Film

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978): Watching Horror Unfold

How the Classic Slasher Uses Point of View to Engage the Viewer

Carpenter never shies away from showing us the violence on screen; victims are strangled and stabbed and hunted, all while Carpenter refuses to cut away from it. We are not allowed to look away.

For a long time, I thought I was unable to watch horror movies — or at least, I could only bring myself to watch science fiction horror movies. This changed when, in the interest of seeing more of John Carpenter’s filmography (after enjoying The Thing and They Live), I sat down to watch his 1978 horror classic Halloween.

I was apprehensive about watching it, knowing this film had spawned the “slasher” genre. The film establishes many elements that would become traditional in slashers: the first-person point of view shot, violence against irresponsible teenagers (particularly teen girls*), a mentally disturbed killer, a distinctive weapon, and a “Final Girl” who survives the film and defeats the killer.

Slashers get their name from their excessive and bloody violence. Blood and gore is difficult for me to see as it sticks with me, which is one of the reasons I avoided the genre and this film in particular for a very long time. Halloween (1978) was a pleasant surprise in this respect — nearly bloodless and full of dramatic tension rather than jump scares and gratuitous violence.

This is not to say that Halloween is non-violent — in fact, it is deliberately and precisely violent. Halloween’s central villain, The Shape (later more often associated with his name, Michael Myers), is “pure evil,” according to Dr. Loomis. In the film, the kids watch Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, and it seems that is what The Shape is: a monster from its own dark and alien world, here to hunt and destroy us because of its own terrible reasons. His violence is established from the opening scenes where he murders his sister and is emphasized as he begins to stalk and murder Haddonfield’s teenagers on “the night he came back,” to quote the film’s tagline.

Carpenter never shies away from showing us the violence on screen; victims are strangled and stabbed and hunted, all while Carpenter refuses to cut away from it. The scenes, particularly Annie’s death where she is strangled in her car, are almost uncomfortably long. The camera lingers — pointedly — on these violent scenes, forcing the viewer to confront them as we encounter them. We are not allowed to look away.

Roger Ebert wrote that Halloween (1978) is terrifying because it “is a visceral experience — we aren’t seeing the movie, we’re having it happen to us.” And yet, Carpenter uses the medium of film to emphasize sight and watching.

In a way, Halloween (1978) is all about the act of seeing. Loomis draws attention to this theme textually when he describes staring into a young Michael’s dark “Devil’s eyes,” but the film also does this apart from the script. What we see, when we see it — all of this is tightly controlled and staged.

The film begins with a first-person point of view shot, making the viewer see through young Michael’s eyes (a point of view only emphasized by the eyeholes once he puts on the clown mask). As the film continues, The Shape watches Tommy, Laurie, or another person as they go about their lives. To intensify the horror, Carpenter manipulates the fore- and backgrounds to carefully create a game of now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t with The Shape — some examples being the hedge, the clothesline, outside Annie’s house, and in the shadows through a door. The film’s final shots are a series of empty places, showing where The Shape is unseen — though possibly present.

However, going beyond this focus on what the characters in the film seem, which the camera narrates for us, the film is also about what we see. The camera, which is not always a neutral observer, paints us as voyeuristic watchers no different than the film’s villain. The Shape watches Laurie walk down the street; simultaneously, in this long, static shot, we watch him watching her. As much as The Shape peers into other people’s lives, thoughts focused on the violence to come, we do the same by virtue of occasionally following his perspective, watching both him and the subjects of his gaze. The film uses the nature of film as a visual medium to question what it means to bear witness to something, as well as whose eyes we are really seeing through when we watch something.

By emphasizing the act of watching and seeing in the film, Carpenter adds a layer to it that implicates — perhaps even condemns — the viewer in the act of witnessing and being entertained by the violent and disturbing acts of the film. Didn’t you come to see people die in terrible ways, to watch The Shape commit horrible violence? Carpenter asks. Isn’t that what you wanted to see? And if we are being honest with ourselves, the answer is probably yes.

*In subsequent slasher films, this was tied to sexuality, with a virgin “Final Girl” outliving the other “promiscuous” (i.e., sexually active) teen girls; however, “punishing” the sexually active teenage girl does not seem to be a focus in Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), at least to this viewer. The focus seems to be responsibility, instead, and paying the proper attention to the children in one’s care.

Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.