PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

On Friday, April 6th, 1979, at the beginning of my Junior year's spring break, my collegiate Beloved and I, having driven to my Beloved's hometown of Geneva, Ohio, went out late that night to attend the night's latest showing of John Carpenter's 1978 film, Halloween.  The seemingly endless sequels (one of them totally unrelated to the franchise) had not yet been announced as being in or under consideration.  The attachment of Celtic Mythology, primarily through reference to the Wiccan festival Samhain (an attachment I found, when it ws presented in October, 1981) somewhat implausible---"something of a stretch," as we used to say in those days.  

   So, in the darkened theater---which was unusually crowded for that time of the night, in that vicinity, and for a film that had premiered some six months prior---my Beloved and I were not entirely prepared for the kind of film we were about to view, a film like to nothing we had ever seen before.  Approximately a month later, while visiting my home town on the weekend of Mother's Day, my mother, who was not usually so generous, paid for our admission (with snack food included) to the film, Alien (1979), which, though horrific, was not as immediately frightening---perhaps because of its futuristic setting in time, the location of its action on a planet and a space vehicle which were both far away in time as well as location.  The cutting edge, so to speak, of Alien had been blunted by the deadly sharp and serrated (and bloody) bladestroke of Halloween.  Just before the eerie opening theme began, I heard the familiar and quiet plop-plop of my Beloved's shoes slipping off.  I knew, with an internal smile of anticipation (the house lights having gone out) that a pair of fragrant, midnight blue socks would comfort me later that night; I just did not know how much comfort I would actually need.

    Although the film has been frequently, and, in my opinion, unjustly criticized as unrealistic, contrived, and artificial, it has had an artistic effect (yes, I called the effect artistic) that has lasted long after the final scene of the film ended on that Friday night, the first weekend of April, 1979.  Just today, I realized---and thus found the purpose of this essay---that the film partakes of the genre of Robert Aickman's strange stories (his term for them).  And whether this was Carpenter's intention or not no longer matters.  Once a film is released to, or upon, the public, their interpretation becomes paramount over the director's, or the writer's, or the production company's interpretation.  

    The setting and most of the characters were exactly like we were, in a midwestern state separated from us only by the geography of Indiana.  The main victims of Michael Myers' murder spree were, within the movie's fictional world, our contemporaries:  they were, for the most part, high school students, as we had been less than three years before.  They dressed like us,or like our friends; and talked like us, or like our classmates.  They evaded parental authority and small town morals, especially as regards human sexual intimacy, in the same way that my Beloved and I had done (but we were abetted by our parents' insistence that we reside on the campus of our college).  And that provided for the staging of a horror that our subsequent viewing of Alien, a month or so later, could not present.  The Xenomorph of Alien is the stuff of nightmares.  But Michael Myers comes right out of our sunlit days, even though he apparently prefers to operate at night.  The Xenomorph was waiting, with all of its egg-contained siblings, on a planet of rather dismal environment. Michael Myers might be lurking in the next room, sipping a cold root beer, and waiting for you to cross his path.

    And it is precisely in this detail, that Halloween rises to the level of Robert Aickman's stories; or enters what its intersection with Aickman's stories.  And I am not here comparing literary artistry---of which Aickman's stories have more than their share---with cinematic excellence which I am not qualified to judge, and which apparently has been debated since Halloween premiered in 1978.  In Aickman's tales, the ordinary---the mundane---even the unbearbly boring existence that has been meted out, to some degree, to all of us is disrupted (a better, and more violent, word would be ruptured) by some manifestation of the uncanny.  In Aickman's most famous tale, "Pages From A Young Girl's Journal," the uncanny rupture is the appearance of an elderly old gentleman who happens to be a vampire.  In his last tale, it is Nell---the protagonist's new, charming, but increasingly weird girl friend.  In Halloween, of course, it is Michael Myers and his instinct to, and preoccupation with, murder.  Michael disrupts the mundane reality of Haddonfield, Illinois, during the course of the film; in the same way that he had disrupted it when he, at the age of five, murdered his older sister, Judith; and as he disrupted Doctor Loomis' life during the intervening fifteen years.  Like the Young Girl's vampiric friend, or Nell of the moors, or any other bearers of the uncanny in Aickman's tales, Michael Myers cannot be satisfactorily explained.  Explanations can be attempted; but not entirely proven.

   And this is where . . . in my opinion . . . the franchise, and especially the subsequent Celtic explanation, weakens the effect achieved by Halloween 1; and that effect is dissipated, disected, and disrespected by the numerous sequels.  To my knowledge, Aickman, understanding that principle of dissipated effect, never raped one of his stories with a sequel.  Having mentioned Alien earlier in this essay, I shall also suggest that the conversion of that first horrifying film to a franchise---and changing the eponymous monster in it to what is essentially a social insect with a hive mentality, and a species history that goes back no further than an android who, in Alien:  Covenant experienced an internal systemic meltdown and created the Xenomorph species in a Frankensteinian attempt to create perfect biological life.  This leads to what we might call, with tongue in cheek, Starward's Axiom of Narrative Parsimony, and the Law of the Dissipation of Poetic Effect such that:

A narrative in which an uncanny phenomenon, or phenomena, is introduced to disrupt---either temporarily or permanently---must conserve the effect and efficiency of that disruption to itself, without the creation of sequels that provide explanations "after the fact"; and the creation of such sequels causes an exponential dissipation of the original effect.

Returning to April, 1979, the final uncanny effect of Michael Myers, within the film that we watched without knowledge of the sequels and franchise, was Michael's disappearance after Loomis fired six bullets at close range into him.  When Loomis looks over the balcony from which Michael fell, the body of Michael, which should have been dead, is already gone; the look of shock on Loomis' face---which attests to Donald Pleasance's enormous dramatic skill---transfers that shock to the audience as the eerie main musical theme takes over, and follows a montage of scenes into which Michael had entered, or visited, in a reverse sequence.  After the film ended, and the house lights came back on, the crowd exited far more quietly than had been my usual experience previously.  I felt that the horror depicted in the film---summarized by Loomis' facial expression of silent shock at the unexpected and sudden disappearance of the monstrous murderer he had just shot (and whose grim potential for mayhem was understood by Loomis far better, although not fully, than anyone else)---had transferred from the screen to the audience; an audience which, at that late showing, must exit to a parking lot not well lit, while most of the businesses in the immediate area had already closed.  The drive back to my Beloved's parents' house was somewhat long, and took over roads that, like the parking lot, were not well lit.  When we arrived, everyone else in the house was asleep, but we were too frightened to sleep; so we remained awake, with the lights in the living room on, while we cowered beneath a blanket, attempting to talk about anything other than the film we had just viewed.  I was not, then, aware of Robert Aickman's literary work; two more years would elapse before his death from cancer in February, 1981; and I did not, myself, become acquainted with his work until the spring of 1991---the first of his stories that I read was the Young Girl's Journal.  But I realized, this week, that Halloween 1978 (I will not affix the sequence number 1 to it, as I refuse to recognize the sequels that became, ultimately, mere parodies of its original effect and impact) had harnessed and displayed the horrifying power inherent in Robert Aickman's short stories and two novels.

Starward