Guest Post: Halloween, Triumphant: A Tale in Subverted Misogyny

Today we have a guest post from friend of the blog Samuel Maleski, you can read more of his work at downtime2017.wordpress.com and find him on twitter at @LookingForTelos . It's a really interesting look at the Halloween movies, and I'm lucky I get to share it here. Enjoy!

Halloween, Triumphant:
A Tale in Subverted Misogyny

Samuel Maleski

[This contains spoilers for: the original and new Halloween - pretty much the entire franchise in fact - and Dario Argento’s 1982 movie Tenebrae. Also, CW – discussion of violence, rape, PTSD and female suffering in the context of exploitation cinema.]


Thesis statement : Halloween, 2018 edition, is one of the best movies of the decade, and the product of the perfect hybridation of the classic slasher with the current trend of modern, deconstructive, socially conscious horror movies a la Get Out or It Follows.

That may not appear obvious. Blame the misleading trailers, maybe, but to the untrained eye, probably quite legitimately pissed off about the less pleasing tropes of the genre, it looks like another of these interchangeable pieces where some masked killer, to quote Halloween scholar and video essayist May Leitz, “do a stab” (1) on some (probably female and scantily clad) passer-bys.  And you can’t blame whoever thought that – with horror as a cheap-to-make, potentially very lucrative cash-in to throw at audiences during the dump months of the winter (2), toxic tropes accumulate very, very fast in loving and festering little piles spread around the popular consciousness.  With the old chestnuts, always - fetishisation of violence, and, of course, its treatment of women, which, if it shows a certain level of complexity – studied for instance by Carol Clover (3) - has steadily gotten worse since the codification of the modern slasher.

A downwards trend which is perfectly embodied by the Halloween franchise itself. History time! –

1. The Long and Painful Story of how slashers got misogynist-er

It doesn’t start with Halloween. It starts, mostly, with the Italian giallo – a singular genre mixing erotic pulp, murder mystery, and gory thriller, who had its turn in the limelight during the 1960s and 1970s, mostly at the end of the three big names of the underground South European horror cinema at the time, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and of course, Dario Argento. A lot of the very specific stylistic trappings of these, like their surrealist hyperaestheticism, were eventually discarded in the conversion to American, more naturalistic norms that gave us the slasher. But quite a few survived: murders as setpieces giving the action its rhythm, and an Iconisation of the figure of the masked killer, often present throughout the narrative by synecdoche, close-ups on hands or hidden face. And, of course, the problem of the representation of female bodies and female suffering – note the “problem”. Because yes, while gialli were definitely an exploitative genre, they also are marked with a deep fascination with femininity and LGBT cultures – the hero is often a perfectly mediocre white dude, who ends up, somehow, plunged into a dangerous, confusing, secret world of queer and female mysteries. These freaks, these outsiders, might be alienated by the gaze of the filmmaker, but they are also celebrated, and shown as sexual, complex human beings in a way a lot of more mainstream, more respectable movies wouldn’t allow – Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and Deep Red (1975), both Argento’s, show very sympathetic gay characters, for instance. Also, the mysterious killer turns out to be, in more than a few of these, a woman taking her revenge on the forces of patriarchy  - once again, monstrous but sympathetic: while the grey, dull heroes might be more socially acceptable protagonists for a movie, they carry a responsibility in the death and destruction that befalls them and their entourage. That complex dynamic is one Argento especially would explore in more depth in the later parts of his filmography, with the way he represents the mystique of female power and sexuality in the Three Mothers trilogy (4) - and especially with the flawed and fascinating Tenebrae (1982), in which a metatextual stand-in for Argento makes a case for why horror should be exploitative … before being revealed as the killer who exploits and tortures female bodies. Self-loathing much?

