she’s seeing. She calls him Michael. Then from the side of the screen the killer, obscured so far, shows us his knife. At this point, Carpenter shifts the camera toward the knife so the audience can have a better look. Then he jabs it into her chest, she falls over, the synthesizer music swells, and the camera goes down the stairs and out the door just as a car arrives and two parents walk out to find a little boy in a Halloween costume holding a bloody knife.
From the point of view of film logic, it makes no sense for the young killer to look at his knife. Why would he when his focus is on the girl? The answer informs you exactly how to read this movie: Carpenter cared less about the motivation of the killer than in telling the audience where to look. The shifting point of view tells its own story. While Hooper puts the audience in the position of the innocent bystander, Carpenter makes us see through the eyes of the predator and then the victim and then back again. By showing us the knife, Carpenter reminds us that our perspective is not the same as that of the killer. The killer is after the girl. The audience cares about the knife, or at least what the knife will do to that girl. But of course, it’s not so simple. Most audience members didn’t notice this break in logic because they kept their eyes on the girl. It’s not always easy to look away from a naked girl. Is Carpenter implicating his audience here or is he making fun of how easy it is to trick them? Stop salivating over the girl, he seems to be saying, look at the giant knife! The arm of the young Michael Myers is that of Carpenter’s girlfriend and cowriter Debra Hill, a convention also found in the movies of Dario Argento, who always shot his own hands killing victims.
This scene would lead many critics to psychological theories. The movie has been attacked for using violence against women to satisfy a sadistic male fantasy. Alternatively, since Myers kills women who had sex, some critics charged that Carpenter was making a statement about the dangers of promiscuity. There is some undeniable truth in the charges. After all, they called these movies “exploitation” for a reason. Carpenter has long denied any connection between sex and violence in Halloween, outside of the fact that women having sex make for good victims because they are distracted. So why are women always getting chased in movies like this one? De Palma, who has fielded more of these attacks than just about any horror director, explains it this way: “There is just something about a woman and a knife.” But what is that something?
Some directors argue that women read as more vulnerable on-screen, and, in a genre that depends on a huge imbalance of power between the monster and the victim, a female victim can be much more potent. There is also a long tradition of movies about women in trouble: it has become the kind of convention that formula movies rely on. Some react against them. Yet still, grappling with traditions helps manipulate the audience’s expectations. And these movies have also been given feminist readings that argue that the pleasures of horror are more masochistic than sadistic, and in the case of Halloween, and most of its imitators, the female hero triumphs at the end.
The sex-obsessed readings of the movie miss part of the point. Carpenter did care about genre conventions but he had no interest in exploring politics in his action and horror movies—and there has never