John Carpenter's Halloween: A Lesson in Breaking The Rules

T’is the season to be spooky. My favourite month of the year is upon us and this year is particularly special in that we are getting a brand new Halloween movie. Not only that, but one approved and scored by John Carpenter himself. Reactions are looking good from early reviews and I’m pumped to see what David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have done with the material, but it got me thinking.

Why is the original Halloween so well regarded? What is it about this simple horror movie about a teenage babysitter being stalked by a masked killer that keeps us coming back for more?

Is it the somber tone? Is it Carpenter’s ability as a director? Is it the lighting? All of the above could be factors, yes. But I think the reason this movie works so well is because of one thing.

It isn’t afraid to break the rules.

Michael Myers/The Shape

When you’re crafting a story nowadays, there are tons of resources to help you along the way. Endless articles by authors, screenwriters and filmmakers all have very helpful tips in constructing the narrative for your story to work.

You’ve no doubt seen some of these before. In order for your story to work, you have to present the main characters, the conflict, the antagonist and an overall idea of what the theme of the story will be, usually in the opening.

Halloween is a pretty simple narrative. A psychotic child kills his teenage sister on Halloween night, and then several years later escapes from a mental facility to wreak havoc in his hometown of Haddonfield, also on Halloween night. (Because, duh.)

Our central protagonists are Laurie Strode, your regular teenage babysitter (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and Dr. Loomis (played by veteran actor Donald Pleasance), the psychiatrist of our main antagonist, Michael Myers.

The opening is all done in one shot, with John Carpenter taking us into the POV of Michael as a child on the night that he kills his sister, Judith. The music and pacing of the camera give the scene a tense, eerie forward momentum, all made the more terrifying when we see a six-year-old child committed the horrific action.

Michael?

Immediately, we’re hooked. And the rest of the movie plays out in a pretty linear fashion. Michael escapes from custody and begins stalking his hometown before the murders ensue. We’re only shown what he looks like in small glimpses until the end, with most of his body either being hidden by the camera or seen in shadows.

Michael Myers/The Shape stalks Laurie Strode on her way to school. 

This plays off the central idea of the monster being scarier when you can’t see it, much like the shark from Jaws or how several ghost movies go about their narrative.

But what’s interesting about the whole movie is that we are never told why Michael does what he does, or why he goes after Laurie in particular.

It’s no secret that the horror genre had a reputation for how women were depicted. And it’s understandable. Many slasher films that followed Halloween presented us with unsympathetic, underwritten and objectified female characters that exist purely to get themselves into trouble with a killer, usually depicted as a male.

While John Carpenter wrote much of the screenplay himself, producer Debra Hill wrote the dialogue between the three female high school-age leads to give a layer of authenticity.

They’re funny, they small talk about boys, school, plans for their night, and why it works are they’re believable and we like them. And despite Carpenter’s legendary use of the killer’s POV in the opening shot, Michael is never more than a mysterious boogeyman figure, so our sympathies lie with the people he’s stalking.

Laurie enjoying a stroll with her friends.

We aren’t even told why he killed his sister in the beginning, in fact, Loomis explains it pretty well in one scene where he states that he spent years trying to get to the humanity within Michael, but eventually gave up as what he saw beneath his eyes was purely, and simply, evil.

There’s even moments where Michael performs unbelievable acts. One doctor notes when he escapes that he won’t get far because he wasn’t given lessons on how to drive, but he does it anyway. This isn’t brought up or expanded upon, because the focus of the movie isn’t on why or how Michael kills, it’s more a question of whether his victims will survive his killing spree.

If you were to look at most articles about writing villains, they would tell you that your antagonist needs to be layered, have a complex backstory, possibly a link to the protagonist and not believe they are the villain. Michael Myers has none of that in this movie, and yet, he still works.

I think this works because it gives an added layer of realism to the movie. Whether we like it or not, sometimes people can just be evil, and the lack of reasoning can make them all the more terrifying.

