HALLOWEEN (1978) - A 10-Step Deconstruction of Carpenter's Secret Recipe

(updated from orig. 2012 version) Every time I've seen HALLOWEEN it's been in a different visual format. I was only 12 when it hit theaters and transformed my grade school cafeteria into a never-ending whisper orchestra of giddy ever-mounting dread. That tagline ("the night he came home") and that image of the butcher knife pumpkin were slowly sandpapering our coccyx down to a sense of bottom chakra vertigo. We too terrified by the credits and of course that theme song, even the font, to watch the actual movie when came on late-70s/early-80s network TV. But we kept hustling through the living room while our parent's watched it, catching just enough of a glimpse to overload our dread before retreating to the empowering solace of DC war comics. It was, of course, pan and scanned, and edited, and different material inserted to pad the time and change the meaning of the whole film. And even then, I could never stay in the same room with it for more than the space between two commercial breaks. 

It wasn't until college that I saw the whole thing through to the end, the original version on VHS, panned and scanned, and me immune to slasher fear through the even stronger empowerment of whiskey. Once afraid only of murderers I was growing up to be afraid only of cops. 

First, we must note Carpenter has never made a film remotely like it since. There's no other non-supernatural horror movie in his catalogue. And despite Dr. Loomis's rantings about Michael being the boogeyman, death itself, darkness" etc., in this first and best-by-far film, he is still just a maniac. There are no 'slasher film rules' yet, the virgin can't be certain she'll even be the final girl or what that even means. These future archetypes are all being created with this film. Carpenter is writing directly on the primordial subconscious. The only imitator to really pay attention to the actual style and substance of Carpenter's film is Sean S. Cunningham in the original Friday the 13th. Everyone else kept the subject 'killer stalking teenagers' but missed the trees for the forest - not examining the variations on cinematic language that made the original HALLOWEEN so scary. 

Carpenter is a stubborn iconoclast who does his own thing so never chased the cheap bucks of the slasher film he and wife/producer Deborah Hill invented. Thus, HALLOWEEN stands alone as a modern film classic that might be sidestepped by some film deconstructionist/analyst writers due to its unseemly progeny and Rob Zombie remakes. But here, at last, I'm old enough, and have gone so very long without ever being stalked by a killer that I can watch this movie and have only pleasant goosebump fear and not the queasy proto-feminist anxiety and Satanic Panic headline dread of auld. And I've noticed some ingenious aspects of Carpenter's framing and story I wish to share. Attention all future horror filmmakers! Don't just have a killer with a knife and wonder why your film sucks and Carpenter made it look so easy. Pay attention to blocking, lighting, and above all, realness and in-the-moment termite art observance.

1.  Tick-Tockality: (AKA tick-tock momentum) 

a. Cross-cut Time Melt: Carpenter subverts cross-cutting in order to slow down 'real-time,' doubling or even tripling the length of scary suspenseful moments so they seem to melt and suspense becomes almost unnaturally intense. Tick-tockality (I coined the phrase in cinema criticism before the advent of the app, so I get to keep it) means a small narrative/diegetic time drawn out via cross-cuts that don't imply simultaneous movement. In this way the climax of the film takes up like 20 minutes but it's really all occurring over 5-10 minute period of actual narrative/diegetic time. So if you're watching Michael come slowly after Laurie as she pounds on the front door trying, to wake up the kids to let her in, the scene seems to go on forever. How can anyone walk that slowly? When we cut between them, we pick up where we left off. If Michael was walking past the neighbor's mailbox right before we cut to Laurie pounding on the door, screaming for Bobby to let her in, when we cut back to Michael he's still right next to the mailbox. The other 'side' freezes when not seen. It's an effect we're not used to as viewers, except in our nightmares wherein scary moments seem to stretch out and melt time. It's very effective, and rarely used. Mostly cross-cuts are used to avoid jump-cuts, allowing for easy trimming of undesirable moments in a shot. 

