Halloween

This book argues that Halloween need not be the first nor the most influential
youth slasher film for it to hold a special place in the history of youth cinema.
John Carpenter’s 1978 horror hit was once considered the be-all, end-all
of teen slasher cinema and was regarded as the first, the best, and the most
influential American slasher film. Recent revisions in film history, however,
have challenged Halloween’s comfortable place in the canon of youth
horror cinema. However, this book argues that the film, like no other, draws
from the themes, imagery, and obsessions that fueled youth horror cinema
since the 1950s—Gothic atmosphere, atomic dread, twisted psychology,
and alienated teenage monsters—and ties them together in the deceptively
simple story of a masked killer on Halloween night. Along the way, the film
delivers a savage critique of social institutions and their failure to protect
young people. Halloween also depicts a cadre of compelling and complicated
youth characters: teenage babysitters watching over preadolescents as a
killer, who is viciously avoiding the responsibilities of young adulthood,
stalks them through the shadows.
This book explores all these aspects of Halloween, including the franchise
it spawned, providing an invaluable insight into this iconic film for students
and researchers alike.

Mark Bernard is Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University.

His primary research interests are horror cinema and media industries. He is
the author of Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American
Horror Film.
Cinema and Youth Cultures
Series Editors: Siân Lincoln & Yannis Tzioumakis

Cinema and Youth Cultures engages with well-known youth films from
American cinema as well as the cinemas of other countries. Using a variety of
methodological and critical approaches the series volumes provide informed
accounts of how young people have been represented in film, while also
exploring the ways in which young people engage with films made for and
about them. In doing this, the Cinema and Youth Cultures series contributes
to important and long standing debates about youth cultures, how these are
mobilized and articulated in influential film texts and the impact that these
texts have had on popular culture at large.

The Virgin Suicides

Justin Wyatt

The Breakfast Club

Elissa H. Nelson

The Freshman
Christina G. Petersen

Y Tu Mamá También
Scott L. Baugh

Halloween
Mark Bernard

American Pie
Bill Osgerby

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Cinema-and-Youth-Cultures/book-series/CYC
Halloween
Youth Cinema and the
Horrors of Growing Up

Mark Bernard
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Mark Bernard to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernard, Mark, author.
Title: Halloween : youth cinema and the horrors of growing up /
Mark Bernard.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Cinema and
youth cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019029189 (print) | LCCN 2019029190 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138732407 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781315185453 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Halloween (Motion picture : 1978) | Halloween films. |
Youth in motion pictures. | Slasher films—United States—History and
criticism. | Horror films—United States—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1997.H25836 B47 2020 (print) |
LCC PN1997.H25836 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/75—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029189
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029190
ISBN: 978-1-138-73240-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-18545-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Dedicated with love to Hope Bernard, who walked with
me—literally and figuratively—through the streets of
Haddonfield.
Frontispiece: Halloween, 1978. Director: John Carpenter
Image courtesy of Falcon International/Kobal/Shutterstock
Contents

List of Figures viii

Series Editors’ Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xii

1 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer: Halloween and

the History of Youth Horror Cinema 1

2 Familial and Societal Failure: Reading Youth and

Ideology in Halloween 26

3 A Triptych of Youth: Teenagers, Preadolescents,

and Young Adults in Halloween 49

4 The Mise en Abyme of Youth: The Halloween

Franchise 75

Bibliography 93
Index 99
Figures

0.1 Laurie waits for a ride xii

1.1 Tommy and Lindsey watch ‘Doctor Dementia’ 2
1.2 Brainy, brash, and beautiful: The girls of Halloween 14
1.3 Loomis in the spookhouse 17
1.4 Violence ‘in really good taste’: Annie’s shadowy death 19
2.1 Michael Myers: Child as monstrous ‘other’ 33
2.2 The shadowy streets of Haddonfield 40
2.3 Brackett and Loomis: Ineffective expertise 44
3.1 Laurie, the final girl 54
3.2 Annie and Laurie drive to the job 59
3.3 Annie’s advice 60
3.4 ‘See anything you like?’ 62
3.5 Space between friends 64
3.6 Michael, miscommunication, and murder 66
3.7 Tommy’s maturing tastes 68
3.8 Michael stalks Tommy 70
4.1 ‘Teenage soap horror’: Halloween H20 83
4.2 Michael Myers: Abandoned child 85
4.3 Choose your own adventure 91
Series Editors’ Introduction

Despite the high visibility of youth films in the global media marketplace,
especially since the 1980s when Conglomerate Hollywood realized that
such films were not only strong box office performers but also the start-
ing point for ancillary sales in other media markets as well as for franchise
building, academic studies that focused specifically on such films were slow
to materialize. Arguably the most important factor behind academia’s reluc-
tance to engage with youth films was a (then) widespread perception within
the Film and Media Studies communities that such films held little cultural
value and significance, and therefore were not worthy of serious scholarly
research and examination. Just like the young subjects they represented,
whose interests and cultural practices have been routinely deemed transi-
tional and transitory, so were the films that represented them perceived as
fleeting and easily digestible, destined to be forgotten quickly, as soon as the
next youth film arrived in cinema screens a week later.
Under these circumstances, and despite a small number of pioneering
studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, the field of ‘youth film studies’ did not
really start blossoming and attracting significant scholarly attention until
the 2000s and in combination with similar developments in cognate areas
such as ‘girl studies.’ However, because of the paucity of material in the
previous decades, the majority of these new studies in the 2000s focused
primarily on charting the field and therefore steered clear of long, in-depth
examinations of youth films or was exemplified by edited collections that
chose particular films to highlight certain issues to the detriment of others.
In other words, despite providing often wonderfully rich accounts of youth
cultures as these have been captured by key films, these studies could not
have possibly dedicated sufficient space to engage with more than just a few
key aspects of youth films.
In more recent (post-2010) years a number of academic studies started
delimiting their focus and therefore providing more space for in-depth
examinations of key types of youth films, such as slasher films and biker
x Series Editors’ Introduction
films or examining youth films in particular historical periods. From that
point on, it was a matter of time for the first publications that focused
exclusively on key youth films from a number of perspectives to appear
(Mamma Mia! The Movie, Twilight and Dirty Dancing are among the first
films to receive this treatment). Conceived primarily as edited collections,
these studies provided a multifaceted analysis of these films, focusing on
such issues as the politics of representing youth, the stylistic and narrative
choices that characterize these films and the extent to which they are repre-
sentative of a youth cinema, the ways these films address their audiences,
the ways youth audiences engage with these films, the films’ industrial loca-
tion and other relevant issues.
It is within this increasingly maturing and expanding academic environ-
ment that the Cinema and Youth Cultures volumes arrive, aiming to con-
solidate existing knowledge, provide new perspectives, apply innovative
methodological approaches, offer sustained and in-depth analyses of key
films and therefore become the ‘go to’ resource for students and scholars
interested in theoretically informed, authoritative accounts of youth cultures
in film. As editors, we have tried to be as inclusive as possible in our selec-
tion of key examples of youth films by commissioning volumes on films
that span the history of cinema, including the silent film era; that portray
contemporary youth cultures as well as ones associated with particular his-
torical periods; that represent examples of mainstream and independent cin-
ema; that originate in American cinema and the cinemas of other nations;
that attracted significant critical attention and commercial success during
their initial release and that were ‘rediscovered’ after an unpromising initial
critical reception. Together these volumes are going to advance youth film
studies while also being able to offer extremely detailed examinations of
films that are now considered significant contributions to cinema and our
cultural life more broadly.
We hope readers will enjoy the series.
Siân Lincoln & Yannis Tzioumakis
Cinema & and Youth Cultures Series Editors
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Siân Lincoln and Yannis Tzioumakis for inviting me
to write this volume for this series. I appreciate their kindness, guidance,
and patience during the writing process. Special thanks to the amazing Kim
Gottlieb-Walker for generously allowing me to use one of her photos. Thanks
also to Marcus Alexander Hart at OldPalMarcus.com for allowing me to use
his handy flowchart. This book would not have been possible without previ-
ous scholarship by the late Peter Hutchings, Murray Leeder (thanks for the
extra tidbit from your interview with Carpenter, Murray), Richard Nowell,
Timothy Shary, Andrew Tudor, and the late Robin Wood. Special thanks
to them. Thanks to everyone in the Humanities Division at Siena Heights
University for their support and encouragement. Finally, thanks to Cynthia
Baron, Colin Helb, Greg Simpson, and Jenn and Callie (again) for talking
me off the ledge, whether they knew they were doing it or not.
Introduction

It is Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. As autumn leaves float

through the air, teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) sits on the stoop
in front of her house with a pumpkin on her lap, waiting for her friend
Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis) to pick her up for a ride to their babysit-
ting gigs (see Figure 0.1). When Annie pulls up, Laurie waddles across the
street with the pumpkin and gets in. During the drive, the two discuss their
plans for the night. Laurie intends to carve a pumpkin with Tommy Doyle
(Brian Andrews), while Annie foresees a night in front of the television for
herself and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards). She says, ‘I plan on mak-
ing popcorn and watching Doctor Dementia. Six straight hours of horror
movies. Little Lindsey Wallace won’t know what hit her.’ Later, Laurie
and Tommy also eventually opt for some television, as the film later shows
them sitting on the couch at the Doyle residence and watching a broadcast
of The Thing from Another World (Nyby and Hawks, 1951). Across the
street at the Wallace residence, Lindsey also watches The Thing as Annie
connives to ditch Lindsey and pick up her boyfriend Paul. Annie dumps

Figure 0.1 Laurie waits for a ride

 Introduction xiii
Lindsey on Laurie and leaves for a date, but she will not even make it out
of the driveway. Michael Myers (Nick Castle), an escaped maniac, attacks
Annie in her car, strangling her and slitting her throat. Back at the Doyle
house, the kids watch Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956) as Doctor Demen-
tia’s marathon continues.
These scenes from Halloween, the 1978 low-budget sleeper that would
soon become a staple of both youth and horror cinema, feature adolescents
and preadolescents watching films from the 1950s targeted at youth audi-
ences. During the 1950s, young people became the dominant audience for
the movies, thus sending the ‘adult minds’ of Hollywood execs ‘racing
madly to interpret adolescent tastes’ (Doherty 2002: 132). In some ways,
Halloween is this type of youth movie. The basic scenario of the film—
suburban teenager babysitters stalked by a mad killer—was conceived by
the ‘adult mind’ of Irwin Yablans, the head of Compass International, a
small independent producer and distributor. Yablans, an industry veteran
who had been working in the movie business in various capacities since
the 1950s (Nichols 1980: 42), believed the concept for the film, tentatively
titled ‘The Babysitter Murders,’ was a perfect fit for youth audiences: ‘It
occurred to me that if we did a movie about babysitters, it would . . . lend
itself to kids in jeopardy’ (Anchor Bay 2013b). To realize his vision, Yablans
employed John Carpenter, a young writer/director whose previous film, the
low-budget action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), had been distrib-
uted in the US by Yablans’s previous distribution company, Turtle Films.
Carpenter was set to direct and co-write the film with his partner, Debra
Hill, who would also produce. With this creative team in hand, Yablans
convinced financier Moustapha Akkad to put up the film’s budget, assuring
him the film would be marketable to youth audiences (Nowell 2011: 81).
Although the germ of the film’s concept came from an adult mind, Hal-
loween was brought to fruition by a young cast and crew. In the 1950s,
production companies ranging from the big studios to tiny independents
made films geared for youth audiences. However, those teenpics made by
independent production companies like American International Pictures
(AIP) resonated with youth audiences because they felt like ‘the kind of
motion pictures a group of high schoolers let loose with 35 mm equipment
might come up with, an impression due in equal parts to market savvy,
youthful talent, and bargain-basement budgets’ (Doherty 2002: 132). Hal-
loween embodied all the characteristics of the best independent teenpics
of the 1950s and 1960s. It not only featured youth characters, but was also
driven by a youthful ethos behind the camera, truly a film made for young
people, by young people. The marketable idea at the heart of the film was
brought to life by a young cast and crew forced to be innovative due to time
and money restrictions. After hiring Carpenter and Hill, Yablans realized
xiv Introduction
no one had made a horror film based around the Halloween holiday, so he
suggested Carpenter and Hill re-name the film Halloween and have the film
take place on the holiday, changes that would potentially make the film even
more marketable and appealing to young people. Hill agreed, later recalling,
‘The Halloween theme was just a perfect theme. . . . [It] enabled us to . . .
really plant ourselves in a teenage world’ (Anchor Bay 2013a).
By all accounts, the youthful attitude of the teenage world was not lim-
ited to the diegesis. Looking back on the production, Carpenter described
Halloween’s cast and crew as a ‘little army’ consisting of ‘a bunch of kids
trying to make a movie’ (Anchor Bay 2013b). Curtis, who rose to stardom
after the film’s release, later recalled the production as being

like guerilla movie-making. It was done on such a low budget. . . . Every-

body was very young. I think John and Debra were the oldest people on
the set. They were thirty. So, there were all these young grips and young
electricians and young actors. . . . It was just really a magical time.
(Anchor Bay 2013a)

