Figure 11.1: A character from John Carpenter’s seminal slasher Halloween (1978) chatting on the phone, blissfully unaware of homicidal Michael Myers lurking in the background. The audience realizes that she is in danger, and that she doesn’t realize it, which produces empathetic anxiety and engagement.
Halloween encourages the audience to root for Laurie Strode and to be afraid of Michael Myers. Nonetheless, some critics have interpreted the use of point-of-view cinematography in the first scene of the film—a scene shot from young Myers’s perspective—as an invitation to identify with him. As Roger Ebert wrote, “when the camera takes a point of view, the audience is being directed to adopt the same point of view” (1981, 55). And in Phillips’s words: “Halloween forces its audience members to implicate themselves in the acts of killing and being killed” (2005, 141). But visual alignment does not entail moral alignment or even sympathetic identification (Smith 1995). Slasher films routinely use point-of-view cinematography to suggest the presence of an agent undetected by the protagonists and to withhold the identity of that agent from the audience (Dika 1987, Hutchings 2004). It is a suspense technique, and in Halloween, it is only used in the opening scene. Here, we see through somebody’s eyes as that person lurks around a house, spies on a couple of teenagers inside the house, sneaks into the house, waits a few moments until the boy leaves (presumably after a remarkably rapid sexual encounter with the girl), and then enters the girl’s bedroom. The girl, naked and brushing her hair, recognizes the intruder and exclaims: “Michael!” Along the way, our point-of-view character has picked up a kitchen knife and put on a mask. The ominous music suggests that the character has malicious intent. Indeed, he stabs the naked girl to death and leaves the house with the bloody knife in his hand. Outside, he is met by a middle-aged couple—presumably just back from a night on the town—who ask: “Michael?” and remove the mask. The camera angle shifts, and we see that the knife killer is a small boy in a Halloween costume. We deduce that the couple are Michael’s parents and the victim his sister. The scene is structured to powerfully bring home the depth of this child’s depravity, not to seduce us into identifying or empathizing with him. As Carpenter himself put it, “the whole movie is about surviving horror, it’s not about identifying with horror. No. It’s ‘Watch out!’ ” (personal communication).
Carpenter constructed a cinematic world that in its all-American setting and its mimetic depiction of teenage protagonists was intimately familiar to the target audience. The kids in the audience knew this kind of town, perhaps they lived in towns that looked like Haddonfield; they knew the types of teenage kids that they saw on the screen, they knew their mannerisms and clothing styles and their topics of conversation. The director wanted to get away from the conspicuously creepy locations often used in older horror films—he wanted to “take a horror movie and put it into a suburban atmosphere, with a nice little row of houses and beautiful manicured lawns and some place that you can assume is very safe. Because if horror can get you there, it can get you anywhere” (qtd. in Jones 1997, 64). He asked his young co-writer, Debra Hill, to pen the dialogue of the female cast to make it realistic. The premise of Halloween is extremely implausible—pure evil doesn’t really exist, only as a cognitive label used to dehumanize antagonistic others and as an illusory metaphysical concept (Clasen 2014, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016), and even garden-variety serial killers are exceedingly rare (Buss 2005)—but this use of realism in setting and character depiction made the premise imaginatively accessible and urgent.
Michael Myers is a homicidal force driven by alien, private motivations and in possession of quasi-supernatural powers. He moves around swiftly and silently, almost impossibly so, and his mind is utterly inaccessible to the viewer. David Buss, in his study of the evolutionary psychology of homicide, explains that when people kill other people, they are rarely driven by psychopathology. Rather, they have intelligible and often rational reasons for killing:
Murder gives us an X-ray of the inner core of human nature. It lays bare the things that matter most to humans everywhere—the necessities of survival, the attainment of status, the defense of honor, the acquisition of desirable partners, the loyalty of our lovers, the bonding of our allies, the vanquishing of our enemies, the protection of our children, and the successes of the carriers of our genetic cargo. These are the things that we humans and our astonishingly victorious ancestors have always been willing to kill and die for. (2005, 244)
If Michael Myers’s murders are X-rays, they bounce off his pale, expressionless mask. There is nothing to lay bare behind it. He is not motivated by any discernible emotion or motive; no search for status, no honor to defend, no sexual desire—nothing to protect. Moreover, Myers’s mask literally blocks our attempts at inferring his state of mind through his facial expression. Humans evolved an ability to infer the content of others’ minds through their behavior, including their facial expressions; by obscuring a villain’s face with paint or a mask, a filmmaker can make that villain even more disturbing (Clasen 2012b). There is no predicting the villain’s behavior, no negotiating with him; there are no visible human emotions to appeal to. A key scene elegantly shows Myers’s inhumanity. Bob, Lynda’s boyfriend, is rummaging through a dark kitchen, looking for a beer and glasses. We faintly hear Myers’s heavy breathing on the soundtrack, which tells us that he is nearby. A door creaks open. Bob goes to investigate, thinking his friends are pulling a prank on him. “Okay, Lynda. Come on out,” he says, opening another door. Shockingly, Myers bursts from the door, brutally slamming Bob up against a wall. With inhuman strength, Myers lifts him one-handedly from the floor and with the other hand pins him to the wall with a knife through the abdominal region. Myers stands back and looks at his victim as life