You all know what day it is—Halloween. The single day Americans set aside for a cathartic release of paganism.
Twelve days ago, an 11th installment was born in the bloated and overblown horror franchise “Halloween.” And, with a generous 79 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, maybe it has undone the sins of the nine other sequels.
But, if we really want to get to the bottom of the franchise’s history and figure out why one should even care in the first place, we’re going to have to go all the way back to 1978—the year when the original, low-budget Halloween changed the face of horror forever.
Those who haven’t seen the film may still recognize its antagonist, “Michael Myers.” Myers is a crazed sociopath who, after murdering his sister when he was 6 years old, being sent to a sanitarium and escaping 15 years later, fixates on high school senior and baby sitter “Laurie Strode,” the inaugural role of Jamie Lee Curtis. Strode goes about her Oct. 31 day and—along with the viewer—discovers that be it daytime or nighttime, Myers can appear anytime, anywhere. You, as am I, are probably used to spookies occurring in the dark, making it a jarring experience when a masked, knife-wielding killer appears in the middle of green grass and white fences.
Following the lead of Psycho, this movie has been lauded as the pioneer of “slasher symbolism.” In the 1970s and ’80s, Halloween defined the slasher genre with its most key tropes: juxtapositions of sex with murder, the background of middle-American suburbia under attack, an antagonist with all the attributes intimidating to the social norms of the era, all of which date back to Gothic stories like Dracula. With his relentless terrorism of women and children, Myers is the sexually-bewitched, hyper-masculine Antichrist of 1970s values, only coming out on that mystical October night when evil things are allowed to roam.
Bet you didn’t know that, huh? Bet you never considered the thematic depth of a ’70s horror film, huh? I wonder why—maybe because it puts emphasis on absolutely everything but that.
For as long as I’ve been a horror addict, I just have not understood the appeal of the slasher genre. More than its strengths or weaknesses, what I noticed most about Halloween were the frequent similarities to some of my favorite movies of this decade—It Follows, The Witch, Hereditary—all dating back to this 1978 strain of “smart horror.”
But, in modern smart horror, these movies actually engage with the viewer. They don’t try to impress them with soon-to-be-obsolete gore, and they don’t beat around the bloodstained bush with their concept. They present a tone of emotional density and scares that are visceral enough to make the viewer really feel the meaning. In slasher films like Halloween, the viewer maybe gets a vague idea of a concept, and only if they look ridiculously hard.
This is not to say spoon-feeding the viewer and encouraging ignorance is ideal, but the reason slasher films are blown off so frequently is because they don’t feel like they mean anything, so the viewer has no compulsion to think any deeper about them. Nostalgia can only go so far, and there are plenty of non-slasher horror films from the same era that take a smarter approach—The Shining, The Exorcist, Alien, Eraserhead—and I still would watch them over this.
Maybe slasher films were necessary to transfer certain vibes and innovations on to the next generation, but when that generation uses the same tools so much better, the slasher genre becomes transitory, destined to be outdone every single time. Halloween is not a bad movie, but, as a whole, this movie and the era it represents is just not for me.
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