As Hill recalls, ‘We were kids back then in ’78. People were giving us
money. We were going out and playing. We had a huge sandbox to play in’
(Anchor Bay 2013b). By Hollywood standards, Halloween’s sandbox was
not that huge. The production budget was around $320,000, with principal
photography taking place in various locations in South Pasadena and West
Hollywood in April 1978 (Anchor Bay 2013b; Muir 2000: 13).1
Halloween rallies its limited resources to produce a simple, straightfor-
ward story. On Halloween night in 1963, 6-year-old Michael Myers (Will
Sandin) brutally murders his teenage sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) with a
butcher knife. Fifteen years later, in 1978, the now-adult Michael escapes
from custody and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. In pur-
suit of Michael is Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), Michael’s former
psychiatrist who is convinced that Michael is the embodiment of evil. Loo-
mis warns Haddonfield’s sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) of the
danger Michael poses to the little town, but it does not help. On Halloween
night, Michael stalks and kills three teenagers: Annie, Lynda (P.J. Soles), and
her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham). At the culmination of his killing
spree, Michael attacks brainy teenager Laurie, who fights back but is unable
to stop him. As Michael is about to strangle her, Loomis arrives on the scene
and shoots Michael six times, sending him flying off the second-story bal-
cony of a suburban home. However, when Loomis looks for Michael’s body
where it fell, he finds nothing. Michael has apparently walked away from a
wounding that should have killed him, suggesting that Michael is an inhu-
man killing machine. Despite its humble beginnings, Halloween went on to
 Introduction xv
gross around $47 million dollars domestically across several re-releases and
spawned a franchise (‘Franchises: Halloween’ n.d.).2
Many histories cite Halloween as the genesis of what would come to
be known as the teen slasher film,3 a film-type that would dominate low-
budget horror film production for the next few years, culminating in 1981,
which saw the production of over 90 horror films, many of them low-bud-
get slashers (Kendrick 2014: 311). Slasher films feature the basic formula
of ‘a blade-wielding killer preying on a group of young people’ (Nowell
2011: 16). Using Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to film genres,
one could argue that the teen slasher combines semantic elements of the
horror film—that is, the ‘genre’s building blocks’—with youth cinema’s
syntax, i.e. ‘the structures into which [semantics] are arranged’ (Altman
1999: 219).4 Like many other slasher films, Halloween takes semantic ele-
ments from a range of previous horror texts and revises them for teen audi-
ences. The Myers house, where young Michael killed his sister in 1963,
is an update of the ‘Terrible Place,’ a generic component of Gothic litera-
ture dating back to the 18th century (Clover 2015: 80). Believed by neigh-
borhood kids to haunted, the Myers house stands ominously among the
well-kept homes of the American Midwest suburb of Haddonfield. In its
depiction of Michael, a killer hailing from a banal, suburban environment,
Halloween draws from the image of the human monster from mundane sur-
roundings that had been relatively prevalent in horror cinema since Psycho
(Hitchcock, 1960). Slashers usually take place in ‘everyday surroundings’
(Worland 2007: 227), syntactic structures that are ‘almost always directly
connected with the adolescent American experience in some way’ (Kend-
rick 2014: 319). Reflecting the ‘increasing awareness that the age of first
intercourse was dropping for American youth’ and American youth’s grow-
ing interest in experimentation with drugs (Shary 2005: 55), the narratives
of slasher movies were infused with sex and drugs, and the teenage victims
of Halloween and many other slasher films to follow ran afoul of ‘Terrible
Places’ and human monsters during their various pursuits of sex, alcohol,
and illicit substances.
Over the past four decades, Halloween has been highly esteemed. It did
not take very long for Halloween to become a ‘canonical horror film’ as
it ‘took its place in Film Studies . . . and remains a mainstay of horror
classes’ (Leeder 2014: 32). Popular critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert
offered Halloween as an example of a ‘good’ slasher film in contrast to other
‘distasteful’ teen slashers like Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), Prom
Night (Lynch, 1980), and Terror Train (Spottiswoode, 1980) (Nowell 2011:
226). Carpenter has grown into one of the most respected genre directors,
with some discourses placing Carpenter among directors of the celebrated
‘Hollywood Renaissance’ alongside names like Martin Scorsese and Steven
xvi Introduction
Spielberg (Conrich and Woods 2004: 2–3). Although his career has been
uneven from a commercial and critical viewpoint,5 Carpenter nevertheless
sits comfortably in the pantheon of ‘great directors’ and, in 2019, received
the Golden Coach Award at the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight.
In 2018, the web series Through the Lens, produced by the Internet
Movie Database and posted to its website, devoted an episode to Carpenter,
titled ‘Defining Carpenteresque.’ The episode argued that the consistency
of Carpenter’s style and themes warrants his name being turned into an
adjective, just as those of filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick or David
Lynch. Many film histories note Carpenter’s auteur status, sometimes jux-
taposing it with the downturn in quality of slasher films that followed Hal-
loween. For instance, David Cook calls Halloween ‘an artful, low-budget
thriller’ as opposed to the ‘oafishly directed’ Friday the 13th, a slasher
blockbuster about teens stalked by an unseen killer at a summer camp that
was released two years after Halloween (2016: 691). Over time, Hallow-
een ‘was commonly held up as the only creatively innovative teen slasher’
(Nowell 2011: 9).
In recent years, however, Halloween’s comfortable position in the canon
of horror cinema as the most prototypical, innovative, and influential slasher
has been contested, with the most significant challenge coming from Rich-
ard Nowell. As Nowell argues, Halloween cannot lay claim to being the first
slasher film. Instead, he cites Black Christmas (Clark, 1974), a low-budget,
Canadian-made thriller, as the first slasher film and the film bearing the
most influence over Halloween (2011: 57–78). While many past studies
trace the slasher film’s prehistory through films such as Psycho and The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), Nowell maintains that these
films actually bear little resemblance to what would come to be recognized
as conventions of the slasher film, that is, ‘a distinct setting, a shadowy
killer, and a group of youths’ (2011: 20). Also key to the slasher formula is
a traumatic past event that triggers the killer (21). There are traces of these
elements between Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but neither
of these films delineates and organizes them into a recognizable slasher for-
mula as clearly as Black Christmas, which offered a template that Yablans,
Carpenter, and Hill followed when conceiving Halloween (57–79). Having
called into question Halloween’s position as the first slasher film, Nowell
chips away at Halloween’s nearly undisputed legacy as well, arguing that
Carpenter’s film is not the most influential and most imitated slasher film of
the era. According to Nowell, this title would go to Friday the 13th. While
Friday the 13th may be dismissed by Cook as ‘oafishly directed,’ Nowell
points out that Friday the 13th not only kicked off the slasher boom of 1980
and 1981 but also more closely resembled the content of films that would
follow during the first slasher cycle boom (120–147).
 Introduction xvii
Regardless of these reasonable revisions to Halloween’s place in horror
history, Carpenter’s film remains a touchstone of horror and youth cinema
for reasons that this monograph hopes to illuminate. If, as Nowell argues,
Friday the 13th, not Halloween, was the most imitated slasher film of the
era, then perhaps one may assume there are fewer slasher films like Hallow-
een or even that Carpenter’s film is unique among slasher films, possessing
some traits and characteristics that most other slasher films—at least those
from the first slasher cycle—do not. In his monograph dedicated to the film,
Murray Leeder requests that the reader ‘be content to acknowledge that Hal-
loween is clearly related to the slasher cycle, but it is an entity distinct from
it’ (2014: 17). This book operates under a slightly different supposition: that
Halloween is a significant youth horror film for reasons both related and
unrelated to its affiliation with the slasher film subgenre.
To contextualize Halloween within the wider history of youth horror cin-
ema, the first chapter offers an overview of youth horror’s prehistory, its
explosion in the 1950s, and its maturation in the 1960s and 1970s. When
viewed in this context, Halloween emerges as a synthesis of youth horror’s
past thematic obsessions. Released at the end of the 1970s, the film emerged
at a pivotal time in the late 1970s, when Hollywood was changing the way it
did business. As such, if Halloween engages with youth horror’s past, it also
capitalizes on blockbuster filmmaking techniques and high concept market-
ing strategies that were emerging at the time of its release. Chapter 1 seeks
to understand Halloween in its commercial context.
Halloween not only came along during a time of change for the Hol-
lywood film industry, but it also emerged during a time when horror films
were being taken more seriously and subjected to rigorous analysis in the
academy. The second chapter begins by looking at how Halloween found
itself in the middle of academic discourses and debates about the socio-
political connotations of horror cinema. Halloween did not fare very well
with critics like Robin Wood, who were disappointed with what they saw as
the film’s negligence to problematize the bourgeois patriarchal family via
the figure of the monstrous child (Wood 1979a: 26). However, frameworks
that deemphasize micro-psychoanalytic-based analysis in favor of macro-
sociological-based inquiry find that Halloween contains a potent critique of
how social institutions have failed youth, leaving young people to wander
in an inhospitable world.
The third chapter focuses on these youth characters and how they navi-
gate through the rough terrain of childhood. Unlike most slasher films
that focus solely on teenagers, Halloween offers an exploration of three
different types of ‘youth’ characters: teenagers, preadolescents, and young
adults. The chapter’s analysis of the film’s teen characters begins with a
consideration of Laurie as the ‘Final Girl,’ a term coined by Carol J. Clover
xviii Introduction
in her influential 1987 article ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher
Film’ (Clover 2015). The Final Girl of the slasher film is the virginal young
woman who, after all her friends are killed off, bests the killer and survives
the ordeal. While classifying Laurie as a Final Girl is a fine way to begin
an analysis of Laurie’s character, the richness of Halloween’s depiction of
youth begins to emerge when Laurie is considered in the context of the cen-
tral trifecta of teen characters—Laurie, Annie, and Lynda—and how they
resemble the archetypical teenage characters of the ‘nerd,’ the ‘rebel, and
the ‘popular girl.’ Preadolescents Tommy and Lindsey, the children Laurie
and Annie are hired to babysit, also play a significant role in the film, espe-
cially Tommy, whose character trajectory shows how nonlinear the path
from innocence to experience can be. Also overlooked in analyses of the
film is the young adult category, as represented by the killer, Michael. It is
tempting to read Michael as an overgrown kid stuck in a twisted perpetual
childhood, but several indicators suggest Michael best fits into a category
of young adult whose life has been derailed by a cruel, ineffective criminal
justice system. Considering Michael in this light illuminates Halloween’s
multifaceted depiction of youth cultures.
The final chapter provides an overview of the Halloween franchise
including various sequels and remakes. Halloween has proven itself to be a
durable franchise, even if the success of individual entries is often depen-
dent of the state of the youth horror market at the time of their release. This
chapter tracks how entries in the franchise produce a wide array of youth
characters. The Halloween franchise focuses on trans-generational conflict
and familial tension in a way that most other horror film franchises do not.
While franchises like New Line’s Nightmare on Elm Street series deal with
familial tension between the young and the old, these conflicts often play
out strictly between teenagers and their parents. The Halloween films also
feature these clashes between the young and the old, but the franchise’s
representation of youth is more varied, as the films often feature characters
like preadolescents in prominent roles. It has been a long time since an
18-year-old Laurie Strode sat on a stoop in the chilly October air, cradling a
pumpkin and waiting for a ride. And it has been a long time since a group of
young filmmakers sipped Dr Pepper and made horror film history in South
Pasadena in 1978. But the film they made and the archetypical characters
featured in that film possess eternal youth and vitality.

Notes
1 There are conflicting accounts when it comes to Halloween’s budget. Muir
(2000: 13) and Boulenger (2001: 28) say the film’s budget was $300,000. Nowell
(2011: 81) cites Muir (2000: 13) as his source for Halloween’s budget but
contradicts Muir’s number and writes that the budget was $320,000. Yablans
 Introduction xix
(2012: 171) claims the budget was $325,000. I have chosen $320,000 because
this is the figure that Joseph Wolf, one of the executives at Compass Interna-
tional, gives in Anchor Bay (2013b) and because this is the final figure Nowell
settles on. Muir (2000: 14) is the source for the film’s shooting schedule.
2 All box office figures and data refer to the US theatrical market and are taken from
Box Office Mojo.
3 For example, see Dika (1990); Rockoff (2002); Worland (2007); Cook (2016).
4 See Nowell (2011) for a more nuanced discussion of the teen slasher film and
genre theory.
5 For more about Carpenter’s career, see Muir (2000); Boulenger (2001); Conrich
(2019).
1 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
Halloween and the History
of Youth Horror Cinema

Halloween’s esteemed position in the history of youth horror cannot rely on

it being the first teen slasher film. Black Christmas can more legitimately
claim that title, not to mention the numerous proto-slasher films that predate
both Halloween and Black Christmas, like Psycho and The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre. Nor is Halloween the most influential slasher film; Friday
the 13th offered a template more closely followed and imitated by future
slasher films than that of Halloween. While John Carpenter’s pedigree lends
distinction to the film, Halloween is not the most highly regarded of Carpen-
ter’s films; judging by various fan and critical discourses, his 1982 remake
of The Thing likely holds that title.1
This chapter argues that Halloween holds a privileged place in the his-
tory of youth horror because it offers a compendium of youth horror’s past
while looking toward its future. The film’s plot is simple, adhering closely
to unities of time, space, and action, but it also distills aspects of youth hor-
ror that made it so vital and exciting for several decades. Leeder identifies
Halloween as ‘one of the earliest horror films to depict characters watch-
ing horror films’ (2014: 11), as youth horror’s past is remediated on televi-
sion with the broadcast of Doctor Dementia’s Halloween movie marathon
(see Figure 1.1). Scenes of preadolescents and teenagers watching 1950s-
era youth horror on television invite the viewer to consider Halloween in
the history of youth horror cinema. While Halloween does not utilize overt
intertextuality to draw attention to youth horror film conventions and/or
satirically comment on them, it does synthesize many facets of youth horror
into a potent mix.
Halloween is usually credited for kicking off the first teen slasher boom,
a trend that lasted until 1981, with the second cycle beginning in 1984.
But what often remains underexplored is how the film fits into the overall
evolution of horror and youth cinema.2 Peter Hutchings (2013: 198–199)
and Murray Leeder (2014: 73) have noted in passing the film’s relation-
ship with teenpics of the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter seeks to trace this
2 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer

Figure 1.1 Tommy and Lindsey watch ‘Doctor Dementia’

linage in more detail, contextualizing Halloween in the history of youth

horror. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, horror cinema was not associ-
ated with children’s entertainment. It was not until the 1940s that the horror
film courted youth audiences. The marketing of horror to teen audiences
exploded in the 1950s, the golden age of youth horror, and there has been a
significant relationship between youth and horror ever since.
This chapter looks at trends in youth horror that prefigured the thematic
preoccupations of Halloween. Capturing the essence of youth horror’s past,
Halloween is a revamped ‘weirdie,’ the name given to that odd hybridiza-
tion of horror and science fiction tailored for drive-in youth audiences of the
1950s (Doherty 2002: 119). Halloween also embodies the dark turn youth
horror took in the 1960s and 1970s. While synthesizing youth horror’s past,
Halloween also looks toward its future, taking cues from contemporary
blockbusters and signaling directions that both major studio and indepen-
dent youth horror would take in the 1980s and 1990s. With this in mind, this
chapter argues that, despite not being the first or most influential slasher
film, Halloween nevertheless holds a privileged place in the history of hor-
ror cinema based on how it takes the disparate thematic threads of youth
horror’s history and deftly ties them together in an economically precise
narrative. In the deceptively simple story of a killer stalking teenage victims
on Halloween night, Carpenter employs elements of youth horror’s past to
great effect. More specifically, one can detect vestiges of the killer robot and
atomic dread of 1950s sci-fi, the Gothic atmosphere of Hammer Films and
AIP’s Poe adaptations, the dark psychology and its attendant violence of
1960s horror (but without the gore), and the female leads meant to appeal to
growing female audiences in the 1970s. Further, this chapter maintains that
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 3
Halloween was among the first low-budget, independent teenpics to employ
blockbuster strategies that the major studios were in the process of adopting.
Slick marketing made Halloween a youth horror brand name perfect for the
multiplex era. As such, this chapter argues that Halloween is a culmination
of three decades of drive-in youth horror and the beginning of youth horror
during the age of the blockbuster.

A Brief Prehistory of Youth Horror

Horror cinema’s origins mainly come from three sources: Gothic literature;
the Grand Guignol Theatre founded in Paris in 1894, which showcased brief
‘playlets’ featuring gory violence; and traveling carnival sideshows which
often featured ‘freaks’ and ‘human oddities’ (Dixon 2010: 22; Skal 1993:
29–30). All these influences come together in the German film The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920), which tells the story of a carnival mounte-
bank (Werner Krauss) who commands a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to do
his evil bidding. Caligari was a product of German Expressionism, an artis-
tic movement fueled by the Gothic’s dark, symbolic settings and twisted
psychology. When it was released in the US in 1921, Caligari was a criti-
cal sensation, influencing American cinema throughout the 1920s, specifi-
cally the dark, dramatic films featuring actor Lon Chaney, who often played
grotesque, deformed, or mutilated characters in films like Phantom of the
Opera (Julian, 1925) and The Unknown (Browning, 1927). Decades later,
Chaney became known as the first horror film star, but when his films were
released, he ‘was known as a talented character actor who specialized in
weird parts’ because horror did not exist as a recognizable film genre in the
1920s (Benshoff 2014: 218). At that time, horror film was in its ‘experimen-
tal stage, during which its conventions are isolated and established’ (Schatz
1981: 37 italics in the original).
These films were not made with the specific intention of attracting youth
audiences, nor did they feature youths in prominent roles. Shary notes,
‘A tradition of movies related to the supernatural goes back to the earliest
days of cinema, although rarely did these films address teenagers’ (2014:
187). After Caligari, Expressionist cinema in Germany continued to explore
the fantastic, with the most celebrated of these films being the poetic vam-
pire tale Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) and Metropolis (Lang, 1927), a dysto-
pian fable. These films examined adult issues like unhappy marriages and
dehumanization in a mechanized society. In the US, the ‘new morality’ of
the Jazz Age emphasized ‘cynicism’ and ‘sexual license’ (Cook 2016: 134),
and dark melodramas featuring Chaney, often playing twisted and deformed
characters, reflected the traumatic aftermath of World War I (Skal 1993:
65–68). There was a ‘general dearth of films about adolescence’ (Shary
4 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
2005: 7). Whenever young people appeared in these films, the characters
‘were designed to exploit adult fears about youth rather than appeal to real
youth audiences’ (6).
This trend continued in 1931 with the birth of the Classical horror film.
Genres enter their ‘classic stage’ when their ‘conventions reach their “equi-
librium” and are mutually understood by artist and audience’ (Schatz 1981:
37). Universal scored at the box office with Dracula (Browning, 1931)
and Frankenstein (Whale, 1931) while Paramount’s release of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931) received critical praise and won a Best
Actor Oscar for Frederic March as the titular split personality. These films
solidified horror cinema’s style, conventions, and themes. As the US was
in the depths of the Great Depression and expendable money was scarce,
Hollywood’s strategy was to appeal to the broadest audience possible. The
vertically integrated Hollywood studio system was firmly established by the
1930s, mass-producing films to play in theaters they owned in downtown
urban areas. During this time, ‘Film studios did not feel compelled to make
products aimed at children, who generally had no income for entertainment,
and who could be assumed to enjoy the same films their parents enjoyed’
(Shary 2005: 5).
Universal helped keep the habit of movie-going afloat during the Great
Depression by making horror movies that appealed to the whole family. As
one of the minor studios, Universal did not own a ‘chain of downtown first-
run theaters and was forced to concentrate its production and distribution
efforts on subsequent-run houses in suburban and rural areas’ (Cook 2016:
190), making it imperative for them to produce films for the whole family.
The studio’s horror films were its biggest hits of the decade, and newspapers
gave accounts of entire families attending Frankenstein (Browning 2014:
232), with adults too riveted to notice their children were terrified. Uni-
versal’s first wave of horror films lasted from 1931 to 1936, when Joseph
Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), began to so
strictly enforce the Code that making horror films was nearly impossible.3
Horror was not dormant for long, however, and it was during the second
wave of Universal’s horror films that the sleeping giant of youth horror
began to awake. In 1938, an internal review of the PCA conducted by Fran-
cis C. Harmon, the PCA’s chief vice president, found that Breen had over-
extended his authority, and ‘Breen’s position was comparatively weakened’
(Vasey 1997: 223). Around the same time, a nation-wide double-bill re-
release of Dracula and Frankenstein netted Universal half a million dollars
(Weaver et al. 2007: 183). With Breen’s strict approach now perceived as a
liability that would hamper big box office from horror films (Bernard 2014:
43), it was not surprising that the Code was loosened. This relaxed regula-
tion likely inspired Universal to begin production on Son of Frankenstein
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 5
(Lee, 1939), their third Frankenstein film. Son does not have the low-key,
moody, and Expressionistic atmospherics of Universal’s previous horror
films. This time around, the mad scientist (Basil Rathbone) has a curly-
haired toddler son, Peter (Donnie Dunagan), who offers cute comic relief.
Peter is one of very few preadolescents featured in 1930s horror cinema.
Son was indicative of the direction Universal would take with horror dur-
ing the 1940s. Rick Worland explains that while ‘Frankenstein et al. had
been pitched to adults, the sequels were increasingly aimed at juvenile audi-
ences’ (2007: 69). The difference between the 1930s version of The Mummy
(Freund, 1932) and 1940s The Mummy’s Hand (Cabanne, 1940) offers an
example. The first film tells a story of exotic danger, as the resurrected
Imhotep (Boris Karloff) seeks to win the love of an Egyptian woman (Zita
Johann) whom he believes is his resurrected lover. The Mummy’s Hand is
a proto-Indiana Jones tale about a group of adventurous archeologists on
an expedition to Egypt running afoul of an evil cult in control of a mind-
less mummy, a story ‘tailor-made for the action house trade’ (Weaver et al.
2007: 229). Films of this type were similar to action serials from Poverty
Row studios being produced at the same time for ‘children and juveniles
for Saturday matinee shows’ (Tzioumakis 2017: 69). While there is a ‘per-
ceived aesthetic decline of the horror in the 1940s’ (Worland 2007: 71),
it would be a mistake to write off all 1940s horror as juvenile fare, as the
decade did produce several sophisticated horror films.4 However, Univer-
sal’s ‘kiddie-oriented fright flick[s]’ like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
(Neill, 1943), House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944), and House of Dracula
(Kenton, 1945) demonstrated that youth horror had gained a toehold in the
film industry (Weaver et al. 2007: 509).