This trend was, if anything, amplified in the primeval slasher that is Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmas – a movie whose “final girl” is a pregnant student hell bent on aborting, no matter what her controlling boyfriend or society might tell her, and who is never judged or looked down for it. To quote film critic Jourdain Searles – “In a way, the unseen killer in Black Christmas, and Peter, the male villain we do see, are a biting critique of the more toxic forms of masculinity. The killer alternates between childish tantrums and extreme brutality, as if just being in the presence of women throws him into a mental frenzy. Once he kills Clare by suffocating her with plastic wrap, he puts her in a rocking chair, and later we see he's placed a baby doll in her lap. He hides from women until he kills them, and upon their death enjoys having full control of their bodies.” (5)  And the original Halloween follows that, to an extent – there is a sick element of twisted voyeurism to the violence, yes, but it’s never coded along the moral lines that would develop as slashers became a solidified genre with affirmed conventions. The killings don’t have some kind of retributive quality to them; the killer doesn’t specifically target those who break some kind of moral taboo regarding drugs, or sex, or whatever – and while Laurie Strode is probably the “purest” character of the movie following these arbitrary lines, she still is shown smoking pot with a friend, and enables her fellow students to go and bone freely (her own lack of a sex life is really portrayed as her just not having the opportunity, not some kind of moral imperative). It avoids the clichés – while, paradoxically, codifying them.

That’s the paradox of the Halloween franchise, really. You can certainly fault the original on some respects, but you can’t accuse John Carpenter of not being a political artist, someone with radical ideas and a keen flair for provocation. His breakthrough movie is a condemnation of the American lifestyle – a look at the repressed evil which lurks beyond the white picket fences of US neighborhoods, ready to strike. Nobody has told Laurie or her friends about the fact a very real murder took place in their town a few years ago; in the end run, no one moves a finger to help her as she’s running, bloody and screaming, through the streets. (6) It’s everything but morally black and white or comforting – Carpenter, really, has always been fascinated by evil as a structure. Evil as the very narrative structure of cinema (Cigarette Burns). Evil as a physical constant, a law of physics (Prince of Darkness). Evil as unseen societal oppression (They Live). Halloween is not different – Michael Myers is not a person, he is The Shape, the hungry void that’s let into the world by a certain social context. Impossible to destroy, and still haunting the suburbia as an all-powerful Boogeyman, as the final shots of the movie – a series of empty rooms where his heavy breathing his heard, showcase.

And then … The sequels.

Halloween is a very bad slasher franchise, truth be told. If you binge a few of these movies, that’s going to be very obvious really quickly. And let’s forget all moral considerations there: talking just in terms of spectacle, there’s just … not much there. Franchises like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street understand the appeal of the genre a lot better – as bad as their entries often get (especially when Jason is concerned), you still do come away with a sense that some fun was had. There’s some gore pageantry at work, increasingly convoluted, if not outright comical, murder sequences that have to at least make you pay attention to the movie a bit: party horns shoved into eye sockets, people turned into cockroaches and then smashed, a machete to the face prompting someone to comically fall down two flights of stairs that weren’t there two shots before … The slasher scene, for all its flaws, has a sense of craftsmanship and naughty fun that’s at least slightly endearing, and which proved extremely formative to some of the people working there: that’s how we got Rachel Talalay, after all.

Halloween doesn’t go that way at all. Its wildest flight of fancy, in ten movies, is either a weird visual leitmotif involving a white horse, or Busta Rhymes trying to karate kick Myers (yes, that really did happen). Michael Meyers is, after all, essentially a thematic shorthand in Carpenter’s movie, not an actual character or someone who’s supposed to be fun to watch. He just, well, do a stab. And there’s only so much ways you can film people getting stabbed. It’s not especially gory, nor especially fun. It just kind of happens: here’s a movie, here are victims, here is violence, and it plays in the same rhythmic pattern, movie after movie, time after time. Like a grey and dour ritual, scored by the same Carpenter synth track whose magic is irredeemably drained around the tenth time you hear it playing – because these are still movies which take themselves largely seriously, with Donald Pleasance going all Shakespearean in the background. And without the element of fun and playfulness, well, what you do end up is a pretty rancid process of fetishized violence, as described by Siskel and Ebert, with their characteristic nuance regarding horror movies:  “These films hate women, and, unfortunately, the audiences that go to them, don’t seem to like women much either…To sit there [in the theater] surrounded by people who are identifying, not with the victim but with the attacker, the killer – cheering these killers on, it’s a very scary experience.” (7)