The sequels and remakes of Halloween expanded on Michael’s backstory, which in the eyes of some fans and Carpenter himself made the character less scary.

In Rob Zombie’s remake, we spend the first third of the movie setting up Michael as a sympathetic character who’s lust for killing comes from growing up in an abusive family, but Carpenter didn’t need to rely on that to make Michael effective. In fact, his parents seem like regular working class people who were just as shocked as we were when his mask was taken off in the beginning.

Michael Myers in the 2007 remake.

The sequels of Halloween expanded on the connection between Laurie and Michael, retconning the events of the movie to make them brother and sister. Whilst this information has been accepted by some fans of those movies, it’s noteworthy that the upcoming new film which aims to take the series back to its minimalistic roots makes fun of this by saying in the trailer that Laurie and Michael weren’t related, and that was something that people had made up.

This is effective in that in order to make sense of things, humans need explanations. Our in built curiosities force us to ask why people do certain things, but less focus is on the impact. We believe in peeling back the layers of someone in order to make us understand them. Carpenter doesn’t give us that, he leaves us hanging, and just like how what you don’t see in a horror movie can be scarier than what you do see, what you don’t know about someone can leave you in a terrifying anxiety.

When we understand why Michael does what he does, all we’re left with is kills and violence and a strange layer of sympathy. But we shouldn’t have to sympathize with a serial killer. John Carpenter knew this and instead made the character a mysterious enigma over a villain with an agenda.

One of the greatest strengths of Halloween is how much goes unexplained. Michael Myers is evil. He is psychotic. He kills people, and on this night, he’s set his sights on his hometown. That’s all you need.

We know nothing else about him, we barely even see his face, and that’s what makes him a terrifying force of nature. If anything, one can read Halloween as a metaphor for the unfortunate truth that there is evil in the world and sometimes bad things happen to good people with a lack of subtext. What sets Halloween apart from other slashers is how well made and entertaining it is.

With John Carpenter being a film student and having just made his mark with Assault on Precinct 13, focused on making a simple narrative entertaining with his use of cinematography and effective lighting to terrify us.

Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance) takes a stand against his former patient.

And look, you can make great narratives by following premade rules of fiction. There’s nothing against creating a multi-layered antagonist and protagonist relationship that relies on the connection to be compelling. So many stories have done this. Star Wars, superhero movies, and many fantasy narratives have these kind of villains.

It’s all about how you can use those rules to break out of the norm effectively. From his craft and understanding of filmmaking, it’s clear John Carpenter wasn’t just ignoring the rules, as he managed to make a horror film that has been hailed as an all time classic, but instead he used the rules and let the reality of human nature be the terrifying moment.

Where it can go wrong is rules are followed to a tee with no creativity to expand upon them. If you create a story out of just following basic structure, you aren’t going to end up with something innovative or exciting. Carpenter used the structure of a hero and a villain being connected, but what made it effective was how random it was.

Just like how a serial killer’s victims could be random, or a killing indeed could be random. When you turn on the news and think to yourself, “What a senseless killing, why did it need to happen?”

The answer is, it didn’t, and it shouldn’t, but the terrifying thing is, it did. And that’s what makes Halloween so scary. It shows that you can elevate simple premises with clear and concise innovative execution, and you don’t need to rely on predictable tropes to make it interesting.

At its core, and what’s seen from the trailers of the upcoming sequel, Halloween is more than a horror movie. It’s a survival story. Laurie Strode is us, the simple babysitter minding her own business and going about her life, and Michael Myers is the evil outside that threatens to destroy that without warning.

So, don’t break the rules just for the sake of it. Stories should have something to say beyond tropes, and Halloween does just that.

But, that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. The existence of evil can be a conflict in itself, it all depends on how that is executed, and Halloween is a great example of how to elevate a simple narrative and break the rules effectively to make a memorable nightmare that you’ll never forget.

It’s all about a masked killer, and the night he came home.