1950s: Birth of Youth Horror

The 1950s was a transformative decade for the film industry that saw a huge
shift in audience demographics. After a peak year in 1946, movie attendance
began dropping dramatically and would continue to do so until the early
1970s (Cook 2016: 334–335). However, one demographic began attending
the movies in droves: teenagers. As the post-World War II economy strength-
ened in the early 1950s, Americans began leaving the city and moving to
the suburbs, where affordable houses were plenty. Living outside the cities,
many homeowners now had to commute to work, so car sales skyrocketed,
leading to the prevalence of car culture. During this time, ‘Teenagers began
buying (or at least driving) cars’ and tended to meet up with other friends in
cars and ‘congregate around a single hangout’ (Shary 2005: 17). One of the
most prominent hangouts for teens in the 1950s was the drive-in movie the-
ater, an exhibition venue that exploded in popularity between 1946 and 1953
6 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
when 2,976 drive-in theaters opened in the US (Davis 2012: 36). The drive-
in offered teens a dark space to engage in a variety of activities, and the
running time of the films—most drive-ins offered double bills—gave teens
a good excuse for being gone for three or four hours. The youth market
became the most significant audience for the movies in the 1950s, eventu-
ally making up 52.6 percent of movie-goers (39).
When young people became the dominant movie-going demographic,
major studios attempted to tap into this audience through the production of
several science fiction films. The genre had proven itself to be the ‘preferred
fantasy form’ of young audiences in the early 1950s (Doherty 2002: 117).
Thomas Doherty argues that sci-fi films of this era possessed a potent sub-
text: fear of the hydrogen bomb. With the first H-Bomb being tested on 1
November 1952, atomic dread was the ‘essential subject’ of sci-fi teenpics
(ibid.). Major studios turned to sci-fi in hopes of securing profits during
uncertain times as the film industry underwent significant reconfiguration.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Paramount, et al. in 1948
stripped the vertically integrated Hollywood studios of their theaters, mak-
ing it prudent for major studios, since they no longer had guaranteed theat-
rical prospects, to roll back production and ‘[focus] on maximizing profits
through fewer and costlier releases’ (Heffernan 2004: 5). Another method
of increasing revenues was the implementation of 3-D technology, which
paired well with sci-fi’s emphasis on special effects. John Carpenter cites
Universal’s It Came from Outer Space (Arnold, 1953), one of the films from
this cycle, as sparking his interest in filmmaking (Anchor Bay 2013a).
Unfortunately for the majors, their attempt to tap into the youth audi-
ence had mixed results. The majors still employed the Depression-era
strategy of appealing to ‘a crossover audience of adults, adolescents, and
kids’ (Doherty 2002: 115). Warner Bros.’ creepy House of Wax (De Toth,
1953) would interest youth audiences, but the film’s 3-D effects demanded
that patrons dish out extra money for a ticket, which may have been a
turn-off for youth audiences with less disposable income. It became clear
by the mid-1950s that the major studios, with crossover films meant for
both young people and adults, were not equipped to cater to the needs of
an ever-increasing youth audience. In 1956, an article in Variety diagnosed
that ‘the major studios were not doing enough’ to reach youth audiences
(Davis 2012: 39), a conclusion seemingly corroborated that year when
MGM’s Forbidden Planet, ‘a Freudian extraterrestrial update of The Tem-
pest labeled “Space Patrol” for adults’ (Doherty 2002: 118), performed
below studio expectations.
It could be that the majors were not willing to get as bizarre, shocking, and
outrageous enough for young people, as teen audiences demonstrated a pref-
erence for ‘weirdies,’ a name trade papers gave to films for youth audiences
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 7
that could be classified as horror, science fiction, or a strange hybrid of both
(119). At this time, a slew of independent producers and their ‘weirdies’
stormed the youth film marketplace. One of these independents was AIP, a
company that owed a great deal of its success to ‘[taking] teenage subculture
on its own terms’ (132). The horror teenpics produced by AIP and other inde-
pendents often displayed a ‘deliberate alienation of the older audience’ in the
ways they ‘began to stretch the permissible limits of violence and gore’ (Hef-
fernan 2004: 68). This testing of the boundaries was enabled by the Supreme
Court decision in Joseph Burstyn v. Wilson, Commissioner of New York (also
known as ‘The Miracle Case’) in 1952, which extended First Amendment
protections to movies for the first time (Draper 1999: 187).
By the mid-1950s, weirdies dominated the teenpic box office, with 1957
being a banner year for youth horror. The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher,
1957), produced in the UK by Hammer Films and distributed in the US
by Warner Bros., was a radical retelling of the story of Frankenstein and
his creation—played respectively by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee,
future horror icons—making Dr. Frankenstein ‘ruthless, sadistic, and odi-
ously suave’ and loading the film with a generous amount of blood and
gore (Heffernan 2004: 49). Shot on a $270,000 budget, the film was a hit
for Warner Bros. in the US, grossing around $2 million by the end of 1957
(Doherty 2002: 115). Along with AIP’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Fowler,
1957), Curse opened the floodgates for youth horror, with 52 horror films
produced in 1957 and 75 in 1958 (122). With teens accounting for over
half the movie-going population, movies featuring monsters who embodied
feelings of ‘psychological dislocation and social estrangement’ with which
teens ‘[felt] a kinship’ ruled the box office (119). Among independents and
companies from outside the US, Hammer continued to acknowledge this
kinship with films like The Brides of Dracula (Fisher, 1960) which depicted
vampirism as ‘a troublesome youth cult’ threatening to ‘[upend] the world
of adult morality’ (Williamson 2005: 79).
As horror teenpics took over the box office, horror took over the home
via television. Studios realized television offered a potentially lucrative
revenue stream. Since television networks needed content to fill airtime,
studios began leasing feature films from their archives. In 1957, Universal,
the king of monster movies in the studio era, leased 550 pre-1948 titles
to Screen Gems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, for $20 million
(Heffernan 2004: 156). Screen Gems assembled 52 of Universal’s horror
films and sold them to affiliates in a package titled ‘Shock Pictures.’ Tele-
vision markets across the US aired these ‘Shock’ films around Halloween
of 1957 and created a ratings bonanza (Doherty 2002: 121), inspiring other
distributors to lease their horror catalogs for broadcast. Screen Gems fol-
lowed up with a ‘Son of Shock’ package (Heffernan 2004: 156). Dracula
8 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
and the Frankenstein monster were remediated as kiddie icons in the late
1950s. According to Allan Fromme, an author of parenting books popular
in the 1950s and 1960s, television made horror films safe for children; he
assured children that horror movies on TV will only ‘provide a smile with
your milk and cookies at bedtime’ (Doherty 2002: 121). Also making hor-
ror feel safer were a bevy of horror hosts, like Ghoulardi in Cleveland and
Vampira in Los Angeles, who would introduce the films and pop in during
the commercials with jokes. The year after the ‘Shock’ films debuted on
television, Warren Publishing released the first issue of Famous Monsters
of Filmland, a magazine edited by fantasy film memorabilia collector For-
rest J. Ackerman, known affectionately as ‘Uncle Forry’ to his youthful
readers, one of which was young John Carpenter (Boulenger 2001: 65). At
the end of the 1950s, youth horror was in full bloom, with magazines like
Famous Monsters on newsstands, a cavalcade of horror films on television,
and movies by foreign producers like Hammer and US independents like
AIP and William Castle, who made a sensation with his gimmick-riddled
spookhouse films like House on Haunted Hill (1959), populating theaters
and drive-ins.

1960s: Youth Horror Grows Up

Like youth horror, Alfred Hitchcock ruled at the box office, with star-stud-
ded blockbusters like Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955),
and on television, with his hit series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which
debuted in 1955. Four years later, Hitchcock brought film and television
together, producing a feature film that would be shot quickly and cheaply
with a television crew. The director drew from the fertile terrain of youth
horror. He purchased the rights to Robert Bloch’s best-selling 1959 novel
Psycho, which was based on the crimes of Ed Gein, a murderer and necro-
philiac whose crimes stunned the world earlier that decade. The adaptation
veered in a youth-oriented direction, as Gein-inspired killer Norman Bates
was transformed from a balding, overweight middle-aged man to a good-
looking young man (Anthony Perkins). Rolled out with ‘a sophisticated ad
campaign, a high-dollar version of the teasing come-ons beloved by AIP
and William Castle’ (Worland 2007: 86), Psycho was a smash at the box
office. Although critics were initially reluctant to embrace the film (Jan-
covich 1996: 220), Psycho’s critical reputation grew over several years.
Wood cites Psycho as a turning point in American horror cinema, when the
monster was no longer foreign and supernatural, but rather was ‘American
and familial’ (1979a: 19). Scholars like Clover would eventually declare
Psycho ‘the immediate ancestor of the slasher film’ (2015: 74). Though
Norman Bates prefigures the human monsters of the teen slasher, there is
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 9
no direct line from Psycho to Halloween because Hitchcock’s film did not
kick off a string of similar slashers with killers stalking teenage victims
(Nowell 2011: 58). Hitchcock’s film did inspire a handful of adult-oriented
thrillers like The Innocents (Clayton, 1961), Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? (Aldrich, 1962), and The Haunting (Wise, 1963) from the majors.
Films that featured evil children like The Bad Seed (LeRoy, 1956), which
predated Psycho, and Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960) were from an
adult point of view, reflecting parental anxiety over ‘what their children
might become’ (Paul 1994: 277). Even William Castle, the king of gim-
micky kiddie horror, directed several features in the 1960s that were more
adult-oriented knock-offs of Psycho. For the most part, however, ‘major
Hollywood studios remained aloof from horror’ for much of the 1960s
(Worland 2007: 90).
Filling this void, independently produced horror teenpics grew more
sophisticated, psychological, and brutal. Andrew Tudor claims that the
1960s is when horror cinema began to explore the ‘fear of ourselves and of
the ill-understood and the dangerous forces that lurk within us’ (Tudor 1989:
217). The career of industrious teenpic director Roger Corman reflects this
transition. Working fast and cheap, Corman directed over 20 films between
1955 and 1959. In 1960, AIP wanted to differentiate its films from other
low-budget teenpics. Knowing Corman could get the most out of a marginal
increase in money and time, they tapped him to adapt an Edgar Allan Poe
short story from the public domain into a color film in CinemaScope. The
result was House of Usher starring Vincent Price, whose salary made up a
third of the budget (Gray 2004: 72). AIP was nervous that the film did not
feature a monster, but Corman assured them that the family’s house was the
monster (71), a sign that Corman aimed to explore internal, not external
struggles. The film was a hit, leading to a series of Corman-directed Poe
films for AIP, during which Corman’s technique evolved as he used ‘overt
symbolism, stylized color, and flashback narrative structure’ to explore inner
mindscapes (Heffernan 2004: 112). Horror teenpics also became more vio-
lent. AIP scored another hit when they handled US distribution for the Ital-
ian-made Black Sunday (Bava, 1960), a film that begins with a spike-filled
mask being hammered onto the face of a young witch played by Barbara
Steele, who quickly became an international star.5 Black Sunday’s director,
Mario Bava, would later follow up with Blood and Black Lace (1963), the
story of a masked killer picking off fashion models in grotesque ways. Even
more graphic were the ultra-low-budget films of director Herschell Gordon
Lewis, who ushered in the era of the gore film with Blood Feast (1963),
which featured a cannibalistic Egyptian caterer (Mal Arnold) dismember-
ing bodies in vividly graphic ways. About a year later, the Supreme Court’s
decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) offered protections for theater owners
10 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
from protests or threats from local authorities (Lewis 2000: 129), giving
exhibitors license to screen films with graphic content that could not be
aired on television.
1968 was a key year for youth horror with the release of Night of the Liv-
ing Dead, directed by George A. Romero, and Rosemary’s Baby, directed by
Roman Polanski. The films encapsulate the spectrum of youth horror of the
upcoming decade. Shot in rural Pennsylvania on a shoestring budget, Night
tells the story of a small group of survivors trapped in a farmhouse by flesh-
eating zombies. Romero explores horror’s capacity for sociological allegory
as he makes the group metaphorical of the United States tearing itself apart
during a time of social upheaval due to various tremors of countercultural
revolt. In crafting his allegory, Romero utilized the extreme gore of films
like Blood Feast featuring shots of zombies devouring human flesh that
allegedly horrified a theater full of children when it screened at a matinee
show in Chicago (Heffernan 2004: 213). Less rough around the edges than
Night was Rosemary’s Baby, which tells the story of a woman (Mia Farrow)
who is impregnated with the spawn of Satan. Hutchings argues that hor-
ror cinema histories often deemphasize Rosemary’s Baby because its ‘high
production values’ strip it of the ‘authenticity and social engagement’ of a
film like Night (2014a: 49). However, the film’s big-budget status as a Para-
mount production is one reason it is significant. With the film industry in
deep recession, studios pursued projects with cross-promotional possibili-
ties, such as a tie-in with a book, play, or television show (Cook 2000: 27).
Rosemary’s Baby was an adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-selling novel, giving
it a ‘pre-sold’ element (Hutchings 2014a: 51). The film’s marketing was
sleek and tasteful. The poster featured the austere image of a baby carriage
in profile on a mountaintop against a green sky. Behind, a blow-up of Mia
Farrow’s profile lies horizontally, faintly appearing through the mist. The
film’s marketing prefigures the ‘high concept’ approach that would grow
more prominent in Hollywood. The ideal high concept film can ‘be sold in
a single sentence and [has] potential to be marketed through stars and mer-
chandising tie-ins’ (Wyatt 1994: 7–8). High concept is ‘the look, the hook,
and the book. The look of the images, the marketing hooks, and the reduced
narratives’ (22). The advertising of Rosemary’s Baby, when paired with its
clear hook (Satan has a child) and novel tie-in, employs the high concept
approach. Rosemary’s Baby may differ from the low-budget Night, but the
films share one crucial element: they both feature a monstrous child—com-
pare the birth of Satan’s child to the preteen girl (Kyra Schon) in Night
who, when resurrected, kills and eats her parents—that ruptures the status
quo. The power of both sides of the horror film spectrum is filtered through
images of vicious youths.
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 11
1970s: Ratings and Revisions
Two changes significantly altered the 1970s youth horror film market. One
was the introduction of the ratings system created by the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA). The system introduced an R rating that
limited the viewership to those above 17 years old and allowed more vio-
lence and nudity. The MPAA ostensibly adopted this system to help parents
determine which films were appropriate for children. Ideally, the ratings
system could help avoid the type of the confusion theater owners experi-
enced when booking Night of the Living Dead for an afternoon matinee
(Heffernan 2004: 213), making sure certain films with mature content are
clearly marked for exhibitors and parents. However, MPAA-member stu-
dios were less concerned with ‘protecting children’ and more concerned
with using the ratings system to control ‘participation in the marketplace’
(Lewis 2000: 150). The system enabled the major studios to offer a ‘wide[r]
range of product lines’ (151), immediately latching onto ‘sensationalist
material they had previously left to independents like AIP’ (Maltby 2003:
179). As long as a major studio film kept sensationalistic material within
certain parameters, it could obtain an R rating ensuring its easy circulation
through the theatrical marketplace (Lewis 2000: 151).
The ratings system was an efficient mode of industry self-regulation,
wherein the studios set their own intentionally vague standards for what
constituted an R rating. This system cleared the way for successes like War-
ner Bros.’ horror blockbuster The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), a demonic-
possession movie with graphic content. The ratings system also allowed
MPAA-member studios ‘to ghettoize independently produced and distrib-
uted films’ by branding any film with violence and/or nudity that MPAA
members deemed excessive with an X rating, which would severely limit
the number of theaters that would screen the film (Lewis 2000: 173). Such
was the case with Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), the brutal story
of parents taking revenge on the criminals who raped and murdered their
daughter. Sean Cunningham, the film’s producer, and Wes Craven, the
director, fought with the MPAA but could not come to an agreement on an
R rated cut, as the MPAA had little investment in the success or failure of a
low-budget independent (171).
Regardless, Craven’s film still ‘performed well on the exploitation cir-
cuit’ (Nowell 2011: 122), showing that there was room for occasional suc-
cess in the ghetto of the American film market. For example, The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre, a low-budget independent, ended up being ‘one of
the twenty highest grossing films’ of 1974 (Cook 2007: 132). One of the
most-often noted features of the film is its lack of gore, despite the title’s
12 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
sensationalistic come-on. Hoping for a rating that would allow young audi-
ences to see the film, director Tobe Hooper consulted with the MPAA for
advice on how to best edit violent sequences to receive a PG rating (Worland
2007: 298n). While he did not get the PG rating, the success of Hooper’s
film suggests that a low-budget horror film that played by the rules of the
MPAA-member studios in terms of graphic content could be a hit. Accord-
ingly, independent producers in the mid-1970s began shifting away from
extreme violence and nudity in hopes of capturing larger audiences (Nowell
2011: 96).
The second change in the industry occurred when shifting gender dynam-
ics led to the revision of ‘the Peter Pan Syndrome,’ which, in turn, led to the
production of Black Christmas, the first teen slasher. Coined by AIP bosses
Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson during the rise of the weirdie, the formula
hypothesizes that studios will attract their ‘greatest audience’ by ‘zero[ing]
in on the 19-year-old male’ (Doherty 2002: 128). While Arkoff and Nich-
olson were right to focus on youth audiences—in 1968, 16–24-year-olds
made up 48 percent of film audiences (Nowell 2011: 64)—they did not
anticipate how important the female contingent of the youth film market
would be. Love Story (Hiller, 1970) and The Way We Were (Pollack, 1973)
were two of the biggest hits of the early 1970s, encouraging production
companies—especially independents—to specifically ‘secure the patron-
age of young women’ who flocked to these films (70–71). With these
changes in mind, when Canadian filmmakers convened in 1974 in hopes
of breaking into the American market, they ‘combined the distinguishing
elements’ of four recent American hits: The Exorcist, American Graffiti
(Lucas, 1973), The Way We Were, and Magnum Force (Post, 1973) (66).
The Exorcist influenced them to make a horror film and populate it with
teenage character types seen in American Graffiti. A turbulent romance
was lifted from The Way We Were, and the gang of vigilantes in Magnum
Force inspired the villain, an unseen killer. All these elements added up
to Black Christmas, a film about a psychopath hiding in the attic of a col-
lege sorority house and picking off victims during the Christmas holiday.
Despite the synthesis of these elements, Black Christmas was not a hit. The
film’s 1974 Canadian release showed promise, but in the US, the film fared
poorly when released by Warner Bros. during the Christmas season (76).
The film’s modest success in Canada convinced Warner to give it another
try with a platform release in the summer of 1975. Again, the film’s box
office faltered, and Warner withdrew it from circulation before the Christ-
mas holiday (77).
Even though it was not a hit, Black Christmas provided a template
for Halloween that Yablans, Carpenter, and Hill would follow, but only
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 13
after making some changes to the type of female characters their film
would feature. These revisions were informed by successful youth films
released after Black Christmas. One change was in the demographics
of the victim group, switching out the ‘careerist university students’ of
Black Christmas with ‘small-town teenage girls’ (84). Nowell argues that
two films encouraged this change. One was The Pom Pom Girls (Ruben,
1976), a low-budget film about a group of small-town high schoolers
enjoying some summertime fun. The Pom Pom Girls was produced and
released by the independent studio Crown International. In overseeing
the production of the film, Crown International production executive
Marilyn Tenser had an approach that ran counter to AIP’s Peter Pan Syn-
drome, claiming that female youths ‘influence our box office’ and ‘are
the ones that decide what movie a couple is going to see’ (qtd. in Nowell
2011: 86). Tenser’s philosophy paid off as The Pom Pom Girls performed
well at the box office, garnering $4.3 million in rentals, a sizeable figure
for a small independent like Crown (Nowell 2011: 87). The second film
that, according to Nowell, influenced Halloween’s focus on female teen-
agers in a small-town high school setting was Carrie (De Palma, 1976),
an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a shy, telekinetic girl (Sissy
Spacek) driven to murder by the bullying of her cruel classmates. An
independent production distributed by United Artists, Carrie garnered
big box office dollars, rave critical reviews, and Oscar-nominations for
its two female leads, Spacek and Piper Laurie (91). Taken together, the
success of The Pom Pom Girls and Carrie was a testament to the prof-
itability of teen films that featured ‘small-town female protagonists in
film-types that were thought to be male-oriented’ like the teen comedy
and the horror film (89).
Following revisions to the Peter Pan Syndrome, the conceptualization
of Halloween began by foregrounding its female characters. Yablans’s
original title for the film—‘The Babysitter Murders’—suggests the film’s
female-centric approach. Since the development of the female main charac-
ters was deemed ‘so important to Halloween’s commercial prospects’ (83),
Hill wrote the dialogue for Laurie, Annie, and Lynda, the idea being that a
female writer would achieve a ring of feminine authenticity and produce
compelling female characters. To this end, Hill carefully crafted three arche-
typal teenage girls: the brainy (Laurie), the brash (Annie), and the beauti-
ful (Lynda) (see Figure 1.2). Halloween inarguably emphasizes the female
teenage perspective over the male. Laurie, Annie, and Lynda are much more
developed as characters than their counterparts. Lynda’s boyfriend Bob, the
only male character in the victim group, is by far the least developed of the
film’s teen characters.
14 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer

