Classic Movie Review : Halloween (1978)
I’m getting old. Not “get off my lawn” old, but I am fully engaged in the process of liking walkmen photos on Facebook and calling today’s youth soft (whatever that means). It doesn’t help that generation Z is absolutely kicking our ass at being relevant, but there’s been worse in terms of generation gap. For example, the philosophical backlash of the sexual revolution has been greatly undersold. Mostly because we’ve been the ones dealing with it.
A film like Halloween could only have been born out of weird generational circumstances. It’s a weird “fuck you” to gen Xers and old millennials for the sins of their parents.
Halloween notoriously tells the story of Michael Myers (Tony Moran), a psychopath who was institutionalized after stabbing his teenage sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) to death. Fifteen years after the crime, Michael breaks out of his psychiatric hospital and comes back to his hometown to take care of unfinished business. Standing in his way is his dogged psychiatrist (Donald Pleasance) and a young woman named Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
It is widely acknowledged that Halloween is the first slasher ever. By that, I mean it is the first movie dedicated to a masked serial murder hunting down horny teenagers with a bladed weapon. Such a weirdly precise occurrence was not born in a vacuum. Children of the sixties were coming of age in 1978 and there was no greater boogeyman to their emancipation than the ghost of conservative values. Family, virtue, abstinence, you know what I’m talking about.
Halloween was John Carpenter’s attempt to create a modern day boogeyman. Before the internet, it was a lot easier to scare people. So, his creature had to be ideological because ideas don’t die. By being deprived of his childhood, Michael Myers is forever locked in 1963 and represents the values that lead him to murder his sister. He saw Judith’s emancipation as a threat to his household and therefore interprets any display of precocious sexuality as such.
He is sexually turned on and intellectually turned away by what he doesn’t know. Reminds you of someone?
That’s right. Michael Myers is the embodiment of every inherent threat packed in “get off my lawn”. Him and Laurie are at ideological odds. That is why she suffers. Being young, she is powerless to act upon the world and witnesses her friends being picked apart one by one. Why is also why Michael suffers, because like any idea that has lived past its expiration date it gets beaten up on by younger generations. In other words, they’re a match made in hell.
No other slasher gets beat up like Michael Myers because he’s an idea that refuses to die.
In general, slasher films have aged poorly. They are the product of a world before internet where urban mythologies were considerably more potent. But Halloween aged like fine wine. Because it is a tale of becoming an adult in a world where you are, in ever possible way, victim of outdated ideas. Don’t wait for October 2021 to rewatch Halloween. Pop it whenever you feel judgmental to millennials, zoomers or whoever was born after you.
8.1/10