b. Concentrated Time Frame - single night: magic hour-to-darkness. There's a palpable fear of the oncoming night suffusing the first 1/3 of Halloween, from walking to school to driving towards babysitting jobs, smoking weed in the car and talking about Mitch Cramer. There's a long scene of Laurie and Annie driving, shot from the backseat, as if we're one of the babysitters or children, watching the sun go down through the front windshield. It being autumn, the darkness falls fast, so we go from late afternoon to early night in a shocking but beguiling jump cut. Any kid squriming with delight waiting for the night to fall so we could go trick-or-treating, or the drive-in movie, or fireworks, to begin, now finds that goosey delightful feeling coupled to insurmountable, roller-coaster climb dread. 

c.  In-the-moment observed (the mundane-rendered uncanny) detail - The sequels to Halloween go the wrong way, making Michael an unstoppable killer, turning all the victims into the audience, imagining progressively more destructive deaths for the killer, trying to ensure he'll never come back, the cast of victims grows obsessively large, the death scenes, black comic relief characters and other cliches abound, and their gore takes over from suspense. The bigger they get the less scary they are. The sense of the unstoppable killer begins with Michael, but never ends across the spectrum. No one keeps bleeding when their stabbed or sliced. Everyone's blood has great clotting ability., not just Michael's.  Instead of, say, drawing out the scene of say, finding yourself locked inside the back yard-separated laundry room in your underwear while trying to wash the spaghetti sauce off your pants, or being on the phone and hearing the dog die outside, thinking only of it's 'getting lucky' - the banality of the conversations rendered uncanny via the external threat, of drawing out every moment of entering a house, yelling the names of your presumed friends inside, wondering with mounting dread why all the lights are off, finally coming in a side door, walking through the rooms, finally walking slowly up the stairs, the tension ramping with every step, we rush heedlessly to sudden death. Take the sequel for example, with the focus on naughty nurses and their asshole EMT lovers in the hospital jacuzzi in the hydrotherapy room, then suddenly bam - a syringe crammed into the dude's neck. No slow drawn-out deaths, no suspense, nothing but creative deaths, i.e. what people remember from the movie rather than the slow functioning engine that gave the deaths palpable fright.  

The combined effect of a, b, and c, is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming and/or unseen, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease. 

Part of the success of this strategy may stem from our familiarity with historical epics, like Gone with the Wind, for example, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static real-time tableaux of eventful key moments in both the life of the heroine and the South as a whole: In the narrative structure: coming-out parties wherein the news of war first breaks out, and Scarlett and Rhett first dance. We become familiarized to the idea that we wouldn't see something, some closely observed detail, if it wasn't foreshadowing and advancing to the story. With this 'training' of our ability to 'read' a film, slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch)-- fill us with mounting dread. 

In this way, 'tick-tock momentum' subverts our familiarity with this epic tack. Just keep showing foreshadowing details, each slow step building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing so that even innocuous minor details, keys, pumpkins, beers, TV, become imbued with uncanniness and anxiety about the coming of the night. You can do this forever, dragging the night forward until we begin to relax our mood; but when we keep feeling the lurking menace, this focus on mundane detail helps us appreciate what may be our last moments. We suddenly cling to our moms and dads, aware of all the dangers they've saved us from; thanks to them, we considered ourselves immortal; thanks to Carpenter, we realize this is not so.

2. Bleeding Darkness - The edges of Carpenter's wide screen are always either black or tending towards darkness or some offscreen vanishing point, bleeding through and erasing the difference between the screen and the dark of the theater, or the room where you're watching the film (which for Halloween should definitely be in the dark). The darkness of the screen makes for many places to hide, and the innocent kids seem always about to be swallowed up. The early scene of the nurse and Dr. Loomis and the nurse driving to the asylum is so dark it seems like any minute they'll crash into a wall or be swallowed up by the black. Eventually you can begin to think the screen extends all around you, and the immersion into a state of delirious paranoia springs to life; on the old fashioned pan and scan TV the slasher was effectively boxed in, trapped. But on the true masterly Panavision rectangle, there are no edges to stop him from flowing out like a nightmare baby with the bathwater darkness.