Figure 1.2 Brainy, brash, and beautiful: The girls of Halloween

Photo courtesy of Kim Gottlieb-Walker, www.Lenswoman, ‘On Set with John Carpenter’

Halloween: A Synthesis of Youth Horror

While the film plays to current trends in youth horror by courting the cov-
eted female demographic, it also builds upon youth horror’s past. The idea
of setting the film on Halloween affords the film endless opportunities to
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 15
explore connections between the holiday and youth culture, a relationship
with a darker dimension than Bob Clark could conjure between Christmas
and youth in Black Christmas. Halloween myths often find youths in dan-
ger of abuse from adults—for instance, urban legends of adults handing
out candy with razors hidden inside; other times, youths are the ones pos-
ing a threat toward adults or other children during the carnivalesque holi-
day.6 Most relevant to this discussion of youth and the Halloween holiday,
however, is the unique relationship between the holiday and entertainment
media. The Halloween holiday ‘supports, and is supported by, a big chunk
of the entertainment industry. . . . Its rituals are more those of media audi-
ences than those of communities interrogating their cohesiveness and hos-
pitality’ (Mathijs 2009). This is the case in the film, as Laurie, Tommy, and
Lindsey structure their Halloween night around Doctor Dementia’s movie
marathon, while Haddonfield’s streets are mostly silent with very little com-
munal activity. Halloween’s depiction of the connection between Hallow-
een and media rituals opens a portal to youth horror’s past, revealing some
surprising connections between Carpenter’s film and the weirdies of the
drive-in era.
Doctor Dementia’s broadcast of The Thing from Another World and For-
bidden Planet points to a number of subtle sci-fi elements in Halloween
that demonstrate its familial connection to the weirdies. This kinship is
evident in Michael Myers, Halloween’s masked madman, who appears to
be a new model of sci-fi’s killer robot. Michael’s blank white face mask
makes him look artificial, like a mannequin whose flesh color has not been
painted on. As he glides in and out of the shadows, Michael’s movements
are unnervingly mechanical in their precision. Leeder observes that there
is ‘something robotic about Michael’ and notes that Carpenter’s vision
of Michael was inspired by the deadly robotic gunslinger played by Yul
Brynner in Westworld (Crichton, 1973), a sci-fi thriller about killer robots
run amuck in a futuristic theme park (2014: 52). Accentuating Michael’s
robotic nature is Carpenter’s electronic score, which often accompanies his
movements (55n). For instance, when Michael attempts to strangle a nurse
(Nancy Stevens) during his escape from custody at Smith’s Grove Sani-
tarium, his actions are intensified by a sting from Carpenter’s score that
sounds like steam shooting out of the exhaust pipe of a futuristic machine.
As the nurse nervously waits in the driver’s seat of the station wagon that
has come to transport Michael to court to stand trial as an adult, Michael
jumps onto the roof. She rolls down the window, and Michael’s arm, syn-
chronized with Carpenter’s electronic hiss, shoots into the window like a
piston and grabs her throat. Later, when a seemingly-dead Michael lying on
the floor mechanically sits up and turns his head to lock Laurie in his sights,
the movement is emphasized by a single ominous note of Carpenter’s
16 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
score.7 When Tommy sees Michael carrying Annie’s dead body into the
Wallace residence, spaceship noises from Forbidden Planet emanate from
the television, creating an auditory metonymic chain connecting Michael
and sci-fi (ibid.). Michael also transubstantiates atomic dread of the 1950s-
era weirdies. Earlier in his career, Carpenter dipped into the realm of weir-
die sci-fi with his first feature-length film, Dark Star (1974), a pitch-black
comedy about a spaceship carrying an atomic bomb that gains sentience
with grave consequences.8 Wood argues that ‘the unkillable and ultimately
inexplicable monsters’ of the slasher film whose ‘mysterious and ter-
rible destructive force we can neither destroy, nor communicate with, nor
understand’ embody the ‘nuclear anxiety’ of the Cold War that continued
from the 1950s into the 1980s (1986: 168). References to The Thing from
Another World and Forbidden Planet make this connection more explicit
in Halloween than it is in any other slasher film.
Halloween’s connections to youth horror of the drive-in era are more
obvious but no less rich. If Halloween’s sci-fi elements are embodied
by Michael, many of its horror tropes are present in Michael’s nemesis,
Dr. Loomis. By casting Donald Pleasence as Loomis, Carpenter taps into the
Gothic atmosphere of Hammer pictures. The Hammer connection is clear
in the actors Carpenter initially hoped to cast. His first choice was Peter
Cushing, a Hammer icon who portrayed Victor Frankenstein and Professor
Van Helsing, among others for the studio. When Cushing turned down the
role, Carpenter turned to Christopher Lee, another Hammer icon who was
known for his portrayals of the Frankenstein monster, Count Dracula, and
others. After Lee rejected the role, Carpenter’s third choice was Donald
Pleasence, perhaps best known as James Bond arch-villain Blofeld. The
casting of Pleasence was crucial to the production, as evidenced by his
$20,000 salary out of the film’s $320,000 budget (Anchor Bay 2013b).9 He
was the film’s most seasoned, well-known actor. Pleasence’s English accent
and ‘old world’ presence call back not only to Hammer horror, but also Cor-
man’s Poe adaptations with Vincent Price.
In keeping with the Gothic atmosphere of Corman’s Poe movies,
Pleasence’s most memorable and iconic scene in Halloween takes place
when Loomis and Sheriff Brackett venture into the dilapidated Myers house
on Halloween night. Standing in the darkness, Loomis tells Brackett about
his first encounter with Michael. The Myers house is one of the first of the
slasher film’s ‘Terrible Places,’ a location cursed by past trauma. The ‘Ter-
rible Place’ of the slasher film is an update of the ruined castles of Gothic
literature like the one seen in Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto,
first published in 1794, which, like the Myers house, is haunted by incestu-
ous trauma.10 As Carpenter generously lays on the atmosphere, the Myers
house becomes a suburban stand-in for a castle from a Hammer film, one
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 17
of Corman’s AIP Poe pictures, or a William Castle spook show. As a moody
descending four-note phrase from Carpenter’s score plays, Loomis recalls:

I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and
the blackest eyes . . . the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach
him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I real-
ized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.
(see Figure 1.3)

Long-time Fangoria magazine editor Tony Timpone cites the ‘camp fac-
tor’ added by Pleasence’s performance as one of Halloween’s most appeal-
ing aspects (Anchor Bay 2013b), suggesting Loomis is a descendant of the
‘campy’ and ‘hammy’ mad scientists of youth cinema’s past (Mathijs and
Sexton 2011: 82–83). Several slashers that followed Halloween feature a
veteran actor from Hollywood’s past that lends them a patina of respect-
ability (Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th, Ben Johnson in Terror Train, Far-
ley Granger in The Prowler [Zito, 1981]), but none of these veteran actors
recall youth horror’s past like Pleasence’s Loomis, especially considering
the relationship between Loomis and Michael.
Doppelgangers have populated horror since its literary roots, but the
dichotomy between scientific creator and monstrous creation represented
by Loomis/Michael in Halloween has its antecedents in two key films
in youth horror history. One is Curse of Frankenstein. As the ostensible
‘hero’ of the film, Loomis may seem far from Cushing’s ruthless portrayal
of Victor Frankenstein, but there is a certain malevolence to Loomis—he

Figure 1.3 Loomis in the spookhouse

18 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
acknowledges that he must appear to be ‘a very sinister doctor’—that sug-
gests Loomis’s ‘treatment’ of Michael is partially to blame for Michael’s
behavior. Halloween’s other antecedent is AIP’s hit weirdie, I Was a Teen-
age Werewolf. In this film, Tony (Michael Landon), an alienated teenager,
goes to ‘headshrinker’ Dr. Carver (Whit Bissell) looking for a way to
control his anger. Carver has a well-intended but insane goal to send the
human race ‘to its early beginnings’ and inadvertently transforms Tony
into a werewolf. The parallels with Halloween are clear. Before visiting
Carver, Tony is not necessarily evil; bullying from his peers makes him
aggressive. Michael’s murder of his sister is certainly more horrifying
than Tony’s bursts of rage, but when Michael’s father unmasks him after
the murder, he does not look maniacal but confused, as if he has no com-
prehension of what he has done. Ultimately, both Tony and Michael sub-
mit to the care of psychologists and emerge more monstrous than before.
Regardless of whether Loomis is to blame for Michael’s condition, the
thematic threads of untrustworthy science and misguided misfit monsters
connect Halloween with the weirdies.
While Halloween draws from the 1950s era, it also demonstrates youth
cinema’s maturity in the 1960s and 1970s. As youth films go, Halloween
often feels old and wizened. Contributing to this air of maturity is the film’s
references to Psycho, a film that attempted to ‘[confer] respectability on the
horror film’ and ‘[attract] audiences who would never have gone to see a
Hammer film’ (Marriott and Newman 2010: 100). Leeder argues that Hal-
loween ‘clearly [exalts] Hitchcock’s masterpiece as an ur-text’ (2014: 10),
drawing from the film’s twisted psychology in its depiction of a child from
an antiseptic suburban environment turned murderer. The influence of other
dark youth horror films released after Psycho are pronounced in Hallow-
een, ranging from the somber ghosts of The Innocents, which inspired the
disquieting images of Michael silently staring at Laurie as he stalks her
(Zinoman 2011: 182), to the paranoiac panoramas and bombastic scores of
Italian horror films like Deep Red (Argento, 1975) and Suspiria (Argento,
1977) (Anchor Bay 2013a; ‘Halloween’ 1990: 36).
One component of the darker youth horror that did not carry over to Hal-
loween, however, was gore. Danny Peary describes Halloween as a synthe-
sis of Hitchcock, Val Lewton, William Castle, and the ‘graphic violence’ of
post-Night of the Living Dead horror (1981: 123). The last entry on Peary’s
list is baffling as the film contains little graphic violence and no gore. Actu-
ally, in the years following Halloween’s release, critics praised the film
for its restraint (Nowell 2011: 96). Additionally, Carpenter and Hill later
claimed that the film’s lack of blood was a conscious artistic decision. On
a 1994 commentary track, Hill explains, ‘We tried to do this with really
good taste,’ and Carpenter is satisfied that there is ‘almost no onscreen,
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 19

