In all of John Carpenter’s filmography, Halloween (1978) is his most impactful and influential contribution to cinema. While films like Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960) originated the slasher genre within horror and created the archetype for a horror villain in this form, Halloween popularized it by establishing characterizations and imagery that still hold up and are repeatedly referenced in the genre, like in It Follows (2014), which paired the nuanced and eclectic feel with a suspenseful electronic score to reference the impact of Halloween to the slasher genre. Halloween’s long lasting effect within the horror genre is wholeheartedly attributed to the mystifying characterization of Michael Myers in the film. The film uses subtlety and refinement to create questioning of the nature of Michael's existence and whether or not he is an escaped psychopath, or a force of evil that is beyond the human realm. This constant internal debate created through Michael’s conflicting characterization further creates suspense and tension throughout the film.
The obscurity and vagueness the surrounds Michael is central in creating the constant lingering sense of tension within the film: how he thinks, how he feels, how he can appear and disappear instantaneously, which furthers the complexity of the enigma of Michael Meyers.
Michael originally appears as simply a man in a boiler suit who wears a mask and holds a butcher’s knife, but the film constantly makes you question his humanity by including commentary from Michael’s doctor, Sam Loomis. Dr. Loomis describes him as simply the personification of evil attributed to the complete absence of any real human qualities within him. In a conversation with a sheriff who is trying to understand the motives of Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis describes his observations of Michael, “I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall, looking at this night, inhumanly patient…waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off.” He’s both human and inhuman, like a otherworldly entity wearing a costume that fits into our material world. What conveys this dual humanity within the psychopathy of Michael Myers is how Dr. Loomis, the only individual who has truly spent time with Michael and knows him the most, is genuinely terrified of him and what he may accomplish. He often refers to Michael as “it” or “evil,” like when he is telling another character in a driving sequence, “don’t underestimate it.” He is virtually the only character who truly understand the scope of Michael’s character, in the sense that he does not identify him as human, but as something else entirely detached from humanity.
The sequels do try to describe him as part of the “curse of the thor,” which means that if an individual kills their entire family, they’ll be granted great strength and immortality. This addition to the story explains why Michael seems to never die and correlates with his overall motive, but additionally, it prove to be ineffective and removes the elements of subtlety created in the original characterization of Michael Myers. The ambiguity of not understanding his motives and intentions prove to be far more impactful in creating and exploring the vision for Michael. His costume seemingly removes any similarity or aspect of a personality, further contributing to his inhuman presence. This embodiment of a purely disconnected figure that was conveyed in such a nuanced way attributes to the failure of some of the sequels and remakes, because they continuously attempted to rationalize and apply a psychology that is simply absent. Michael Myers is effective because the subtlety of his behaviour and his ability to exist casually within the world serves to a much greater effect than any backstory or psychological reasoning can serve. The attempts to rationalize or expand upon a purely conveyed psychopathy or evil resemble Leatherface’s character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), who also received unnecessary backstory within failed prequels and remakes. When you can only perceive them through how they are bluntly portrayed, it lets your imagination wander more vividly. Nick Hassall, who played Michael, was told to simply walk from point A to B and given virtually no direction for his characterization of Michael, in order to make him appear as empty and inhumane as possible. When attempting to get through to Michael, Dr. Loomis describes it as “talking into the abyss.” Donald Pleasance’s nuanced performance and dry but impactful sentiments regarding Michael make the viewer curious about what he’s experienced. Throughout the onscreen encounters with Dr. Loomis, the view is left with the implication that he’s witnessed something completely unworldly that cannot be understood by any of the other characters and even by the viewer itself. Throughout his time studying Michael, even Dr. Loomis wasn’t capable of reaching a rational understanding of the phenomenon of Michael Myers, but instead, he has simply seen evil through Michael's eyes. This creates an interesting relationship between Michael and his mask, where is truly matches Dr. Loomis’s description of his face behind it: blank, pale, emotionless, and cold. Even when we see Michael’s face, it never humanizes him because of his distorted features and blank gaze–which proves that he really is just a vague entity that integrates in with his surroundings despite his costumed appearance.