3. Forbidden Sound- The viewer's relation to the image onscreen when watching any movie is generally associative dream-like narrative immersion. Unless there's a distraction in the theater, or we suddenly have to go to the bathroom, chances are we're completely absorbed. This absorption is something Carpenter deliberately disrupts by leaving us way behind or far from the action. The muffled voices of the people talking far away from our POV killer perspective is very unusual in any other film: we can hear them just enough to understand what they're saying, but not be sure we're meant to. If you've ever heard Blue Note jazz records on a really good pair of headphones you know you can sometimes hear people whispering or talking very low in the studio - whispers - maybe the producers talking over lunch orders - you can't tell if you're hallucinating or not. It's the same way with Halloween. The break with golden rule sound mixing throws us off balance. Are we supposed to hear their words amongst the breathing and ambience? Maybe, probably, but the result is a feeling of privileged, eavesdrop information unusual in cinema, especially horror cinema which exploits the voyeur impulse but not the eavesdrop impulse. 

4) Vanishing Point-of-View (VPOV): 

 Carpenter gives master-worthy class on how to generate maximum dread from just a series of long shots down tree-lined suburban streets. Carpenter popularized the killer POV at least in the suburban setting, but did more than just that - he made every shot seem threatening. Note the use of big dark trees in the post-opener daytime tracking shots around the neighborhood.. At the right of the image above we see the road disappearing into the distance, to the left and middle is a big dark spot of bushes. The shadows are rich and deep (at least on my Anchor Bay DVD) on both sides, with the car and house fronts in the center like a lonely outpost flanked by Edward Hopper-style darkness. The darkness almost seems to be sucking the light parts towards it like a black hole, thus we get the feeling of movement without really moving (unless we're watching this in a car). 

5. Reverse Angle Denial: As Sheldon Hall notes in his essay "Carpenter Widescreen Style," we never see Michael see.

"(W)e are often positioned along or beside Michael but we are denied the reverse angle cut which would show us his reaction if he were not wearing his mask: the necessary pre-condition for empathy as both Hitchcock and Carpenter have noted."

"We are however given just such a reaction shot when positioned with Laurie at the several points where she becomes aware of being followed. At these moments --such as when Laurie watches as the car Michael is driving passes her and Annie (Nancy Loomis) and comes to a momentary halt, or when she looks out from her bedroom window at Michael standing below--suspense derives in part from the fixed distance between Laurie/the camera/us and Michael: she is not close enough to identify him clearly, to recognize or dispel the threat, and the camera does not close the gap. A variation of the device is Carpenter's manipulation of the distance of the camera from Laurie and her friends. It does not always stay with them as they traverse the sidewalks of Haddonfield, but will sometimes hold a fixed position as they walk into the shot's depth. In refusing to be prompted into movement, to be motivated by the action happening before it (as is customary in classical cinema), the camera's objective autonomy suggest Michael's subjectivity even in his absence, and again increases our anxiety for Laurie. (2)

. 6. Hawksian Seige Dynamics

Carpenter is a huge Hawks fan, and Hawks' films are all about the dynamics of group action, with the camera situated to represent one of the people in the group as people argue and layer their dialogue, so that no matter how grim the action we feel involved and comforted by a sense of belonging to the group. This overlapping dialogue draws us in. It comes too fast for us to think, just like real life, we can only follow the thread. We never see what they don't see. We're with them all the way. We feel connected and competent and brave in their presence. Even the "Winchester Pictures" logo in the beginning of The Thing, with the crossed rifles denotes a kind of rock solid safety - strength and solidarity in firepower, frontier-style. 

But soon enough that image burns away as "The Thing (from Another World)" begins. It's surely no accident that even when I was too scared to watch HALLOWEEN I had already seen the THE THING around 100 times, it was like a security blanket, it always 'worked' its magic, but in HALLOWEEN the film is metatextually swallowed by the darkness, as if a screen barrier suddenly slammed down between me and this beloved 1951 classic. Cutting back and forth to the kids watching, the overlapping dialogue momentum in the background, between babysitter phone calls, becomes trapped in the slower-than-time amber dream drip of Haddonfield, IL. It's a reminder of normal life's warmth, exiled,  reaching towards us through a fence. 