Figure 1.4 Violence ‘in really good taste’: Annie’s shadowy death

overt violence in the film’ (quoted in Anchor Bay 2013a) (see Figure 1.4).
However, Hill’s and Carpenter’s comments elide the economic concerns
that informed the decision to downplay gore and violence, as Yablans and
Akkad wanted to avoid trouble that films like Last House on the Left had
when they clashed with the MPAA (Nowell 2011: 95). The independents
were aware that the X rating would virtually eliminate any chance that the
film would return a profit, and ‘Yablans was part of the sea change sweeping
the American independent sector’ that favored content compatible with the
ground established by the MPAA (Nowell 2011: 96). Playing by the rules
paid off for Halloween. The film ended up being the tenth highest grossing
film of 1978 and was the only independently distributed film in the top ten
highest grossers that year.
The ratings system gave control of the marketplace to the major MPAA-
member studios and distributors and was buttressed by Supreme Court deci-
sions in anti-obscenity cases like Miller v. California (1973) which—unlike
Jacobellis v. Ohio—made theatrical venues more vulnerable to local cen-
sorship and protest (Lewis 2000: 262–264). Decisions in the Paramount
Decree, ‘The Miracle Case,’ and Jacobellis v. Ohio set the stage for youth
cinema: the first brought about its necessity from a business standpoint by
opening up a vacuum in the market for youth films, the second assured
freedom of expression and relaxed regulatory restrictions, and the third
protected exhibitors. However, the re-entrenchment of the majors via their
renewed control over content and exhibition overturned these decisions. As
such, Halloween marked the end of an era for youth cinema, as its style and
marketing campaign looked toward a new era that left the drive-in behind
and headed toward the multiplex.
20 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
1980s: Blockbusters, High Concepts, and Halloween
The late 1970s was another time of immense change that had far-ranging
implications for youth cinema. During the drive-in era, weirdies would often
be released following a ‘saturation’ model; producers and distributors special-
izing in teenpics would release the picture to as many exhibition sites as they
could. As such, these teenpics often had what the industry calls ‘marketability,’
but they often lacked ‘playability’ (Lewis 2003: 65). The Allied Artists release
Attack of the Crab Monsters (Corman, 1957) provides an example. The hyper-
bolic title is wildly evocative and places it within the weirdie idiom, making
the film marketable and guaranteeing a reliable turn-out during its opening
weekend. But it is doubtful the film has much ‘playability,’ which refers to a
film’s ability to generate good ‘word of mouth’ that will attract more audiences
for subsequent screenings. Most audiences interested in seeing Attack of the
Crab Monsters would probably see it on its opening weekend, and the film’s
threadbare plot and bargain-basement production value are unlikely to inspire
good word of mouth. However, the low-budget film likely turned a profit dur-
ing its opening weekend, if only because of the wide release. During the 1950s
and 1960s, major studios and prestige productions did not utilize the saturation
model, relying instead on the platform release model, especially for films that
seemed to have playability. This model slowly rolled out releases and steadily
increased the number of screens for a film, the idea being that good word of
mouth would slowly build an audience for the film.
This approach began to change in the early 1970s, when an industry
reeling from an intense recession saw in the huge box office of films like
The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) and The Exorcist a potentially lucrative
model: the blockbuster.11 A key characteristic of the blockbuster strategy
is the aforementioned saturation release, a practice the majors borrowed
from small independent distributors of teenpics and other low-budget films.
While saturation booking was once ‘a means of throwing a movie away’
and getting the most out of a subpar product, the major studios began to
use it as ‘a way of signaling [a film’s] importance’ (Cook 2007: 134), and
they had the money to give blockbusters releases on a previous unheard
of scale. Universal’s Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) is generally considered as the
first blockbuster of ‘the new Hollywood’ era with a successful then-massive
opening on 464 screens (Schatz 2003: 25).
Three years later, when the major studios were well into the blockbuster
era, Halloween scored big, ironically, by employing the platform release
strategy once used by the majors. Unable to strike a distribution deal with
the majors, Yablans worked with regional exhibitors and secured Halloween
a release in Kansas City and Chicago in late 1978 (Yablans 2012: 175–177).
The film did great business in both cities. In Chicago, nationally syndicated
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 21
reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film a rave review, encour-
aging Yablans to open the film in larger markets (ibid ). Unlike many low-
budget genre pictures that were given a saturation release in drive-ins,
Halloween had ‘playability.’ Word of mouth was strong, and ticket sales
steadily climbed until March 1979, when the film began getting attention
in trade papers (Nowell 2011: 101–103). All the majors had passed on the
film, but Halloween’s surprise success hinted that the film’s concept could
be adaptable to the blockbuster release strategy. As Nowell notes, Hallow-
een was ‘crafted to capitalize on developments in blockbuster filmmaking’
and demonstrates solid ‘commercial logic’ by ‘locating content’ from other
blockbuster films like Jaws, The Omen (Donner, 1976), and Star Wars (Lucas,
1977) and assembling it to craft Michael, a heavy-breathing, demonic, and
unstoppable force signaled on the film’s soundtrack by highly recognizable
music (9 and 92–94). As soon as Compass announced a sequel, Hollywood
power player Dino De Laurentiis contacted Yablans, offering to buy sequel
rights for his company (Yablans 2012: 191). Taking on production of the
film, De Laurentiis struck a distribution deal with Universal. By the time
Universal handled the release of Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981) on Hallow-
een eve 1981, the blockbuster release was standard, and Halloween made
a perfect transition into this era. The sequel opened in 1,211 theaters in the
US and grossed $25.5 million (‘Franchises: Halloween’ n.d.). Halloween’s
concept found itself at home during the blockbuster era.
Halloween also benefitted from its integration of high concept style
and marketing—even more so than Rosemary’s Baby had a decade ago—
embodying the ethos of ‘the look, the hook, and the book.’ The high concept
film is partly ‘differentiated through the emphasis on style in production’
(Wyatt 1994: 20). Carpenter described the film as ‘a stylistic exercise’ and
crafted it in a polished, commercial style that disguised its low budget (Bou-
lenger 2001: 97). Leeder observes that the film’s ‘stylistic flourishes’—its
use of anamorphic widescreen to realize its environs, Panaglide/Steadicam
to give the feeling of floating paranoia, and Carpenter’s relentless electronic
score to keep the audience on edge—are all ‘smoothly integrated’ (2014:11).
The film’s style gives it ‘the look’ so important to high concept. Halloween’s
style was deftly sold by its marketing, which did an excellent job selling
‘the hook.’ Understanding the challenges of independently distributing the
film in a tough marketplace, Yablans ‘spent a lot of time working on the key
art’ for the film’s advertising (2012: 174). Its marketing parlayed the film’s
most commercial elements into an advertising campaign, epitomizing ‘the
integration of the film with its marketing,’ essential for high concept films
(Wyatt 1994: 20).
The most appealing aspects of the film inform its iconic poster. As
Nowell explains, the poster’s tasteful use of ‘near-monochromatic images’
22 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
resembled posters for other major studio horror releases that had done well
at the box office, and the combination of an upraised hand wielding a knife
combined with the jack-o-lantern promised ‘mild horror in the context of
a fun experience’ (2011: 100). The film’s tag line ‘The Night He Came
Home!’ takes the film’s already simple story and simplifies it further, creat-
ing the perfect ‘hook.’ The poster is topped off by the film’s logo. The most
potent and marketable high concept can be sold through a short title effec-
tively made into an instantly identifiable logo (Wyatt 1994: 4). Yablans’s
idea to title the film Halloween and set it during the holiday pays off in
dividends here. The single word title gives the film a stately, austere qual-
ity that is complemented by the use of ITC Serif Gothic typeface, which
‘[combines] gothic simplicity with traditional roman elegance’ (‘ITC Serif
Gothic’ n.d.). The Halloween-orange outlining the white words make for an
instantly recognizable logo. The film became a blockbuster hit on the back
of a marketing campaign that was able to embody all aspects of high con-
cept: the look, the hook, and, eventually, the book, especially as the film’s
simple narrative quickly inspired a novelization of the film in 1979.
Halloween foreshadowed nearly all the elements it would take for a youth
horror film to be successful in the blockbuster era. Many histories of youth
horror argue that Halloween ‘truly inaugurated’ the slasher cycle (Shary
2014: 8), but the cycle was over by 1981. Perhaps more significant is how
Halloween offers an example of crafting a youth horror brand name. The
blockbuster era began around the same time as the rise of the shopping mall
(Schatz 2003: 26), and these two developments dovetailed significantly,
especially in regard to youth audiences. As Shary explains,

With the relocation of most movie theaters into or near shopping malls
in the 1980s, the need to cater to the young audiences who frequented
those malls became apparent to Hollywood, and those audiences formed
the first generation of multiplex moviegoers.
(2014: 7)

As movies appeared more often alongside other consumer goods in mall

multiplexes, blockbuster films were expected to establish a brand name that
could act as ‘the spearhead for numerous concurrent revenue streams’ and
‘prove sufficiently popular to inaugurate a “franchise”—a series of sequels
whose shelf life could extend for decades’ (Cook 2007: 134). This develop-
ment makes it necessary to approach films of the multiplex blockbuster era
as both ‘text and commodity, intertext and product line’ (Meehan 1991: 62).
The importance of establishing a brand name—even for a low-budget
slasher movie—is demonstrated by the success of another low-budget
slasher, Friday the 13th. Unlike Halloween, Friday the 13th was picked up
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 23
by a major MPAA-member studio for distribution when Paramount gave
the film a saturation release that grossed over $16 million before the end
of 1980. Sean Cunningham, Friday the 13th’s producer and director, first
provoked interest in the film with the title alone; in July 1979, he posted a
full-page advertisement for the film in Variety, promising it would be ‘The
Most Terrifying Film Ever Made!’ (Bracke 2006: 17). Thus, the journey of
Friday the 13th begins with the promise of an exploitable title, and after
Cunningham independently produced the film, Paramount was able to turn
the film into a smash success by creating a marketing campaign that made
the most of the title. Paramount’s marketing created a recognizable logo
for the film by using scratchy, blood-red letters. The logo was less elegant
than Halloween’s, a difference that reflected the film’s content, which was
a bit gorier than Carpenter’s film. At the same time, however, Paramount’s
use of ‘comic-book style’ design on the film’s poster assured audiences that
the content would not be too extreme, so as to not scare off any potential
multiplex audiences (Nowell 2011: 140–141). Like Compass before them,
Paramount successfully crafted a teenpic brand name.
This brand name would hold the studio in good stead during the onslaught
of teen slasher films that poured into the box office in the months following
Friday the 13th’s successful release. Prom Night, a Canadian-made produc-
tion starring Jamie Lee Curtis, performed well, but follow-ups Terror Train
and My Bloody Valentine (Mihalka, 1981) failed to score. Things got worse
as the market was inundated with slasher films throughout 1981, and inter-
est in the slasher film waned (Nowell 2011: 230–231). Out of a group of
seven slasher films released between February and September 1981, only
one was a success: Paramount’s Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981), which
did at least double the business of all the other films during this period
(Nowell 2011: 233). Nowell observes that the marketing for Friday the 13th
Part 2 emphasized its connection to the first film, from the trailer to the
poster, which consisted of only the film’s title—written in the same rough
and jagged type face of the original—against a black background. Nowell notes
that the poster’s tagline, which reads ‘The body count continues . . .’ stresses
continuity with the first film (236). The marketing of other slasher film
releases from 1981 also attempted to attach their films to Friday the 13th,
but to little avail, suggesting that the brand name was most important in
securing business during the multiplex era.
The attempt to suggest continuity of a successful brand is present in the
marketing materials for Halloween II, released in October 1981, months
after dismal returns of other slasher films. Like the poster for Friday the
13th Part 2, the Halloween II poster goes to great lengths to emphasize its
connection to the previous film. Most of the elements of the original poster
have returned; the monochromatic color scheme, the pumpkin, and the logo
24 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer
are all present. This time, a skull emerges out of the pumpkin, and there is
no hand wielding a knife, a choice that may reflect the diminishing returns
of slasher fatigue in the theatrical market. Continuity with the first film is
most important, even down to the tag line: ‘From The People Who Brought
You “HALLOWEEN” . . . More Of The Night He Came Home.’ In fact,
the poster may have adhered to the brand name a little too closely, as the
words ‘ALL NEW’ appear at an angle on the side of the poster, as if the
distributor worried that it might be so similar that it looks like an ad for a
rerelease of the original film. For the most part, the rest of the decade would
prove that franchising a recognizable brand name was crucial for success
in the youth horror market. There would not be another successful brand
name established in youth horror until 1984 with New Line’s A Nightmare
on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) which featured a concept—a murderer stalks
and kills you in your dreams—and visual hooks—a razor-fingered glove
among them—that fit perfectly with the tenants of high concept marketing.
The multiplex mentality held strong.

Conclusion
This chapter argues that Halloween, by stringing together many of the reoc-
curring obsessions of youth horror cinema, compiles an index of youth hor-
ror’s past. Youth horror exploded onto the film market in the early 1950s
after the fallout of the Paramount Decree. The majors attempted to appeal to
youth audiences with pictures like House of Wax and horror/science fiction
hybrids like It Came from Outer Space, the latter of which reflected soci-
ety’s atomic dread in the wake of the first hydrogen bomb test. However, the
major studios were not as well-positioned to appeal to youth audiences as the
independents were, which they did with aplomb, pioneering the ‘weirdies,’
bizarre films that blended horror and science fiction. Throughout the 1950s,
weirdies projected a youthful ethos by mirroring teenage frustration with
their portrayal of monsters as troubled, alienated outsiders distrustful of the
establishment and authority. The distrust grew deeper in the 1960s, as youth
horror plumbed the depths of human depravity and explored a culture grown
paranoid due to distrust of others and the self. All the while, horror cultivated
a following among teens and preadolescents in a domestic setting as horror
films from decades past were remediated on television. With Doctor Demen-
tia’s televised Halloween horror movie marathon, Halloween kept open a
portal to the past while also taking on many of the changes in the youth
horror market during the late 1960s and early 1970s like increasing attempts
to appeal to female viewers. Halloween’s creators also profitably embraced
blockbuster filmmaking and high concept marketing, both of which would
play significant roles in youth horror cinema during the multiplex era.
 I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer 25
This chapter maintains that ultimately, Halloween’s significance may not
be bound up in its status as the first or most influential slasher film, but
rather as a compendium of youth horror’s past and a bellwether of its future.
Youth horror had been captivating audiences for several decades, but as it
was making the transition from the drive-in to the multiplex, the subgenre
started to gain attention from another, perhaps unlikely, audience: academia.

Notes
1 The Thing consistently tops many, if not all, online ‘best of’ listicles and fan
polls of Carpenter’s films. IMDb’s Through the Lens episode about the ‘Carpen-
teresque’ describes The Thing as ‘a filmic landmark, almost the definition of the
word Carpenteresque’ (‘Defining Carpenteresque’ 2018). In a 2013 interview,
Carpenter noted that The Thing is the film he is most asked about (Carpenter
2013).
2 Nowell’s history of the first slasher cycle covers 1974 to 1981 (2011). The first
cycle peaked commercially in 1981, but slasher films continued to be released
throughout 1982 and 1983.
3 For more about industry self-regulation during this era, see Black (1994); Do-
herty (1999).
4 See Jancovich (2014).
5 The next year, AIP would pair Steele with Price for Corman’s second Poe adap-
tation, The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).
6 See Leeder (2014: 60–69).
7 Actor/stuntman James Jude Courtney quotes this movement/moment in his per-
formance as Michael in 2018’s Halloween (Green, 2018), a testament to the
iconic status of Nick Castle’s performance.
8 Carpenter would return to sci-fi with his remake of The Thing and his films Star-
man (1984), and Ghosts of Mars (2001).
9 This figure is taken from Joseph Wolf in Anchor Bay (2013b).
10 The theme of incest is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.
11 See Cook (2000) for more about the recession of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
2 Familial and Societal Failure
Reading Youth and Ideology
in Halloween

As noted in the previous chapter, youth horror cinema was booming in the
1970s, with films populating both the mainstream and the margins of the
cinematic marketplace. A number of notable horror films from this era fea-
tured youths as main characters or were geared to appeal to youth audiences
or both. Deathdream (Clark, 1972) features a young soldier returning home
from the Vietnam War as a blood-thirsty zombie.1 A duo of teenage women
fall prey to a violent gang in The Last House on the Left. A young man is
demonically possessed in The Possession of Joel Delaney (Hussein, 1972),
and a pubescent girl is possessed by a demon in The Exorcist. A woman
gives birth to a monstrous baby in It’s Alive (Cohen, 1974). A shark devours
teens and pre-teens in Jaws. In Carrie, a high schooler uses her telekinetic
powers to slaughter her bullies. Following in the youth horror tradition,
Halloween told the story of teenagers stalked by a masked assailant. With
youths accounting for almost half of box office revenues, youth horror ruled
at the drive-in and multiplex.
Horror movies also began attracting attention from another, more mature
audience: academics. Although film studies appeared sporadically at the
university level at various points before the 1960s,2 it officially entered the
curriculum in the late 1960s. Infused with radical, countercultural politics
of the time, much of film studies adapted already-existing disciplines like
anthropology, semiology, and psychology to undertake an ideological anal-
ysis of film that considered how Hollywood films not only reinforce but also
question or subvert dominant ideology. Film studies soon turned its atten-
tion to horror cinema. In 1979, a group of Canadian academics including
Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood, employ-
ing critical approaches drawn from a re-interpretation of the works of Marx
and Freud, published a collection of academic essays about horror cinema
titled The American Nightmare. While several films were praised for their
subversion of social institutions, Halloween took a drubbing, with Wood
citing Carpenter’s film as the end of an era of ideologically rich horror films
 Familial and Societal Failure 27
from the 1970s that attacked dominant ideology and as the beginning of an
era of conservative horror in the 1980s that reinforced dominant ideology
(1986: 189–197). Wood’s methodology ‘left its mark on subsequent horror
criticism’ and made it ‘commonplace for horror films to be labeled as politi-
cally progressive or reactionary’ (Hutchings 2014b: 298), and Halloween
and Carpenter’s other films were labeled as reactionary (Grant 2004: 15).
Nevertheless, Halloween shares with politically progressive horror of the
1970s a disdain for the authorities and institutions put in place by dominant
ideology, retaining many of the contradictions and complexities of 1970s
cinema. Roughly a decade after the publication of The American Night-
mare, Andrew Tudor constructed another framework for analyzing horror
cinema (1989: 211–224). While Wood’s model focused on how horror films
represent the bourgeois heteronormative family and its attempts to mold
‘ideal’ inhabitants for patriarchal capitalism, Tudor moved away from the
microcosm of the family to the macrocosm of society, its institutions, and
the ability or disability of these institutions to protect its inhabitants (1989:
217). Tudor’s taxonomy produces a reading of Halloween that finds the film
more critical of dominant ideology.
This chapter argues that Tudor’s framework ultimately draws out a more
nuanced analysis of Halloween’s depiction of youth. Wood reads the film
as politically reactionary partly because of the ways it portrays youth. He
feels that Michael is presented as a monstrous ‘Other’ and that the film,
to its detriment, neglects to analyze the social forces that shaped Michael.
Further, he believes the film depicts teenagers as hedonistic revelers deserv-
ing of punishment from a puritanical slasher. However, Tudor’s taxonomy
foregrounds how institutional failure in the film—the failure of community,
education, law, and science—affects Haddonfield’s youth. Drawing from
Tudor’s paradigm, this chapter contends that, from an ideological perspec-
tive, Halloween is best understood as a mediation on how social institutions
fail young people and leave them to fend for themselves, a scenario at the
heart of many teen slasher films.