leaves the body and it ceases to move. Myers, standing still, tilts his head first to the right, then to the left, and then to the right again. The effect is deeply disturbing. Here is a man who has just violently assaulted and killed an innocent stranger. What does he do? He stands back and admires, in a slightly puzzled way, his handiwork (see Figure 11.2). The scene suggests that Myers is homicidal, yes, but also that he is devoid of empathy, of humanity. To him, other people are fleshbags that either move or they don’t. When stabbed, they stop moving. When strangled, they stop moving. Dr. Loomis, Myers’s psychiatrist, says that when he met six-year-old Myers “there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong . . . I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply . . . evil.” The film corroborates the psychiatrist’s assessment. We don’t know why Myers does what he does, and some of his behavior is disturbingly illogical. By the end of the film, Laurie nervously enters the house in which she suspects that Lynda may be in trouble. As she enters a bedroom, she finds the corpse of Annie splayed on a bed. Above her head sits Myers’s sister’s gravestone, which Myers has stolen from the cemetery. The corpse of Bob swings out of a closet, suspended from the legs. Another closet door swings open, revealing the body of Lynda. Why has Myers arranged this tableau of terror? How did he do it so swiftly? The film doesn’t tell us. It uses the scene to reinforce our sense that Myers is beyond rational reach, that he is dangerously erratic and unnaturally quick and strong (Kendrick 2014).
Figure 11.2: Michael Myers of Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) has just stabbed an innocent guy to death. He stands back and gazes quizzically at the result, not unlike a bewildered patron in a gallery of modern art. The scene suggests Myers’s inhumanity, his lack of empathy; he is a monstrous semihuman agent of death.
The filmmakers’ decision to deny the audience access to Myers’s motivation has prompted some critics to invent it. Robin Wood, for example, says that “the basis for the first murder [is] sexual repression—the girl is killed because she arouses in the voyeur-murderer feelings he has simultaneously to deny and
enact in the form of violent assault” (Wood 1979, 26). The film gives us no cues to suggest such an interpretation—the cues are in Wood’s head, spawned by dubious Freudian ideas about perverse infant sexuality. Likewise, Peter Hutchings says of Myers’s murder of his sister that it is “redolent of social taboos such as incest and child sexuality, with a young child stabbing his naked, postcoital sister to death with a large and decidedly phallic carving knife” (2004, 74). A more plausible interpretation, one in line with the film’s actual content cues, is that six-year-old Myers is a raging sociopath, possibly prompted to attack his sister because she pursues selfish pleasure rather than looking after him while their parents are away, possibly—and more likely—driven by no intelligible motive at all—that he is “purely and simply evil,” in Loomis’s phrase. When his parents remove his mask after the murder, young Myers has a blank, almost sleepy facial expression. There’s no lust, no rage, no strong emotion in his face. Moreover, there is really no interpretative need to invest the knife with psychosexual significance. The choice of a knife as murder weapon is narratively motivated—it’s one of the few lethal implements accessible to a six-year-old in normal circumstances—and contributes to the revolting quality of Myers’s killings. As Kendrick points out: “Unlike being shot from a distance, as is typical in most action-adventure films and thrillers, being stabbed is a deeply personal, physically close violent action that leaves a lingering sense of discomfort in the viewer” (2014, 319).
Adult Myers is a reflection of a persistent ancestral threat, the homicidal male, yet dehumanized and apparently impossible to kill. He bears some resemblance to the great white shark of Jaws (Nowell 2011a, 92), with the crucial difference that unlike the shark, which is confined to its element, Myers roams freely and can emerge anywhere. During the course of the film, he is stabbed with a sewing needle, a steel coat hanger, and a kitchen knife, and he is shot six times at close range, falling wounded from a second-story balcony, yet still he keeps going. The film ends with a montage, showing static images of places that have been haunted by Michael Myers and overlaid with the sound of Myers’s breathing, suggesting that not only is he still alive, he could be anywhere. Myers became a horror icon not because he is a symbolic embodiment of sexual guilt or a castrating, phallus-wielding agent of conservatism, but because he is a supercharged representation of an ancient danger—a murderous conspecific outside rational reach, an individual perfectly capable of, and willing to, take lives using whatever implement is at hand. As David Buss notes, people’s fascination with murders and murderers “results from our evolved homicide-prevention psychology” (2005, 21). Throughout human evolutionary history, other people have consistently been “one of the most pervasive hostile forces of nature” (Duntley 2005, 224). This fierce selection pressure has resulted in evolved cognitive biases that “lead people to overinfer homicidal intent in others” so that they “systematically overestimate the likelihood that they will be killed” (241), particularly in situations of great uncertainty, as a defensive measure—a false alarm is infinitely better than a miss. We evolved to swiftly detect anger in others and to pay close attention to hostility in conspecifics (Öhman, Lundqvist, and Esteves 2001), to be vigilant toward potential killers, and the fascination that murders and murderers command extends to fictional representations of slasher villains. Indeed, Myers is even more dangerous than the homicidal individuals that have threatened our ancestors for millions of years, with his quasi-supernatural powers and complete lack of humanity. Once we understand the evolved psychological dispositions targeted by this figure, it’s no wonder that he became a cinematic icon, an enduring symbol of human evil.