In Halloween that warm Hawksian feeling exists, but it's only a by-product of ignorance; the babysitters are too wrapped up in their boyfriend issues to even notice the ample warnings. Hawksian framing (middle range, waist-up) occurs but Carpenter inverts the sense of security, as in the shot below where Nancy and Laurie flank the kids watching TV inside the room. Though we would hope they'd be aware of the onrushing menace, protecting the kids and able to handle danger, the dialogue is all focused on Annie teasing Laurie about Ben Tramer, continually interrupted by ringing phones, requests from the kids, and noise from the TV; instead of overlapping dialogue ala Hawks it's overlapping cacophony. It could almost be like a Hawksian comedy--Bringing up Baby or Monkey Business- certainly in her way Nancy fashions herself a vivacious wild child like Ginger Rogers or Katherine Hepburn, except that there is a devouring 'shape' coming to eat them, a devouring giant leopard of a figure (to use the iconography of BABY -- see more on that here).

The fundamental difference between Hawk's comedies and dramas lies in a similar lack of perspective: comedies occur when the the hero thinks he's in danger (but he's not); in the dramas the hero knows he's in danger so he can pretend he's in a comedy. In Halloween the heroine thinks she's in a drama, which should mean she's actually in a comedy, however it's we who know she's in danger, not her. It's like the end of the climax at the jail in Bringing up Baby, wherein Susan brings in the killer leopard thinking she has the tame one, if that two minutes was stretched to a full hour. 

7. Emptiness: 

What makes the film terrifying is the emptiness - the lack of reliable adults. There's a single cop (Charles Cyphers), a shaky Ahab of a criminal psychologist (Donald Pleasance, in a career-defining role), a nurse in the rainy darkness of a car, the rainy darkness of the front lawn of the asylum; then just the encroaching darkness of the suburbs. Except for one or two shots in Laurie's English class, we seldom see more than one or two people in any given shot. Always the emptiness remains. Imagine being part of the team in THE THING and taking a nap in the coffee room and waking up and everyone is gone!

Note the deep ornate shadows falling all over the street as the sun sets in the shot below. You can barely make out the three figures walking down the sidewalk at right. This is hardly a conventional shot. It's something Martin Scorsese might do, and maybe Robert Altman, but Altman would keep their dialogue at a higher level. They'd be far away but sound up close. It's no wonder both Altman and Scorsese love rich sound mixes and overlapping dialogue.

8. The Eternally 'On' Television

Movies that try to depict a threatened middle class existence tend to omit one key element, probably because a) licensing issues and b) the difficulty of avoiding 'streaks' from the diegetic recording of a recording. People live and work in place where the TV just isn't. But if you look at the truly scary films of threatened middle class teenagers, you see a through line from Halloween (where they watch a double feature Forbidden Planet and the Thing, the bulk of the movie seeing to occur over the length of both those films) to Scream (watching Halloween) to The Ring (cursed video) to It Follows (watching Killers from Space and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet) and so forth. Having a TV on in the background hits really close to home. Do producers not know that? Are Hollywood filmmakers not aware of what the rest of the world does all night? Either way, this is a godsend to smart filmmakers as the presence of a TV, obliquely commenting on the action like a Greek chorus, is an element that hasn't been done to death. So use it, future horror filmmakers! 

8) The Teenage Hormonal Spike

I know of a lot of people who resent having to grow up and face the wearying demands and pressures of adulthood. All actions have consequences, and for someone as emotionally arrested as Michael the consequences add up only to bodies for disposal and use in creepy tableaux. He seems to have a point, as sexual excitement over boys so overwhelms these three friends that it shuts out all the warning signs coming their way. Watching them from the illusory security of our living rooms, we all have a tendency to try and get ourselves off the squirming hook by thinking 'ah they get what they deserve for not locking the door or closing their car door or letting the dog come in, the way narrow-minded parents will look for some reason their kids are lying when they say they've been abused by an uncle or a priest. It's a vain attempt to avoid the crushing sense of powerless anger. Annie especially is guilty of ignoring danger signs -- first by the barking dog--which in her self-absorption she thinks is growling at her even though it's clearly growling at something else. She sees it only as an inconvenience as--what else?--she's on the phone. Later she hears a potted plant crash on the porch, and the yelp of the dog being strangled; all she can presume is the dog is getting laid. She's blind to anything and everything unless it's related to sex and boys. 