The American Nightmare: Academia and Horror Film

Film studies as an academic discipline emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s,
bringing with it much of the countercultural politics of the time (Maltby
2003: 527). Scholars embraced insights from Black Power movements;
adopted Marxism’s focus on class, power, and ideology; and reverse-engi-
neered frameworks for studying gender and sexuality from Freud, craft-
ing a methodology focused on the triad of race, class, gender. Ideological
analysis was also a ‘motivating force behind . . . psychoanalytic and feminist
film theory in the 1970s’ (533). With its focus on gender and sexuality, the
28 Familial and Societal Failure
application of psychoanalytic theory was meant to be a ‘politically sensitive
activity that could contribute to a transformation of wider social relations’
(535). Psychoanalytic theory sought to dismantle the power of dominant
ideology embedded in Hollywood cinema. Film studies took root in the
academy during a moment when it seemed that the monolithic institutions
of capitalism and patriarchy were briefly on the ropes from the pummeling
they had taken by the counterculture.
Wood and his compatriots felt studying horror cinema offered an opportu-
nity to unveil the cruelty of capitalist patriarchy, revealing these institutions
as inimical to the humane advancement of civilization. According to Wood,
the horror film dramatizes society’s struggle to oppress all those who differ
from ‘normal’ (straight, white, male) and to repress ‘abnormal’ impulses
within itself. Wood argues that US horror in the 1970s was fueled by ‘the
whole pervasive sense of ideological crisis and imminent collapse’ of social
institutions during the decade (1986: 121). This was a ‘a historically specific
crisis in American society’ brought about by ‘concerns over the Vietnam
War and the protests against it, the Watergate scandal, the civil rights move-
ment, feminism [and] discomfort with . . . dominant social structures and
belief systems’ (Hutchings 2014b: 297). In 1979, Wood and Richard Lippe
organized a horror film retrospective to take place during the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival. The retrospective included film screenings, semi-
nars, and the publication of a booklet titled The American Nightmare.
In the booklet, Wood outlines horror film’s basic formula: normality is
threatened by the monster. In the Classical Hollywood horror film, nor-
mality consists of capitalist patriarchy and the accompanying social institu-
tions that perpetuate it. Conversely, the monster represents all those who are
oppressed by normality and/or embody normality’s repressed impulses and
energies. The relationship between normality and the monster, for Wood,
‘constitutes the essential subject of the horror film’ (1979a: 14). Many hor-
ror films depict normality as fulfilling for all its inhabitants, and the mon-
ster as an inhuman, alien threat that must be defeated by social institutions.
Thus, the narrative does not acknowledge the connection between normality
and the monster, that the monster is ‘normality’s shadow’ (ibid.), an entity
made up of normality’s repressed energies and desires. Wood acknowledges
that his formula does not easily apply to all horror films and notes that ‘as
a general rule, the less easy the application, the more complex and interest-
ing the film’ (1979b: 59). In these ‘more complex’ horror films, the rela-
tionship between normality and the monster is not as clear cut but instead
is more ambiguous. These films, Wood believes, have radical potential.
The narrative of these films erodes the barriers between normality and the
monstrous, leading the audience to feel ambivalent about normality and the
monster. Normality seems more constrictive, and the monster grows more
 Familial and Societal Failure 29
sympathetic. Wood argues that this sympathy felt for the monster ‘extends
to our attitude to normality’ (1979a: 15), leading one to question those insti-
tutions that uphold normality.
According to Wood, the 1970s saw a proliferation of horror films that
reflected the lack of confidence in American institutions in the wake of the
counterculture movement, Vietnam protests, and the Watergate scandal. He
argues that how a horror film represents the monster’s struggle against nor-
mality reveals the film’s underlying political position. To rate a horror film’s
political stance, Wood uses a metric that ranges from ‘progressive’ to ‘reac-
tionary.’ Films that display an ambivalence toward normality, depict the
monster as having a motive related to its oppression/repression, and reveal
the often-hidden connection between normality and the monster are labeled
‘progressive.’ These films, according to Wood, demonstrate the untenability
of patriarchal capitalism, stress the necessity of revolution, and suggest the
creation of a society governed by a more equitable ideology. Prominent
among Wood’s ‘progressive’ horror films are Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead, his follow-up Dawn of the Dead (1978), and films directed by Larry
Cohen such as It’s Alive and God Told Me To (1976). He finds The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre ‘essentially nihilistic’ but nevertheless admirable as
it depicts the annihilation of a world corrupted by patriarchal capitalism
(1979a: 19–22).
Falling on the other end of Wood’s spectrum are those he feels either
attempt to recuperate capitalist patriarchy and/or lament its disintegration.
He designates these films ‘reactionary.’ One film he labels reactionary
is The Omen, which he believes performs the same apocalyptic function
as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a key difference: The Omen pines
for the ‘bourgeois capitalist patriarchal Establishment’ even as Damien
the devil-child brings about its destruction (1979a: 19). The final part of
Wood’s essay, titled ‘The Reactionary Wing,’ discusses films that Wood
feels are politically regressive in their attitudes. These films do not depict
the monster as normality’s shadow; instead, the monster is ‘non-human’
and has no discernable motive, suggesting that normality is innocent of any
wrongdoing in its enforcement of surplus repression (1979a: 23). Thus,
these films uphold the necessity of normality and its defense, even if it
may be a fruitless effort. Prominent among Wood’s reactionary wing are
David Cronenberg’s early films—Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977)—which
he feels depict sexuality as loathsome and destructive to bourgeois society
(1979a: 24). Another film Wood labels reactionary is Alien (Scott, 1979), in
which ‘sexuality [is] so rigorously repressed’ that it ‘returns grotesquely and
terrifyingly in its monster’ (1979a: 27). Cronenberg’s films and Alien share
an often-repulsive body horror that Wood feels extends to the film’s wider
attitudes toward sexuality and dominant ideology.
30 Familial and Societal Failure
Halloween as ‘Reactionary’ Horror
Sandwiched between Wood’s critique of Cronenberg and his dismissal of
Alien is a passage about Halloween. Even though Wood places it in the same
reactionary drawer, his initial attitude toward the film is more measured than
his critique of Cronenberg. Wood does not wish to place Halloween in the
same bracket as Cronenberg’s films, noting that ‘Carpenter’s films reveal. . .
an engaging artistic personality . . . a delight in skill and craftmanship, [and]
a pleasure in play with the medium’ (1979a: 24). Wood finds Carpenter’s
‘film buff charm’ and intertextual references to past films ‘cunning’ even if
a little confused (24). Carpenter says that Wood even once sent him a copy
of one of his essays (Leeder 2014: 32), which indicates that Wood had at
least some affinity with Carpenter’s work. Or maybe Wood felt it would do
Carpenter some good to read his essays. Throughout the early 1980s, his
opinion of the director soured. Wood initially did not wish to group Carpen-
ter with Cronenberg, feeling that Carpenter is the more engaging creative
persona. A few years later, however, Wood’s position changes considerably.
In a 1983 essay, Wood amends his preference of Carpenter over Cronenberg,
dismissing Carpenter because he ‘lacks precisely that “artistic authenticity”’
that Wood acknowledges in Cronenberg’s work, even if he does not admire
it (1983: 128). Carpenter quickly fell out of favor with Wood, and his valua-
tion of Halloween seems to decline further during the following years.
This decline is on display on Wood’s 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam
to Reagan, which contains a revised version of his essay from The American
Nightmare. For the book, Wood extracted much of ‘The Reactionary Wing’
from the original essay and moved it to a separate chapter titled ‘Horror in
the 80s.’ For Wood, horror cinema in the 1980s follows the lead of films by
Spielberg and Lucas, what Wood’s compatriot Andrew Britton calls ‘Rea-
ganite Entertainment’ (Britton 2009: 99). These films construct the audience
as children and reassure them that after the social and political upheaval of
the 1960s and 1970s, things have been restored back to how they should be:
social institutions have stabilized, the patriarchal family is reunited, and tra-
ditional values have been reinstated. Films from the Spielberg/Lucas camp
assure audiences that rebellion and revolution are unnecessary because the
world is as it should be. Reactionary horror in the 1980s performs this same
function. Any monstrous disruption can be contained by returning things
back to ‘normal.’ As Britton explains, Reaganite entertainment frames any
progressive social change as impossible (101). Thus, in Reaganite horror, if
a return to normality is not enough to contain the threat, no other solutions
are possible, so it is best to just let things fall apart because ‘there’s nothing
you can do, anyway’ (Wood 1986: 168). In an introduction to the ‘Horror in
the 80s’ chapter, Wood calls Halloween a ‘divisive film’ that marks the point
 Familial and Societal Failure 31
where the progressive horror of the 1970s ends and the reactionary 1980s
begin (1986: 193), further emphasizing the point by removing the material
about Cronenberg that originally opened ‘The Reactionary Wing’ section
and moving Halloween to the forefront as an exemplar of reactionary horror.
Two main components of Halloween that make it ‘reactionary’ have to do
with the film’s representation of youth: 1) the depiction of the child as mon-
strous ‘Other’ via young Michael Myers and 2) the depiction of teenagers
who are killed by Michael during their sexual escapades. Wood’s reading of
Halloween highlights how youth plays an important part in his framework;
Shary notes that Wood’s scholarship is ‘integral to the imaging of youth’
in horror cinema (2014: 170). Wood argues that the source of horror in
American cinema is the release of surplus repression—often referred to as
‘the Return of the Repressed’—with this liberation conceived as monstrous
(1979a: 7–8). According to Wood, those things most repressed in our society
are sexuality, bisexuality, female sexuality, and sexuality of children, with
childhood sexuality being the most ‘fundamentally’ repressed (1979a: 9).
He describes the prohibitions placed upon childhood sexuality as a ‘process
moving . . . from repression to oppression’ (9).
Given the degree to which oppression from the bourgeois adult world
forces children to repress their sexuality, it is little surprise that children
appear on Wood’s list of ‘Other’ figures that often emerge as monstrous in
the horror film. Wood defines the ‘Other’ as ‘that which bourgeois ideology
cannot recognize or accept but must deal with . . . in one of two ways: either
by rejection and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimi-
lating it’ (9). The ‘Others’ on Wood’s list are those oppressed —women,
racial and ethnic minorities, the proletariat—that are made to embody nor-
mality’s repressed impulses and are often punished for them. Wood singles
out children as perhaps ‘the most oppressed section of the population’ (10),
arguing that ‘the “otherness” of children . . . is that which is repressed within
ourselves, its expression therefore hated in others: what the previous gen-
eration repressed in us, and what we, in turn, repress in our children’ (ibid.).
Thus, the child as monstrous Other is a personification of adult anxiety that
children will do what adults secretly long to do: break out of the shackles of
oppression and release all their repressed energies.
Before Halloween’s monstrous child Michael, the intensity of the image
of the child as Other would simmer under the surface in horror cinema up
until the late 1960s when it would explode during the 1970s and after. Earlier,
the child as monstrous Other appeared in such films as The Bad Seed, Vil-
lage of the Damned, and its sequel Children of the Damned (Leader, 1964).
However, these films disavow the possibility that these monstrous children
are normality’s shadow and that their Otherness is born out of the normative
adult world’s repression and oppression. Instead, these monstrous children
32 Familial and Societal Failure
are the result of defective genetics or alien intervention. In The Bad Seed,
suburban housewife Christine Penmark (Nancy Kelly) discovers that her
daughter Rhonda (Patty McCormack), a seemingly-perfect 8-year-old, is a
psychopathic murderer. The possibility that bad parenting led to Rhonda’s
condition horrifies Christine, but the film later reveals that Christine was
adopted and her birth mother was a serial killer, suggesting that Rhonda
inherited murderous genes from her grandmother. The mysterious incidents
leading to the birth of a throng of malevolent telekinetic children in Village
of the Damned and Children of the Damned are never fully revealed, but
the films hint that an alien invasion-via-impregnation may be the culprit.
Similarly, Night of the Living Dead intimates that radiation from a return-
ing space probe caused the zombie outbreak that results in a little girl rising
from the dead to murder and consume her parents.
When monstrous children became ubiquitous in the 1970s, their motives
become clearer and more directly related to their parents and the social/
political milieu, making films of this nature more progressive by Wood’s
metric. However, the child-as-monster does not immediately appear in films
that Wood and company would consider progressive. 1973’s The Exorcist
depicts one of the most recognizable cinematic child monsters with Reagan
(Linda Blair), a demonically possessed 13-year-old girl. However, Wood’s
compatriot Andrew Britton denounces the film as one of the worst offenders
of the reactionary wing, a film that represents the release of repression via
Reagan’s possession as repulsive and demands its punishment in order to
reinstate dominant ideology.3 Other films in the demonic-child cycle, like
The Omen, do not fare much better by Wood’s estimation. Conversely, Larry
Cohen’s It’s Alive and sequel It Lives Again (1978) strike Wood as the most
ideologically progressive. The first film tells the story of an expectant mar-
ried couple (John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell) who give birth to a monstrous
killer baby. A pharmaceutical company executive (Robert Emhardt) fears
that the baby is a side effect of birth control pills produced by his company
and seeks to have the baby destroyed before his company can be found
liable. However, an exact reason for the baby’s deformed state and super
strength is never revealed, as it is also hinted that environmental pollution
may have caused the abnormal birth.
The non-specificity of the baby’s origins and the depiction of the family
that produced the baby lead Wood to believe that Cohen’s baby monster
symbolizes ‘disturbance about heterosexual relations, male/female gender
roles, the family, the contemporary development of capitalism, its abuse of
technology, its indifference to the pollution of the environment, its crass
materialism, callousness, and greed’ (1986: 102). In It’s Alive, the mon-
ster is created by normality and reflects its monstrousness, a theme devel-
oped further in It Lives Again. Wood argues, ‘Cohen’s films never repress
 Familial and Societal Failure 33
the possibility of imagining that the world might be changed; indeed they
implicitly encourage it’ (1979c: 80), making them the very definition of
progressive horror. At the conclusion of his essay on Cohen in 1979’s The
American Nightmare, Wood compares It’s Alive to Halloween. Even though
he has not yet entirely soured on Carpenter, he claims that Halloween ‘does
nothing new’ while Cohen ‘extends the boundaries of the genre . . . to the
point where the horror movie becomes impossible and must logically give
way to some form of revolutionary movie’ (1979c: 86). Placing Halloween
in opposition to the progressive It’s Alive foreshadows the prominent posi-
tion Halloween would eventually hold in Wood’s canon of reactionary hor-
ror. At the middle of these crossroads between progressive and reactionary
stands the image of the youth as Other, with Cohen’s baby looking forward
and Carpenter’s child looking backward.
Michael, Halloween’s child-as-monster, ends up being a reactionary fig-
ure for Wood due to how the film disavows the possibility that bourgeois
ideology created this child monster, even though the opening suggests it (see
Figure 2.1). After the film’s opening credits, title cards establish the setting
as ‘Haddonfield, Illinois’ on ‘Halloween Night 1963.’ Then, the audiences
sees from young Michael’s perspective as he approaches the family home
and spies on his sister and her boyfriend (David Kyle) through the living
room window as they make out and eventually go upstairs. He then slips
around to the back of the house, walks in the back door, takes a butcher knife
from a kitchen drawer, waits until his sister’s boyfriend leaves (presumably
after a lightning round of sex), sneaks upstairs, dons a clown mask, and
stabs his sister in the chest until she is dead. He then runs down the stairs and
out of the front door. Just as Michael exits the house, his parents pull up in a

Figure 2.1 Michael Myers: Child as monstrous ‘other’

