Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [91]
The monster has traditionally been a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural. But Myers doesn’t reveal anything. He wears a mask, but there is nothing of importance under it. Emerging out of an idyllic suburb, Myers is evidence that evil wasn’t the result of urban blight or the Vietnam War. Myers doesn’t represent the cold calculus of scientific progress (see 2001) or a religious conception of evil (The Exorcist).
Unlike past killers, Michael Myers didn’t scamper or cower or express any human emotion. He moved as fluidly as a ghost, calmly, with no agitation. Michael Myers doesn’t jump into the screen, and while he certainly attacks with a variety of knives, he is at his most threatening standing still, just looking. This is when his perspective is most unsettling. “There was a movie called The Innocents made in the sixties where ghosts were standing across a pond, just looking. Doing nothing but looking,” Carpenter recalls. “There’s something arresting about that. It stuck in my mind when making Halloween.”
When Myers killed, it was not a crime of passion. There is no suggestion that Michael Myers kills for sexual pleasure, or any other type, for that matter. Nor does he do it out of dysfunction. Carpenter’s firm belief, developed reading Lovecraft, watching The Thing, and in long discussions with classmates at USC, was that explaining ruins a good story. Influenced by the terror of Samuel Beckett, he wanted an empty space at the heart of the movie, where the answers usually are. The absence of meaning defined him. It wasn’t that Myers didn’t fit into the categories of cinematic killers with which audiences had become familiar. He didn’t fit into any category. The mystery about this strange killer remained. In the credits, he was called simply “The Shape.” He was not supernatural, but not human either. He was the thing in-between.
“We tried to strip out the plot devices of horror films that had come before, because they didn’t matter,” Carpenter said. “All you are dealing with is something that’s pure evil. We strip everything down to a purity. He’s not wearing anything distinguishable. It’s an outfit at a gasoline station. But it could be anything. He’s a blank. We stripped away the particulars, the details. I had never seen that.”
What we do know about Michael Myers comes from Dr. Loomis, who seems utterly convinced that nothing will stop him. “I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding,” he explains about Michael. “Even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.” Hovering at the corners of the frame, Myers appears and disappears suddenly, giving the audience an anxious sense that he could be anywhere. And when Laurie asks the doctor about who the killer was, Dr. Loomis does not attempt to give a religious and medical explanation. Those movies have been made. He simply tells her, “It’s the bogeyman.”
Of course, it is also true that Carpenter came up with this character at least in part to save money. You didn’t need a great screenwriter to waste time figuring out motivation or a talented actor to work on the performance. Practically speaking, Myers was easy. But make no mistake: the character was rooted in a conceptual idea that the scariest thing in the world is something you can’t understand. By emptying out all the details from the character, Carpenter solved the Monster Problem. But it took him a while to figure out how. Michael Myers was the result of a lifetime of experimenting with monsters.
THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD was one of Carpenter’s favorite movies—and there is a direct reference to it in Halloween when we see Laurie Strode watching the movie on television. The Howard Hawks movie was based on a short story by John