Michael Meyers is a non-character, a non-entity. He is literally defined by absence: the absence of good, of a motive. A “pale, blank, emotionless” face. And yet, he ended up pretty much becoming the main character of the franchise, resisting an attempt by Carpenter to reboot the franchise as an anthology series with the very commendable Season of the Witch (1982). The female heroines can triumph and win, but never in a really meaningful way. See Laurie Strode: in the original continuity (movies one through six), she dies off-screen in a car crash. Her trauma, and pain, and character? Irrelevant, we’re here to see the bad man stab people. In the second one (H20 and Resurrection), she initially triumphs and kills the boogeyman, only for the following movie to reveal in a truly astoundingly stupid twist that it was actually someone else wearing the mask, leading her to be held in an asylum, and then killed unceremoniously in the pre-credits when Michael returns. Maybe Rob Zombie did better? Of course not. She ends up insane and potentially murderous, locked up in the same asylum as Michael (or maybe that’s just a hallucination as she is dying, depending on which cut you’re watching, but neither feel especially empowering). And she’s not even the character who gets the worst deal out of the franchise! That’s probably Jamie Lloyd, the cute child protagonist of episodes four and five, and daughter of the deceased (in that continuity – yes, this franchise is a nightmare to follow) Laurie. Two whole movies of struggling against the boogeyman, including one where trauma has rendered her incapable of speaking, and what happens to her in movie six? Well, she’s been kidnapped by a doomsday cult for a good fifteen years, probably raped by Michael Meyers (once again, it depends of the version you’re watching, but is “forced impregnation with artificially created fetus” such a better alternative?), and then gets killed through impalement on farming equipment.

So. There we have it: Halloween is both the direct heir of a tradition centered around a layered, if problematic, representation of women and femininity; and also one of the franchises that have most shamelessly profiteered from female suffering and exploitation, ritualized on screen, to get some big bucks.

Where do we go now, in a context where horror is getting a lot more overtly political – or at least, better at getting recognition for it –, and where the social tensions have reached a boiling point in our world? How do we make Halloween relevant again? Can we transcend that legacy and even try to aim for “empowering”?

Well. That’s where the 2018 version comes in, doesn’t it.

1. The Shape Burns

Here sounds like the right time for a confession: I don’t especially care for Carpenter’s Halloween. It’s a good movie – a masterpiece, even –, but not one that especially resonates with me: maybe it’s because it’s rooted in the very specific experience of American suburbia; but I think the issue I have with it is in the very nature of the film: it’s a very cold, almost experimental piece, when you get down to it, a clinical, scientifical look at the effects of evil on ordinary people, where the structure, and the mise en scène, in a very Hitchcockian way, matter more than characters and their emotional journeys.

That’s what’s so fascinating about Halloween 2018 – it’s not so much a sequel as the second part of a diptych. A radically different take on the same concept, which questions and completes its sister-film. An inverted, twisted mirror. Whereas the original was clinical and structuralist, this new iteration very much puts the emphasis on heat instead of cold, down to its choice of final setpiece – it’s a deeply emotional character-driven narrative, yes, but more than that, instead of being calm and distant, it’s a fucking angry movie.

It takes a look at the long and annoying history of the franchise, and decides that, no, this is not going to be swept under the rug – we are going to talk about this shit, and we’re going to talk about it now.

So, what does it have to say? What is it about? There are many ways to articulate the points the story is trying to make, but I think the best way to sum it up is to describe it as a narrative about the evils of centrism.

One of the best lines in the movie is uttered by Laurie’s daughter, tired to see her disheveled hysterical mum barging in her living room – “the world is not a dark and frightening place!” And, for a good hour, the movie wanders about that narrative, that artificial world which makes sense and feels safe. It’s not naïve – it’s never showing it as anything but an illusion: but it also explores it, peels back its layers slowly, and venomously pokes at the people who are interested in maintaining it.