Whether we remember it or not we've all been babysat and we've all had to deal with the sudden arrivals of horny boyfriends, anxious to take advantage of a temporarily parent-free space. Maybe we've also, once in high school ourselves, taken advantage the same way. As kids our budding crushes on this older but not yet adult girl are dashed by this coarse brute's arrival. Is this not also a fine metaphor for our own sense of powerlessness? We can't stop the boyfriend and we can't stop getting old and having to one day get a job. And we can't stop the night from falling. Michael terrifies us because he represents an alternative too dark to consider consciously. We can just disappear down the rabbit hole into an eternal 'Other.' 

8.b - Tele-Cocooning - Even Laurie is guilty of this, while on the phone with Annie she ignores Tommy's excited ranting after seeing the Boogeyman across the street because she's appalled after learning Annie told some Ben Tramer that Laurie liked ho, Look at the way Jamie Lee twists the phone cord and twirls her hair in overwhelming anxiety at Annie's matchmaking gambit. This fear causes her to miss the sight of the boogey man across the street and dismiss Tommy's anxiety the way her friends have dismissed hers earlier when she spied Michael peering behind bushes. Much has been written since the dawn of cell phones about this bubble of security and separation a phone call brings, leading us into traffic or down deserted muggy streets, etc. This effect is as pervasive as TV in real life but again, most slashers and horror movies fail to pick up on it. 

8c.) Focus up! - Imagine if Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) was so wrapped up in the issues with Nikki (Margaret Sheridan, above) that he ignored the danger in The Thing? If he just told everyone they were hallucinating after the ice melts and not to bother him as he and Nikki canoodled upstairs? Maybe that's maybe why Carpenter's remake is all men. It's not the women's fault, men just aren't as strong multi-taskers as Hendry anymore, at least not in the movies. Women confuse them. They can't navigate a woman and a monster at the same time. One will always get away.

9) Music

The music of Carpenter is so essential to the film's success you would think his imitators would try for something similar, hiring Carpenter to score their works, for example, or reaching out across the sea to Goblin, or Ennio Morricone. Instead, they lean back on the same-old / same-old orchestral cliches we've heard so much of we either roll our eyes or never even notice it. Even Manfredini's Friday the 13th score only has the "keee-kee-kee ya-ya" cue to differentiate it from the usual Hermann-string aping banality of a thousand other films just like it. (The real scary music in that film is the sound of rain beating down on canvas). The only American-made post-Halloween (early-80s) movies made in the US (other than those made by Italians) I can think of offhand to use eerie synths and odd time signatures are Phantasm and The Bogey Man. Let me know if I've forgotten any others. Today they are much more common, as in It Follows.

10)  Escape

I knew quickly that when left alone at home during my circa 80-81 slasher squirrelly phase how to fight the monsters. Turn the lights on, check the doors and windows, and then turn the TV on loud so you don't hear the scratching of the branches against the shingles outside. I'd always turn on something nonthreatening but playfully spooky from the desert island video collection - FORBIDDEN PLANET? THE THING? If you've read this far I'm pretty sure you know I own both on DVD, and had them on tape before them, and I know they can protect you from fear like only a competent group of quick-thinking, heavily armed officers on your side can, the guys in THE THING will even make sure you get a cup of coffee no matter how busy they are. If you're on Altair IV, maybe the captain will let you sneak out and hit Robby up for some genuine Rocket bourbon.  

Of course when both films are on the TVs in HALLOWEEN that sense of security is just a fleeting memory -- faded color, washed out images-- the kids only marginally paying attention, as right behind them, gathering in the darkness of our gaze --they're about to be devoured. And now the killer is leaking out of the screen and into the surrounding darkness of the theater or your living room. All you can do now is make sure your back is against a sturdy wall, far from any window where a hand can crash through and grab you by the throat. Stay alert, with porch light on and guard dog, knife and baseball bat by your side, and keep watching... keep watching THE THING.