Halloween hit a nerve in contemporary audiences and significantly influenced subsequent horror films. Shortly after the first wave of slasher films petered out in the early 1980s, a second wave took off with A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven) in 1984. In the 1990s, a third wave of genre-savvy slasher films—kicked off by Scream (Craven) in 1996—delighted fans of the films in the first waves as well as a new generation of horror fans. The films in the third wave explicitly toyed with genre conventions and presumed knowledge of those conventions in their audience. In Scream, the protagonist, Sidney Prescott, receives a threatening phone call from the killer. He asks: “Do you like scary movies?” Sidney replies: “What’s the point? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act, who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It’s insulting.” All slasher fans will recognize with delight the kind of hackneyed film to which she is referring. The 1999 film Cherry Falls (Wright) turned the perceived plot convention of sex-equals-death on its head and introduced a slasher killer who targeted only virgins, sending the teenage population of an entire town into a sexual frenzy. Yet no matter their postmodern self-awareness or clever convention-juggling, films in all three waves work when they effectively target evolved dispositions, chiefly the disposition for detecting and reacting adequately to homicidal conspecifics. Halloween’s original target audience—American suburban teenagers—were particularly receptive to the scenario of the film. They were at the life stage where one is learning to fend for oneself, and they may have felt that the world was less safe and less stable than they had previously assumed. Family structures were loosening, social and sexual norms were slowly shifting, the world was changing around them. Halloween resonated with audiences because it tapped into a diffuse sense of unease. It transformed that unease into a full-blown terror scenario with the infestation of an almost otherworldly agent of evil into peaceful suburbia, an agent who would suddenly appear in between the nice little houses and on the beautifully manicured lawns and disappear just as suddenly, lurking just out of sight.
Carpenter gave his audiences a thrill; he allowed them to immerse themselves into an evolutionarily potent scenario of predation, but he also wanted to suggest that evil can be conquered. As he expressed it: “If there’s any point to be made in the film, it’s that you can survive the night . . . being aware of the possibility of evil is an important thing in life . . . the world can be bad and dark and dangerous, but with a little luck and awareness you can survive” (Carpenter 2003). That interpretation of the film aligns well with the evolutionary hypothesis that horror stories function as threat-simulation devices. They sensitize us to danger and have real emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects—but they can also help us think about evil and to cope with danger and calibrate our responses to it.
CHAPTER 12
Lost and Hunted in Bad Woods
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The Blair Witch Project opens with a brief message written in white letters on a black background: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” The message is followed by the students’ footage, edited into a coherent narrative about three young amateur filmmakers chasing the legend of the Blair Witch. According to this legend, a ghostly witch—Elly Kedwards—has haunted the woods outside of Burkittsville (formerly Blair) since she was killed in the late eighteenth century over suspicions of witchcraft and child abductions. Ever since, children from the area have irregularly and mysteriously disappeared. In the 1940s, Rustin Parr, a local hermit, abducted and killed seven children, claiming to have acted under the influence of the witch ghost. Now director Heather Donahue and her two helpers—camera operator Josh Leonard and sound recorder Mike Williams—interview Burkittsville locals about the legend and travel into the Black Hills in search of the witch. They soon lose their way in the vast woods, and come across eerie signs: what appears to be a primitive cemetery with seven stone cairns, one of which is accidentally knocked over by Josh, as well as a number of humanoid stick-figures suspended from trees. Forced to camp out in the woods, they are awoken in the middle of the night by disturbing, unidentifiable noises. Trust among the three deteriorates as they lose their map and bec
ome irrevocably lost. Josh then disappears, a bundle of cloth containing bloody teeth appears outside their tent, and Heather and Mike follow screams to a decrepit house. Following the screams into the basement, Mike and Heather apparently meet their deaths at the hands of an unseen agent. The last shot of the film is taken by Heather’s camera which lies, dropped and still recording, on the floor of the basement.
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