Michael Meyers is still a black hole of a character: he doesn’t do anything but kill and be evil. And in a way, that could be perceived as a flow – Jourdain Searles, quoted earlier in this, complained that the movie misses an opportunity to explicitly condemn and explore the misogyny underneath his murders. But, by still presenting the Shape as an unknowable, quasi-Lovecraftian evil, it manages to tackle how society itself actively puts these women, and other minorities, in the way of evil: how it undermines them, belittles them, and essentially grooms them into victims. No one cares about the women, about Laurie and her family – when journalists go to find her, it’s only to ask questions about the killer who has haunted her life: he is the one who’s important, the iconic monster, the one audiences want to see. In an especially potent moment of screenwriting, they pretty much “both sides” the Laurie/Michael dynamic: sure, he tried to kill her, but hasn’t she done some bad things in her life, too? Surely he deserves some pity, people need to try and understand him. It would be laughable if it weren’t something happening every week in the real world, where every young man who decides to grab an assault rifle and shoot minorities is presented as a “deeply flawed” human being whose motives have to be more complex than simple racial hatred, who deserves understanding and patience. A man can kill and murder, and he’ll become a celebrity, even in prison; a woman has a life that’s less than perfectly immaculate, and she’s a witch, an outcast, a dangerous madwoman hanging about in the woods.

That, especially if you add to it the scene where Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter, dismisses the old “Michael is Laurie’s brother” plot arc (which really, downgrades the series from quasi-cosmic societal horror to “one fucked up family”) as a story people tell themselves to make sense of the ugliness of the confusing reality, is remarkable in its own right. But the movie doesn’t stop there: it actually offers an answer as to “why” people conjure up these narratives. The answer? They just like to see people suffer.

The character of Doctor Sartain, Michael’s therapist, is wonderful that way: he pleads for his charge, over and over, despite all the horrors he has committed. And when he gets the chance to do it, he commits a murder of his own, wearing the iconic mask, and exclaiming – “so this is what it feels like!” The pen with whom he wrote about Michael, pleading pity for him, turns into a knife, in a great bit of visual symbolism. And the worst thing is, the movie is right about that. Centrism, the cult of civility, and politeness, of giving everyone a voice, is just a smokescreen, one that conceals the suffering of the oppressed and turns the spotlight on the woes of the oppressors. And its propellants are indulging in it because at best, they’re indifferent to the pain of minorities; and, at worst, because it serves their interests and/or their pleasure. Sartain throws Michael at the Strodes because, essentially, he thinks it’s fun. Because it satisfies his male, privileged curiosity, because it’s a nice little spectacle – just like generations of male writers, directors and spectators have found fun and entertainment in the reification of female bodies as slabs of meat to be carved up on the big screen. The Michael Meyers of this movie is Siskel and Ebert’s warning come true: his empty Shape is the vessel for the unsayable male pulsions bubbling under the surface of our society; under the anonymity of his mask, it could be any random white dude you encounter in the street. It could even be you - the movie forcing you to adopt, for a couple of scenes, the point of view of Michael, following him in long, carefully constructed shots, like if you were playing him in Third Person Shooter game.

Because really, in the world of Halloween 2018, no man gets spared by the script. The condemnations can be subtle, but they’re definitely there: Ray, Laurie’s son-in-law, is probably nice enough, but spends the movie in a state of empathy-less meatheadedness; Allyson has to deal with a boyfriend who, despite adorning himself in the woke trappings of gender-nonconformity, still tries to fuck other girls when she disappears for twenty seconds in order to have a phone call, and a typical Nice Guy ™ who assumes he’s entitled to bone her just because he’s nice and not-a-cheating-asshole. An especially good example is this scene where the true crime podcaster we spend a lot of the first act following, is reading the case files on the murder of Judith Myers over her grave, intercut with footage from the original movie’s opening – the almost lurid tone with which he describes the killings, intercut with the cult PoV shots, very much makes you feel as if he’s projecting himself in that scenario, becoming the murderer and enjoying the benefits of female pain. It’s especially interesting to note that this flash-back is the only point of the movie where explicit female nudity is shown: it’s very much a thesis, and the rest of the movie is going to be an antithesis. Its use of gore strikes a fascinating balance that way: acts of extreme violence are committed, yes, but the camera never really dwells on them, showing short flashes of some truly baroque murders, but never relishing in them; moreover, none of the female characters actually die on-camera, the movie relying on sound, synecdoches and out-of-frame murders to both raise the stakes and avoid any kind of lurid voyeurism.