The implication that he is the embodiment of evil is manifested in the opening sequence. The first image we see is a jack o'lantern as the camera slowly creeps into its eyes. This image is followed upon when we witnessed Michael's first kill through his perspective, which forces the audience to watch helplessly. The viewer has no choice but to engage with the action being committed from a perspective that we feel completely dissociated with because as Loomis puts it, he is practically “dead behind the eyes.” This scene creates a strangely unique and disruptive experience with the immediate creation of tension because we don’t understand the context or the relationship between the killer and victim, but because we know where the killer is and can sense him getting closer to the victim, we start to fear for them. The viewer has a great sense of awareness which is lacking from the victim’s perspective, inturn creating psychological suspense and moral conflict. You are then shocked with the jarring revelation that the killer was a child the entire time, completely changing the viewer’s emotional understanding of the murder, as a child would naturally lack motive or understanding for this kind of action, allowing the aspect of evil that was acted upon at such a young age linger in the back of your mind for the rest of the film. It also creates an unwarranted empathy for Michael, as you are associating such dark attributes with what is supposed to be the embodiment of innocence. His stance in this revealing shot matches Loomis’s later description of Michael, as he appears to be bewitched or under the trance of something greater than him. He is totally numb to his actions which connects to the sinister idea that even six-years old, the only thing behind the eyes of this innocent looking child is pure evil.
Naturally, one can assume that Carpenter chose to surround this story about a murderous lunatic around Halloween due to its historical association with evil. This connects to the origin of the holiday at the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. This traditional festival marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of the darker half of the year. The basic idea surrounding it is that evil cannot be killed on this night, warranting rituals to ward off spirits. The main aspect of Halloween in the film is that the entirety of the story takes place on Halloween night, which can implicate a possible possession of Michael by some evil spirit or entity. These correlations to the origin of Halloween and its connections to evil are effective in Michael being characterized as a personification of evil, presented by these traditions. The film makes you question why evil looks and like this, as Michael’s screen time within the film is mostly taken up by shots of him constantly stalking his victims. In the sequence where Laurie peers out of her classroom window to see Michael standing across the street, she is momentarily distracted by her teacher, to only look back and see that he has disappeared. This exemplifies the many moments in the film where Michael’s seemingly obscure ability to quickly appear and disappear, and makes the viewer question if what we’re seeing is real or if he is some sort of supernatural entity that only partially exists in the material world. Seeing Michael get stabbed and shot with no verbal outcry or response whatsoever, and then to completely disappear further supports Dr. Loomis’s suspicions that Michael is more than human.
The conclusion of the film, which includes ghostly shots of the empty suburbia with Michael’s heavy breathing and his sign track in the background indicate that he could truly be anywhere. This maintains complete ambiguity throughout the film and beyond. It leaves the viewer with a great sense of questionability about who Michael Myers actually is. Michael’s seemingly constant presence is something that projects a real sense of contained rage within him, but his shallow exterior allows him to blend in organically with the rest of the world, making his inevitable appearance so much more eary and unexpected. This is something Loomis called attention to later in the film. He points out Michael’s unique ability to casually exist and fit in with the world. In the sequence where Loomis is on the streets looking around for Michael, wondering where he could be while being distracted by his own thoughts and fears, Michael casually drives behind right behind him in a beige and mundane looking vehicle and going at a normal speed. This perfectly highlights Michael’s nuanced existence within the diegesis. The sheriff’s description of a peaceful, quiet, family-friendly time shortly after Michael’s escape highlights the social fear of such a character in the suburban setting, as he capable of existing among them in broad daylight–which makes him seemingly more omnipresent. This reflects the subtlety of how slasher films can be. A human looking figure like Michael that exists in our material world can be both terrifying for his presence and the unnerving fact that it’s set in a rather safe looking suburb, portraying a great sense of realism.
The use of jump sequences to portray Michael’s kills are set up after a reasonable build of suspense and are executed after a prolonged period of time reflect Michael’s precision and meticulousness and are greatly more effective than cheap one second jump scares that kill the suspense immediately.
The film’s use of subtlety as a means of building tension, conveying the narrative, and portraying Michael in a greatly nuanced form makes the film feel complex and enriched with meaning. The film is in the exact same headspace as Michael. On the outside it looks hollow, but on the inside there’s clearly a very efficient, clever and deeply disturbing phenomenon occurring. We are arguably experiencing Michael’s terror from the perspective of the victims in the sense that we can empathize with their fear, but also in Michael’s perspective, due to the fact that similar to him, we don’t have any understanding or motive for the terror he is inflicting on the other characters. This deep complexity created through the mysterious characterization of Michael and his existence in a mundane world attributes to the film’s almost forty year uphold as a horror classic.