EVIL IN SUBURBIA

       He is the embodiment of evil. We know this as soon as he places the mask on his face, our camera peeping through two eyeholes, as we linger up the stairs of a dark house before witnessing a murder, prying the mask off, and realizing it has been covering the face of a knifed psychopath -- pure evil -- in the form of six-year-old Michael Myers, dazed, confused, but not nearly sympathetic or regretful. This is Haddonfield, Illinois. Jumprope chants of schoolgirls open the film, and a sequence of shots of the central neighborhood close it, envelop it in a terrorizing view. This is the height of neighborly horror, the apex of paranoia in the cul-de-sac. This is the suburban nightmare.

We know of the suburban nightmare. It often holds no value but of whispers and tales, of urban legends and autumn spirit. It lies in the boogeyman and the haunted houses and the dark -- and director John Carpenter goes to lengths to maximize these truths, as they are inherent in the context of the story. But where Halloween strikes dead-on is its self-aware subversion -- the notion that, yes, these silly childhood fascinations with ghosts and goblins are just that: playful, disassociated, tangential. But beneath them lies a true root of evil, a true uninhabited spirit of all terror and no mercy.

       Enter Michael Myers. Surely one of the stand-alone names in horror infamy, though not nearly exclusively on the basis of its timeliness preceding the “slasher” boom of the 1980s (which Carpenter, intention notwithstanding, really provides the commencement for). What is it that makes Myers so individual, so singular? It must be his complete and utter disconnect to anything human. Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street) was a man with a dark past who became the byproduct of those who were cruel to him. Similarly for Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), whose teenage-idiot-sex-crazed-unabashedly cliché peers drove him to death, and from the grave into madness. But what for Michael? There is no past. There is no tragic event. The tragedy of Michael’s past was that he was ever born into the Earth, a pure and mechanic personification of the evil that blankets the suburban nightmare.

      And he is blanketed over Haddonfield. From the moment of his escape, he is roaming his former childhood grounds, stalking children from school, feeding from paranoid teens who heard a rustle in the bushes, but look to no avail. One of these teens is Laurie Strode, whose father wants to sell Michael’s old murder-house. Bad idea. Early in the film, she enters the house and sets a key there. Worse idea. Not because of the haunted-house scares, which she is reminded of by the children she babysits during the film’s runtime, but because Michael is inside watching-- and he has found his halloween night.

      This neighborhood threat is tightened into the film’s dual central locations -- homes which lay across the street from each other. In this way, by diluting the view, Carpenter elongates the insight into primordial suburban fears which will follow for the story’s remains; again, not just the fables and ghoulish stories that kids tell around the campfire, but the darker, more invisible threats of the campfire: the darkness, the unknown. The vulnerability. The allowance of evil. Myers holds his gazes on his prey, a purely mechanical and entirely unsympathetic viewpoint. This is not your ordinary teen-slasher: this is a robotic amalgamation of all we see as utterly impossible and monstrous, the true figure under the bed that makes the kids keep the lights on, keep the campfire burning.

      One of the film’s most honest moments comes through Michael’s tyranny on two teenagers in yet another dark house (at some point, the mere invention of a lightbulb must have been forgotten). One teenager is massacred, and Myers takes a ghoulish white-cloth and places the teen’s glasses on them, approaching the other character. With no knowledge of the murder just having taken place, she laughs at what she believes is her friend, playing a trick. This is Carpenter in full effect, playing with the mindset of the audience. He laughs at the picket fences and the swift sidewalks he presented earlier in the film, and knows they create a sense of false security, a comforting cover to an endearingly terrifying cause.

     The tagline tells all. The night he came home. It introduces a darkness in night and an evil in he, but the true smirk for Carpenter is that last one: home. Michael Myers terrorizes this town, preys on the innocent, tricks them, deceives them, laughs at them. And this is his home. He is not necessarily horrific due to the adolescent environment, but even so, he is a product of it. The marketplaces we share and the churches we attend and the courtyards we pass by are his, too. And at the film’s tail, when the two-hour search for Michael by police and psychologist Sam Loomis proves futile, it isn’t the thought of where he could go now that haunts them. He escapes, seemingly into thin air, because that’s where his spirit lies: here, in the heart of this cul-de-sac, home-by-nine wonder. He escapes, and so too, does the camera, resting in its final moments on glimpses of the town: this town, these houses, these hum-drum people who wake and work and repeat. This is his town, too, and he came home. It’s not just the evil; it’s the evil right next to them, that always seems to escape into thin air. That’s the suburban nightmare.

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