There’s a desperation to the whole movie – this is not something that could really have happened in a pre-2016 world: it’s very much poking in the wasps’ nest which has been revealed by the fall of increasingly large portions of the world into savage conservatism. It feels like a slasher written by El Sandifer, with, as a motto “let us assume that we are fucked”. Just look at the murder of Vicky’s, Allyson best friend: she is dragged away and stabbed in front of the very kid she’s babysitting. Who, in another subtle screenwriting touch, happens to be black. The movie is very clearly implying that trauma, PTSD and the spectre of the Shape and the structural evil contained therein will pass on to another generation – that everything that plays out now will play out again, just like the holiday of Halloween comes back every year, just like this pumpkin in the opening credits, which reconstructs itself in slow-motion. In a way, it has resigned to the fact that it will, inevitably, be overwritten and cancelled out by some trashy sequel ignoring all the points it has just made – and you better believe it’s not please about it.

And yet, surprisingly, it avoids nihilism.

It’s thanks to Laurie Strode, really. Who is the emotional core of the movie, thanks in no small part to a frankly breathtaking performance by Jamie Lee Curtis, in what’s arguably her best role ever. It’s a painful thing to watch, it really is – someone doubting her own sanity, alone in a world that consistently belittles her, diminishes her, makes her feel like a freak and an outcast for daring to be a man’s victim who won’t shut up and pretend that “the world is not an evil place”. But, there’s the thing – she is allowed to be right. The movie validates her, at every single turn, and, in maybe its biggest twist, has her win in the end. She defeats Michael Meyers. Oh, maybe he’ll be back in another sequel, in fact that’s pretty much guaranteed by now. But here – she does more than just killing him, she robs him of his power. She literally invades the narrative of the original Halloween movie, stealing Michael’s place in iconic Carpenter shots: she forces the movie to iconize her and her struggle instead of the killer’s. Her fight isn’t just happening within the movie: it’s a metanarrative one, and she absolutely shreds her opponent. That’s what the final setpiece is all about, really: beyond a bunch of Home Alone traps, what really happens is a bunch of women banding together and taking back control of the narrative. They pose as helpless victims, only to then gang up on the man who ruined their lives and beat the shit out of him – they master the conventions of slasher movies and use them as tools to assert their agency and power.

That’s all the ambiguity of the final few shots, really. Michael disappearing from the burning cellar can be seen as sequel bait, sure – but it’s also a sign of his ultimate defeat. Without the fear of others, without the exploitation of female pain, he is nothing – sure, the evil he embodied is still out there, hence the breathing sound on the soundtrack, but The Shape is destroyed, because people have stopped believing in him. They’ve stopped letting the Shape shape their lives, and it burns away into sighs. The knife in Allyson’s hands, with which she stabbed Michael in a lovely bit of reversal of the classic phallic symbolism inherent to the slasher, becomes a trophy. A mark of female solidarity – a proof that some can indeed escape Halloween, triumphant.

And they need this solidarity. Because, as the movie showcased, the world is, indeed, a dark and evil place.

Happy Halloween …?


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Sources and footnotes:

1. LEITZ, May, “Local Trans Talks About The Movie Where He Do A Stab”, YouTube,  24/10/2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuiFY0gpR5g&t=31s

2. RAYMOND, Adam K., “Just How Bad of a Movie Month Is January?”, 1/7/2013, Vulture: https://web.archive.org/web/20150127031450/http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/january-worst-movie-release-month.html

3. Men, Women & Chainsaws : Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)

4. But mostly just Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). People tend to try and forget Mother of Tears (2007) ever happened, and they’re right.

5. SEARLES, Jourdain, “The Low-Budget Canadian Film That Inspired 'Halloween' and Launched an Entire Horror Genre”, Thrillist, 30/10/2018: https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/black-christmas-review-first-slasher-film-genre

6. LEITZ, May, “Halloween and the Suburban Nightmare”, YouTube, 29/09/2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwv3FsFj3_M&t=1s
 
7. EBERT, Roger, Siskel & Ebert at the Movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8hj66FIFmw