34 Familial and Societal Failure
car and get out. His father (George O’Hanlon Jr.) asks ‘Michael?’ and pulls
off the mask. The camera cuts to a reverse angle and reveals the identity of
the killer as a six-year-old boy in a clown suit. The shot tracks away and
cranes up above the tableau of Michael holding a bloody knife bookended
by his onlooking parents and then cuts to black.
Halloween’s opening is rich with possible connotative meaning, begin-
ning with the image of the house. David Roche explains that the setting
immediately creates ‘a synecdoche of white patriarchal middle-class subur-
ban America’ (2014: 44–45). The Myers family is established as ‘unremark-
able middle class WASPs’ (Leeder 2014: 74). As Michael watches from
outside the window, Judith and her boyfriend continue to make out on the
living room couch, and the boyfriend jokes around by picking up a clown
mask and pretending to kiss her through it. The couple heads upstairs. After
the boyfriend leaves and Michael ascends the stairs with knife in hand, he
spies the clown mask, now laying discarded on the floor, and puts it on. Paul
argues that Judith’s boyfriend wears the mask to hide ‘their furtive sexual
act . . . from others’ (1994: 322). In the milieu that the film’s opening has
established, premarital sex would be discouraged. Michael dons the mask
to hide a similar impulse, but his action takes the repression engendered
by the social milieu to its logical conclusion: murder, an act of destruction,
substituted for sex, which surplus repression relegates to procreation.
Paul’s reading of the mask dovetails with Wood’s theory that the monster
represents a release of repression. In the case of Halloween, Wood views
Michael as emblematic of the ‘sexual repression of children’ (1979a: 26).
According to Wood, at play here is ‘the incest taboo that denies sexual feel-
ing precisely where the proximities of family life most encourage it’ (ibid.).
Although the film offers only a glimpse of the Myers house’s layout, it
appears to be a breeding ground for repressed desires to simmer under the
surface before violently erupting. Michael’s room sits opposite of Judith’s,
with no hallway or door between them. When Michael finds her, Judith is
sitting topless in front of a vanity mirror, wearing only her underwear and
lackadaisically brushing her hair. Given that Judith sits in the open door-
frame separating her room from Michael’s—she would be visible from
Michael’s bed—young Michael has likely seen her in this state in the past.
Under bourgeois capitalist patriarchy, Michael’s repressed emotions can
manifest only as violence. Wood calls Halloween’s opening ‘remarkable’
and feels it sets up the film as possibly ‘the definitive family horror film’
with a ‘child-monster’ that is clearly ‘product of the nuclear family and
small-town environment’ (ibid).
However, according to Wood, the remainder of the film does not follow
through on the promise of its opening minutes. The first scene concludes
with a crane shot that ascends into the air and hovers over the frozen tableau
 Familial and Societal Failure 35
of Michael and his shocked parents. Robert C. Cumbow observes, ‘The
crane shot up and away, dwarfing the characters in the context of their sur-
roundings, is a shot . . . most commonly used as an end title shot’ (2000: 51).
The film’s abrupt cut to black reinforces a sense of finality, and in some
ways, it is a conclusion, as the opening seems somewhat disconnected from
the rest of the film. As Steve Neale notes, the film never again returns to a
shot from Michael’s POV; even though a great deal of the film finds Michael
spying on his prey, none of these shots are from his subjective, first-person
perspective (2004: 361). Michael’s parents never appear again, suggesting
that Halloween may not be the ‘definitive family horror film’ since it does
not explore the intricacies of the family that produced the child-monster.
Wood argues that the rest of the film disavows the possibility that Michael’s
monstrosity could be a product of bourgeois patriarchal repression. Con-
trary to what the film’s opening may suggest, Michael is not positioned
as ‘normality’s shadow’ or the result of bourgeois repression. Instead, he
is something completely alien, unrelated to normality’s machinations. As
Sheldon Hall puts it, Michael ‘is from Haddonfield but not of it’ (2004:71).
Richard T. Jameson describes Michael as ‘cosmic-evil’ typical of The Omen
era (2009). Similarly, Murray Leeder argues that Michael represents a threat
akin to otherworldly Lovecraftian monsters (Leeder 2014: 87–93). Dr. Loo-
mis constantly insists that Michael be treated as a being of pure evil and
tells Sheriff Brackett that, as a child, Michael had ‘the blackest eyes . . . the
devil’s eyes.’ For Wood, Loomis’s description of Michael places Halloween
in the cycle of Satanic horror films like The Exorcist and The Omen, which
he classifies as reactionary.
From this perspective, Halloween’s downbeat ending reads as one typical
of Reaganite horror. Halloween fits comfortably among certain American
films from the later 1970s like All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976) and
Rocky (Avildsen, 1976) that emerged from what Wood calls ‘a huge sigh
of ideological relief’ after the disruptions of the counterculture had been
quelled, a feeling that presaged attitudes of the Reagan era (1986: 162).
Wood describes Loomis as ‘the most extreme instance of Hollywood’s per-
version of psychoanalysis into an instrument of repression’ (1979a: 26), but
even if he is an ‘instrument of repression,’ he is still unable to contain the
upheaval caused by Michael. Loomis empties his revolver into Michael at
the film’s conclusion, but Michael survives and disappears into the night.
The film concludes with a sequence of shots of all the domestic spaces
Michael has terrorized during the course of the film, all the way from the
Doyle household to the dilapidated Myers house. Layered over these shots
is the sound of Michael’s heavy breathing, insinuating that no place in
the cozy, small-town bourgeois environment is untainted by his presence.
Repression has failed, and since no other possible explanation is offered
36 Familial and Societal Failure
for Michael’s actions besides him being totally evil, there are no other lines
of defense. Reaganite horror depicts the social conditions of the world as
immutable. Thus, Halloween cannot conceive of an alternate realm outside
of the patriarchal bourgeois world that has been obliterated by a monster for
which it refuses to take any responsibility.
Beyond its representation of the child-monster, Halloween may also be
read as reactionary because of how it depicts teenagers, another example of
how the representation of youth figures prominently in Wood’s schema for
reading horror cinema. Stereotypical depictions of horny teenagers being
picked off in their pursuit of sex and/or drugs and alcohol are now com-
monplace, a widely recognized trope of slasher cinema. Before this ste-
reotype became ubiquitous, Halloween’s release precipitated some of the
early discussions of the possible implications of these conventional teen-
age characters. In his review of the film, Jonathan Rosenbaum makes a
connection between teenage transgression and death, especially when it
comes to the film’s female characters. Rosenbaum writes that Halloween
belongs to a ‘popular puritanical genre’ he calls the ‘Mainstream Simulated
Snuff Movie’ or MSSM (1979). In these films, ‘suspense is generated by
an audience waiting for a woman to be torn apart by a maniac, and the act
is “morally” prepared for—unconsciously sanctioned—by identifying her
with illicit sex’ (1979). Thus, female sexuality is punished by violent death
in Halloween. Wood agrees with Rosenbaum: ‘The killer’s victims are all
sexually promiscuous, the one survivor a virgin; the monster becomes . . .
simply the instrument of Puritan vengeance and repression rather than the
embodiment of what Puritanism repressed’ (1979a: 26). A cursory look at
the film seems to bear out this reading: Judith is murdered after a tryst with
her boyfriend, Annie is killed in the car when she is getting ready to pick
up her boyfriend; Bob and Lynda are both dispatched after having sex; and
virginal Laurie is the only teenage survivor.
By this rationale, Halloween inaugurated a series of slasher films that
viciously eschewed the progressive politics of 1970s horror and redefined
the image of the ‘typical’ youth in horror. The misogyny of slasher films was
long taken as a given. Both Wood and Clover contend that, while both male
and female youths are slaughtered, women are specifically punished for
their femininity in these films (Wood 1986: 195; Clover 2015: 83). Further,
Wood argues that slashers represent a ‘disturbing inversion’ of his formula.
In Classical horror, normality is founded upon sexual repression, with the
monster representing a release of this repression. However, the roles are
reversed in slashers: normality is characterized by sexual permissiveness,
represented by the horny teenagers who populate the films, and the monster,
‘while still produced by repression, has essentially become a superego fig-
ure, avenging itself on liberated female sexuality or the sexual freedom of
 Familial and Societal Failure 37
the young’ (1986: 195). Wood feels that Classical horror films encourage,
‘however ambiguously, an identification’ between the viewer and the mon-
ster who seeks to disrupt repressive ‘normal’ society, an identification that
feeds into the viewer’s own subconscious desires to smash through society’s
boundaries. Conversely, slasher films encourage audiences to identify either
with a monster that represents puritan vengeance upon a society grown
too permissive or with victims who are punished for their transgressions,
encouraging ‘sexual guilt’ among youth audiences (195, 196).
Scholarship often argued that Halloween was an example of how ‘patriar-
chy positions women as subject to men (and their violence)’ as it ‘rehearses
and restates that ideology as an assertion both of male aggression and male
power and of male fear of women and female sexuality’ (Neale 2004: 367).
This is not to say that all scholarly assessments of Halloween denigrated
the film as reactionary, misogynistic dreck. For instance, J. P. Telotte argues
that, rather than encouraging the audience to revel in a world in which
‘people are easily transformed into objects of voyeuristic attention, sexual
pleasure, and finally homicidal mania’ (1987: 127), Halloween invites the
viewer to reflect on how these impulses are commonplace in Hollywood
cinema. However, Halloween figures prominently in Clover’s 1987 ‘Her
Body, Himself.’ Her theory of the pleasure male film audiences derive from
slasher films is another symptom of misogynistic patriarchy and its (mis)
use of women’s bodies as explained by psychoanalytic film theory. Rich-
ard Maltby explains, ‘By the early 1990s, “psychoanalytic film theory” and
“contemporary film theory” had become more or less synonymous terms’
(2003: 535), pointing out that psychoanalytic theory dominated film studies
throughout the 1980s. If this was true about film studies in general, it was
doubly true about horror film studies. Psychoanalytic film theory was not
incredibly kind to slasher films or Halloween. If psychoanalytic discourses
continued to dominate the study of horror cinema, Halloween’s position in
the canon would be an uneasy one.

Halloween and Institutional Failure

A shift away from a strictly psychoanalytical perspective offers a more
nuanced reading of Halloween and its depiction of youth. Wood finds the
film’s opening fascinating because of what it may reveal about Michael’s
psychological profile, but others are wary about delving into Michael’s
psyche as a way to interpret the film. Leeder warns that ‘“Profiling” Michael
is a fool’s errand’ (2014: 20). Similarly, Paul argues there is no ‘coherent
motivation’ much less a ‘sexual motivation’ for Michael’s actions (1994:
321). Despite this, Paul speculates that Michael may be lashing out because
he feels abandoned by Judith, who is supposed to be babysitting him but
38 Familial and Societal Failure
has thrown him over to spend time with her boyfriend (322–323). Mikel J.
Koven also makes this point, suggesting Judith’s ‘poor babysitting’ leads to
her death (2008: 124). If one sees Judith as a person who has been instituted
to protect a child from harming themselves or others, she has failed, allow-
ing her brother to commit an atrocious act—and perhaps even leading him
to commit it. Judith’s failure to the institution of childcare foreshadows a
series of institutions that will continually fail to protect young people.
Andrew Tudor offers a useful model for examining larger social struc-
tures and institutions in horror cinema. Mark Jancovich notes that Tudor’s
work moves beyond the ‘reliance on various forms of psychoanalysis and
their consequent emphasis on gender and the family’ to consider horror
cinema ‘within a far broader social and historical context’ (1996: 226). In
Tudor’s taxonomy, horror films generally fall into two categories: ‘secure’
and ‘paranoid’ (1989: 217). The secure horror film presents a world in
which ‘authorities [are] credible protectors of order’ (ibid.). When faced
with danger from an ‘external “distant” threat,’ authorities are able to use
their ‘effective expertise’ to defeat the threat, leading to a ‘closed’ narra-
tive with a clear resolution (ibid.). Since the expertise of authority is what
defeats the threat, the secure horror film focuses on the experts. Conversely,
the paranoid horror film features authorities who are not credible nor able to
contain the disorder brought about by the threat, which is this time ‘internal’
and/or ‘proximate’ (ibid.). Since the authorities are ineffectual, the narrative
lacks closure and remains open (ibid.). Also, paranoid horror focuses more
on the victims who are left to fend for themselves in the absence of effective
intervention from the authorities. Tudor argues that horror cinema slowly
transitioned from secure into paranoid over the course of several decades
and breaks down the history of the genre into three periods. The first period
of horror cinema, lasting from the 1930s to the 1950s, was predominantly
made up of secure horror. The second period, stretching from the late ’50s to
the early 1970s, was a time of transition between secure and paranoid when
the genre was ‘in a state of flux’ (218). The final period, from the late 1970s
onward, is dominated by paranoid horror.
Tudor reads Halloween as indicative of paranoid horror, claiming, ‘At
every turn, the world of Halloween . . . is thoroughly unreliable and inse-
cure’ (2002: 108), and many sources of paranoia in Halloween relate directly
to the film’s depiction of youth. One of the most significant of these is the
paranoid horror brought about by the ‘internal’ source of horror in the film,
which is Michael. Wood is frustrated because the film fails to develop the
idea that the middle-class bourgeois family may be responsible for Michael
and instead insists that Michael is pure evil, but Tudor’s model encourages
one to look beyond the family and consider larger social and institutional
structures. Despite its innocuous suburban veneer, Haddonfield rarely feels
 Familial and Societal Failure 39
like a safe place. As Sue Short describes it, Haddonfield is a place where
‘everyone seems to know each other’ but ‘no one can be called upon in a
time of crisis’ (2007: 52). In his analysis of Carpenter’s visual style, Sheldon
Hall discusses how Carpenter uses formal elements to heighten suspense
and anxiety throughout Halloween. He argues, ‘Halloween’s refusal to
develop the psychology of its characters concentrates our attention on their
role as components in a design or machine’ (2004: 70). To this end, Carpen-
ter’s camera tracks his characters through a wide vista of small-town uncer-
tainty and unease (70–75). Describing Halloween’s mise-en-scène, Jameson
writes, ‘Virtually every shot contains corners, apertures, fillable black holes
fraught with ghastly potentiality’ (Jameson 2009). As Jameson explains,
Carpenter takes advantage of the anamorphic frame, staging elements in a
panorama that makes ‘unverbalizable’ connections between characters and
their surroundings (Jameson 2012). Halloween does not verbalize but nev-
ertheless conveys through its visuals that Haddonfield is an uncomfortably
open social space—a ‘geography of horror’ as Muir puts it (2000: 78)—in
which children are often left to fend for themselves.
Unease is visually conveyed when Laurie first appears. A crane shot drifts
to the left and slowly descends to reveal the Strode house. Laurie exits, text-
books in hand, presumably leaving for school. As she walks away, her father
(Peter Griffith), a real estate agent, tells her to drop off a key at the Myers
house. Laurie says she will remember as she walks down the sidewalk away
from the camera, shrinking into the distance. As Laurie turns a corner, the
film cuts to a far-away shot—somewhere between a long and extreme long
shot—of Laurie crossing the street. From this shot length, Laurie is dwarfed
by her surroundings: tall trees looming overhead, a wide street completely
empty besides a few cars parked along the curb, everything eerily quiet
as Carpenter’s score plays nervously on the soundtrack. While the camera
tracks with Laurie, she approaches a corner where Tommy runs toward her
from deep in the frame along an intersecting sidewalk. This shot is the first
extended look the film offers of present-day Haddonfield, and it sets a mood
of agoraphobic dread for these youths. A parental figure, Laurie’s father,
appears briefly as Laurie leaves the house, but he does not offer much com-
fort or affirmation, as he orders her to perform a task for him. Youngsters
are left to walk the streets alone.
Later, Laurie, Lynda, and Annie walk home from school along a street
with overhanging trees that throw shadows on them, suggesting that even in
the middle of the suburbs, danger looms ever-present (see Figure 2.2). The
tall trees seem to cut them off from the rest of the neighborhood, which may
be just as well since all of Haddonfield feels empty and ominous. When
Michael drives in the station wagon he stole during his escape, his presence
makes literal the danger that has already been intimated. As Paul explains,
40 Familial and Societal Failure

Figure 2.2 The shadowy streets of Haddonfield

Halloween tells a story of ‘terror in isolation’ and the ‘terror of suburban life’
(1994: 323), and Carpenter uses stylistic elements to visually depict (to use
Jameson’s term) the ‘unverbalizable’ terror of children stranded in an empty
world in a way that dialogue cannot. Wood denounces the film because he
feels it attempts to disavow any suggestion that Michael is a product of his
environment. But the way the film reveals the emptiness of Haddonfield’s
social world makes it easy to believe that it produced Michael, a killer bereft
of emotion.
For young people, Haddonfield appears even bleaker when one considers
the indifference of the town’s institutions. Prominent among institutions that
play a large role in the lives of youths is education. In youth films, the school
is, as Shary describes it, ‘a symbolic site of social evolution, with young
people learning from and rebelling against their elders (and each other) in
the ongoing cycle of generational adjustment and conflict’ (2014: 29). Only
three scenes in Halloween take place at school. Two of these scenes are at
Haddonfield High, and the other unfolds at the intermediary school. Even
though these scenes are brief, they reveal a great deal about the harsh world
young people must navigate in Haddonfield.
The first high school scene finds Laurie in an English class. As the cam-
era slowly tracks toward her sitting in a desk near the back of the room, the
teacher (who is only heard, never seen) lectures about two authors, Costaine
and Samuels,4 and the different ways they write about the concept of fate.
Laurie makes a note, absentmindedly glances out the window, and notices
Michael, standing behind the station wagon and staring at her. Noticeably
uncomfortable, Laurie meekly glances around as if to see if anyone else
notices and looks out the window again, only to see Michael still there.
 Familial and Societal Failure 41
Perhaps because she suspects Laurie of daydreaming, the teacher asks Lau-
rie a question. Taken off guard, Laurie asks, ‘Ma’am?’ The teacher, sound-
ing somewhat irritated, demands, ‘Answer the question.’ Laurie offers a
thoughtful response, and the teacher replies, ‘That’s right.’ The teacher’s
approval is of little comfort for Laurie, however. She looks out the window
again, and even though Michael is now gone, she is still uneasy and shakes
her head, as if trying to fend off a feeling of dread. This is the first time Lau-
rie sees Michael, and the teacher’s failure to recognize the threat at this key
moment foreshadows how adults in the film will remain largely oblivious
to the danger facing the youth of their town.
The two other school scenes—one at the intermediary school and one
at high school—are equally revealing. The scene in Laurie’s classroom is
immediately followed by a scene at Tommy’s intermediary school that finds
Tommy being bullied by three schoolmates. After they decide they have tor-
mented him enough, they run away, and one of the boys runs into Michael,
who has apparently been watching the incident from behind a chain-link
fence. Michael lets the boy go and continues to follow Tommy from a dis-
tance as Tommy walks dejectedly away from school.5 There are no authority
figures around at Tommy’s school to watch out for bullies or masked men
stalking students as they walk home. These two school scenes—one with
Laurie, one with Tommy—create the sense of a world where youths are in
danger and adult authority figures are indifferent or entirely absent. A later
scene—the third and final scene in an educational setting—succinctly cap-
tures the atmosphere of Haddonfield’s educational system. At the end of the
day at Haddonfield High, Laurie and Lynda begin their walk home by pass-
ing through a dark tunneled outdoor hallway. Their exit from school plays
out in one shot that is approximately 30 seconds long. For the first half of the
shot, Laurie and Lynda are enveloped in total darkness before they emerge.
This shot subtly indicates that in Haddonfield, education is not a source of
enlightenment; instead, it is one of those ‘fillable black holes fraught with
ghastly potentiality’ that Jameson notices in Carpenter’s mise-en-scène. In
Halloween, education is an institution that does not recognize the threats
that Haddonfield’s young people face; rather, it turns a blind eye toward
these perils, leaving its youths vulnerable to danger. When one considers
the darkness at the heart of Haddonfield’s institutions, it is not difficult to
imagine how this environment produced Michael, a child with, as Loomis
describes, ‘the darkest eyes.’
Another notable hallmark of paranoid horror in Halloween is the fail-
ure of authorities as ‘credible, protectors of order’ (Tudor 1989: 217), as
the film depicts the inability of law enforcement to stop Michael’s killing
spree. In Halloween, law enforcement is represented by Leigh Brackett, a
character who plays a dual role in the story: he is Haddonfield’s chief law
42 Familial and Societal Failure
enforcement officer and Annie’s father. In terms of the narrative, Brackett is
one of Carpenter’s most deftly economical choices as he collapses the father
figure into the representative of the law, thus allowing one character to rep-
resent two institutions—the family and the law—that fail the young people
of Haddonfield. Several commentators have noted the absence of parents
and parental figures in the film.6 Reynold Humphries attempts to extrapolate
theories for why Michael does what he does based on the little informa-
tion the film offers about the Myers family (2002: 140). Similarly, one of
the primary aspects bothering Wood about the film is its denial to explore
the family as an institution that attempts to produce ‘“ideal” inhabitants’ of
heteronormative capitalist patriarchy but often produces neurotics (1979a:
26, 8). However, Carpenter’s choice not to explore the Myers family as a
normalizing institution that produced a monster in Michael, combined with
his choice to make the most prominent father figure in the film a police
officer, may signal that Carpenter is more interested in critiquing societal
institutions and their unreliability than family dynamics and their impact on
the young individual.
The untrustworthy nature of the police is underscored when Brackett first
appears. As Laurie and Annie walk home from school, Laurie sees Michael
peeking from behind a hedge. When Annie investigates, there is nothing
there. Annie goes into her house, and as Laurie walks away, she keeps sus-
piciously glancing over her shoulder. She begins walking backward, afraid
to turn away from the hedge for a second, and walks into Brackett, who sud-
denly appears behind her. Laurie lets out a yelp and profusely apologizes.
Brackett assures her it is all right, but there is something subtly sinister when
Brackett grins and says, ‘You know, it’s Halloween. I guess everyone’s enti-
tled to one good scare, huh?’ The scene suggests that law enforcement may
be as much of a threat to Haddonfield’s young people as Michael is. As
David Woods notes, many of Carpenter’s films depict a struggle between
‘ordinary citizens’ and ‘the forces which threaten them,’ creating a ‘divide
between an “us” and a “them”’ (2004: 22). Woods explains that the ‘they’
in Carpenter’s films is often either a force ‘identified with the supernatural’
or ‘an officially sanctioned authority’ (ibid.). Halloween has both: Michael
and the Haddonfield police.
Halloween’s teenagers are placed in opposition to inept and corrupt social
institutions throughout the film. In terms of societal structures, Barry Keith
Grant argues that Carpenter’s films resemble those of Howard Hawks, but
with a key difference. As Grant explains, ‘Hawks’s characters may live
briefly on an existential precipice, but the safety net of dominant ideol-
ogy always is stretched underneath’ (2004: 13). Grant offers Hawks’s 1948
Western Red River as an example of this schema: ‘Hawks’s cowboys may be
cut off from the law while on the cattle drive in Red River, but ultimately the
 Familial and Societal Failure 43
film endorses entrepreneurial capitalism’ (ibid.). Characters in Carpenter’s
films are also ‘distanced from normal legal and social structures,’ but the
difference is Carpenter’s films depict ‘those very structures as the locus of
corruption’ (ibid.). Carpenter’s protagonists are often outcasts from main-
stream society for various reasons. For example, Ethan Bishop’s (Austin
Stoker) blackness differentiates him from the rest of the police force in
Assault on Precinct 13, and Nada (Roddy Piper) is left out of luxuries of the
elite class because of his working poor status in They Live (1988). However,
the films quickly reveal that the legal and social structures have been cor-
rupted; the police are mostly worthless in Precinct 13, and the elite class
in They Live is revealed as alien invaders. The ages of Laurie, Annie, and
Lynda make them outcasts, cut off by their parents and set adrift in lonely—
and deadly—Haddonfield on Halloween night and left to ‘face monumental
horrors alone’ (Cumbow 2000: 54).
The divide between youths and law enforcement is illustrated by a scene
that takes place when Annie and Laurie are driving to their babysitting gigs.
As Annie and Laurie share a joint, Annie is shocked to see her father with
a group of police officers outside of a hardware store downtown. After
putting away the joint, the girls pull up to the curb and hear a loud alarm
ringing. Raising her voice to be heard above the alarm, Annie asks, ‘What
happened?’:

Brackett: Someone broke into the hardware store, probably kids.

Annie: You blame everything on kids.
Brackett: Well, now, all they took was some Halloween masks,
rope, and a couple of knives. Who do you think it was?
Annie (to Laurie): It’s hard growing up with a cynical father.

Carpenter’s depiction of the police is more cynical than Brackett could ever
hope to be. While the scene offers some comic relief, it also demonstrates
that battle lines have been drawn between the young and the establishment
in Haddonfield. Annie’s complaint that Brackett ‘blames everything on kids’
suggests that this conflict has arisen many times in the past: something goes
wrong, and youths are to blame. As Woods would say, the teens of Haddonfield
are ‘us,’ and the police and adult authorities are ‘them.’ As Leeder observes,
Carpenter creates ‘separate spheres of the adolescent and adult,’ and the audi-
ence ‘can see how neatly those lines are divided in Halloween’ (2014: 75).
The ringing alarm makes conversation between Annie and Brackett almost
impossible, as if they are speaking two different languages. The sound barrier
represents an institutional barrier dividing youths and the police.
If law enforcement is a threat to youth in Haddonfield, however, it is mostly
because of incompetence rather than corruption. As a representative of law
44 Familial and Societal Failure
enforcement, Brackett proves to be ineffectual throughout the film. At the
hardware store, Brackett is incorrect about the identity of perpetrator behind
the break-in. It is not some anonymous teenage troublemakers who steal the
masks, knives, and rope, but Michael, who uses one of the stolen knives to
murder Brackett’s daughter only a few hours later. As Roche puts it, Brackett
‘fails to protect his daughter, her friends, and the community’ (2014: 72).
Brackett’s misidentification of the culprit provides another example of how a
Haddonfield institution places its young people in danger with its ineptitude.
After Annie and Laurie continue on their ride, Laurie worries that Brackett
smelled the joint they were smoking, saying fretfully, ‘Think he knew? I’m
sure he could smell it. . . . Did you see the look on his face?’ Annie scoffs,
‘He always looks like that,’ confident that her father can be easily fooled.
Michael’s killing spree takes place completely under the nose of Brackett and
the rest of the police force. The Haddonfield police force offers a textbook
example of ‘failed human intervention’ when facing the threat, a trademark
of paranoid horror (Tudor 1989: 217). But it is possible that the police force
is not entirely to blame for failing to stop Michael since Brackett is given
some bad advice from a representative of another failed social institution.
Perhaps the most prominent representative of a failed, corrupt social insti-
tution in Halloween is Dr. Loomis. Ostensibly, Loomis should be the hero of
the film. As Leeder notes, he is ‘the film’s key figure of patriarchal author-
ity’ but ‘he, like Brackett, is a failed patriarch’ (2014: 76) (see Figure 2.3).
He does not exhibit the ‘effective expertise’ of the authorities in secure hor-
ror and offers only ‘ineffective expertise’ characteristic of paranoid horror
(Tudor 1989: 217). Loomis’s lack of expertise is observable when he first
appears. On the night of 30 October 1978, Loomis and a nurse are driving

Figure 2.3 Brackett and Loomis: Ineffective expertise

 Familial and Societal Failure 45
to Smith’s Grove hospital through the dark and stormy night to transfer
Michael to stand trial as an adult. Loomis seems calm and collected, though
his words to the nurse are uneasy:

Loomis: Just try and understand what we’re dealing with

here. Don’t underestimate it.
Nurse: Don’t you think we could refer to ‘it’ as ‘him’?
Loomis: If you say so.
Nurse (sarcastically): Your compassion’s overwhelming, doctor.

Loomis’s reference to Michael as ‘it’ suggests that he gave up on Michael

a long time ago. He later tells Brackett, ‘I spent eight years trying to reach
him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I real-
ized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.’ In
Wood’s reading of the film as reactionary, Loomis’s diagnosis of Michael is
key to interpreting the film. Wood believes the film suggests ‘the possibil-
ity [emphasis in original] of psychoanalytical explanation’ for Michael’s
crimes, leaving ‘two possible explanations: either he is the devil, possessed
of supernatural powers; or he has not spent the last nine [sic] years . . .
staring blankly at a wall meditating further horrors’ (1979a: 26). The latter
option would suggest Michael’s evil is ‘what his analyst has been projecting
on to him for the past nine [sic] years’ (1979a: 26). But Wood feels that the
film ultimately agrees with Loomis’s character that Michael is inhumanly
evil, as opposed to normality’s shadow, and trying to read the film against
Loomis ‘does not constitute a legitimate (let alone coherent) reading of the
actual film’ (ibid.).7
This reading is more legitimate and coherent, however, if one considers
the broader view of the failure of institutions and how these institutions fail
young people in specific. Muir writes:

The victims of Michael Myers in Halloween do not expect to die at

the hands of such a monster because they live in what should be a
safe society. There is medicine, science, law, education; there is the
security blanket of parental protection. In Halloween, none of those
protections function adequately. Parents are universally absent, the law
is completely ineffective, and science has released (but not created) the
monster which stalks the streets. Thus teenagers Laurie, Annie, Lynda
and Bob have no protection at all from Michael Myers.
(2000: 77)

The parents and educational system in Haddonfield fail the youth. The
law does as well, by allowing Michael to escape. He may not have had an
46 Familial and Societal Failure
opportunity if the law did not arbitrarily dictate that he appear before a judge
on his 21st birthday. On the way to Smith’s Grove, the nurse asks Loomis
why they are going through all of the trouble of taking Michael before a
judge if he has no hope of parole, to which Loomis replies, ‘Because that is
the law,’ the tone in his voice suggesting that he agrees the process is per-
functory.8 Perhaps it only makes sense, then, that the science of psychology
fails them as well. Muir notes that science does not create the monster in
Halloween; it only lets it escape. However, given how incorrect and wrong-
headed Loomis is about everything else, the possibility that Smith’s Grove
made an already disturbed child even worse is not out of the question.
Ultimately, Loomis does not do anything particularly well. He quickly
loses his composure at Smith’s Grove, snapping at the nurse and running to
a call box and leaving her alone. She is immediately attacked by Michael,
who steals the car and drives off, leaving a panicked Loomis to impotently
exclaim, ‘He’s gone. He’s gone from here. The evil is gone.’ A later scene
with Dr. Wynn (Robert Phalen), an administrator at Smith’s Grove, shows
that Loomis was unsuccessful in convincing their officials that Michael
was a dangerous patient (which may not have been Loomis’s fault, but rep-
resents another institutional failure either way). When he arrives in Had-
donfield and meets up with Brackett at the hardware store (a scene of law
enforcement failure), he fails to see Michael drive by right behind him.
When he convinces Brackett to take the threat of Michael seriously, he
instructs Brackett to not inform the local news media so as to not cause a
panic when awareness of a killer on the loose may have helped. At the old
Myers house, Loomis believes Michael will return to the house and elects
to wait for him, but Michael never returns. After waiting behind a hedge for
over an hour, Loomis looks over his shoulder and notices the station wagon
Michael stole from Smith’s Grove, which leads one to wonder why it takes
Loomis so long to see an automobile parked within eyeshot of where he has
been standing for hours.9 While it is true that lapses in judgement like Loo-
mis’s are what make many horror narratives possible as audiences are asked
to suspend disbelief the preponderance of institutional failure in the film
is overwhelming. If Halloween does not, as Wood argues, give the viewer
a critique of the bourgeois patriarchal family, perhaps it offers something
broader: a cynical appraisal of the systemic shortcomings of dominant ide-
ology as this is personified by its key institutions.

Conclusion
While Wood and Tudor offer two of the most prominent methodological
paradigms in the study of horror cinema, this chapter concludes that Tudor’s
framework produces a more useful reading of Halloween. Utilizing a method-
ology informed by a fusion of ideas derived from the work of Marx and Freud,
 Familial and Societal Failure 47
Wood reads Halloween as an endorsement of bourgeois values, via its depic-
tion of Michael as ‘pure evil’ rather than as a monster created by repression
required to sustain the middle-class, heteronormative family. If the film had
depicted the monster not as pure evil but as ‘normality’s shadow,’ one could
read it, according to Wood’s rubric, as a ‘progressive’ horror film containing a
critique of capitalist patriarchy. Instead, Wood classifies the film as politically
‘reactionary,’ not only because of its refusal to explore the social forces that
shaped Michael into a killer, but also because female characters like Judith,
Annie, and Lynda are ostensibly punished for their sexual promiscuity.
Tudor’s framework produces a better reading of Halloween that draws
attention both to Carpenter’s critique of social institutions and to the ground-
work Carpenter lays for future teen slasher films. Rather than reading the
film as a fundamentally conservative text, Tudor’s taxonomy of ‘secure’
versus ‘paranoid’ horror reveals Halloween as a film deeply skeptical of
established social institutions because they consistently fail young people.
As a result, young people are cut off from any protection adult institutions
could offer and left to fend for themselves. As this chapter demonstrates,
this scenario is partly essayed through Carpenter’s visuals alone. As photo-
graphed by Carpenter’s team, Haddonfield is an eerily quiet and shadowy
place, even in the daytime. Additionally, Halloween’s story exposes a whole
parade of institutions—education, law, and science—as ineffectual in stop-
ping the threat. In future teen slashers, the separation from adult institutions
like the law is often geographic, as teen characters travel to the woods or
similar isolated environments and are beset by a killer there. In Haddonfield,
young people do not need to go far in order to be isolated; just a step outside
the door will suffice. In this way, Halloween is both typical and unique of
youth horror’s depiction of institutional failure.
As this chapter argues, Tudor’s model draws out how Halloween taps
into young people’s fears that the institutions that are supposed to nurture,
educate, and protect them will ultimately fail them, especially when young
people need them the most. As authorities fail and expertise proves ineffec-
tual, Tudor’s model of paranoid horror shifts the focus from the experts who
should be able to stop the monster to the victims who are forced to face it
on their own. The next chapter examines these victims and argues that some
of them die not because of their promiscuity but because they betray other
members of the group. In an inhospitable place like Haddonfield, teenagers
have to watch their backs because adults are unwilling or incapable.

Notes
1 Canadian filmmaker Bob Clark directed this film two years before Black Christmas.
2 See Polan (2007).
3 See Britton (1979).
48 Familial and Societal Failure
4 These authors are imaginary.
5 This scene is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
6 See Paul (1994); Cumbow (2000); Short (2007).
7 Chapter 4 discusses how director Rob Zombie attempts such a reading with his
2007 remake.
8 Chapter 3 discusses the juvenile justice system in more detail.
9 See Leeder (2014: 83–87) for a more detailed discussion of Loomis.
3 A Triptych of Youth
Teenagers, Preadolescents, and
Young Adults in Halloween

The previous chapter discussed the ways in which Halloween resembles

the ‘paranoid’ horror film as described by Andrew Tudor. Many of these
‘paranoid’ characteristics are among the film’s foundational themes: the
ineffective expertise of authority figures, the threat that comes from within,
and the lack of closure at the narrative’s end, with the monster left unde-
feated. However pertinent all these factors are, the aspect of ‘paranoid’ hor-
ror that is perhaps most prominent in Halloween is the focus on the victim
group. Tudor explains that in ‘secure’ horror, there is a ‘centre-periphery
structure. Those at the centre are conventionally expected to be capable of
autonomous action; those at the periphery require the protection of cen-
trally located expertise’ (1989: 215). ‘Paranoid’ horror reverses this schema.
Since the authorities and the experts cannot defeat the monster or protect
those on the periphery, the focus shifts to the victim group, left to fend for
themselves. In Halloween, this victim group is made up of young people
who are abandoned at the periphery by Haddonfield’s center: its adults and
social institutions.
The victim group in any horror film is important, but the young people in
Halloween occupy a significant place in horror cinema history because they
constitute the victim group in what is generally considered to be the pro-
genitor of the slasher film. The teen slasher film came along after a quarter
century of profitable youth horror films, and catering to this audience made
young people the ‘prime movie-going demographic’ (Nowell 2011: 34). In
the past, horror films for youth audiences did not always feature young
people, but in slasher films, they became an essential component, compris-
ing the majority of the victim group. As Richard Nowell puts it, ‘On screen
depictions of the target audience were perhaps the most valuable hooks’ that
a film targeted at youth audiences could have (36). Understanding the value
of this hook, Carpenter and Hill prioritized the veracity of Halloween’s
youth characters. The film’s success suggests Halloween’s youth characters
connected with audiences.
50 A Triptych of Youth
Teenagers are not the only engaging youth characters in the film, as it
also features preadolescents and young adults in compelling roles. If as
Nowell argues, on screen depictions of the target audience were a valuable
hook in the youth film market, the presence of preadolescent characters
suggests that the makers of Halloween may have had their eye on youth
audiences outside the teenage demographic. Yablans believed that slasher
films were highly appealing to pre-teens, and in a 1980 interview, Yablans
notes that kids from ages 11 to 12 have the ‘greatest response’ to teen
slasher movies (quoted in Nowell 2011: 40). He thought his ‘Babysitter
Murders’ idea would be appealing because ‘everybody had either been a
babysitter or been a baby’ (Anchor Bay 2013b), with his comment about
everyone having ‘been a baby’ suggesting Halloween’s appeal beyond the
teenage audience. Another dimension of Halloween’s depiction of youth is
how Michael Myers embodies the young adult. The film’s opening tempts
one to think of 21-year-old Michael (erroneously identified in the credits
as being 23 years old)1 as an overgrown child, the fixed stare on his 6-year-
old face after he murders Judith suggesting he will remain frozen in time.
However, details in the film identify Michael as a young adult, broken by
a failed criminal justice system and resisting the responsibilities of becom-
ing an adult. The roles played by preadolescents and young adults in Hal-
loween contribute to the film’s multifaceted depiction of youth and bears
closer examination.
The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how Halloween’s youth char-
acters are more complex and richer than they may first appear. While Clo-
ver’s concept of the ‘Final Girl’ has proven useful in slasher film analysis,
this chapter contends that relying on this mode of analysis runs the risk of
overlooking other members of the victim group, besides the Final Girl, who
may be equally compelling. This chapter instead examines the core teen-
age group as examples of the character types that ‘permeate the subgenre’
of ‘youth in school’ movies (Shary 2014: 34–35), looking at Laurie as the
‘nerd,’ Annie as the ‘rebel,’ and Lynda as the ‘popular girl.’ This approach
unveils nuanced aspects of the girls’ relationship and offers insight into what
goes wrong in their relationship to allow in a destructive interloper like
Michael.
This chapter also examines the film’s two preadolescent characters,
Tommy and Lindsay. While the depiction of teenagers in the film is focused
on female characters, this chapter holds that the opposite is true of the pre-
adolescent duo, as Tommy is the one who has a discernable character arc.
Finally, this chapter examines Michael as a youth character, considering
him as a young adult. This approach reveals Michael as a figure broken by
a failed criminal justice system—another example of institutional failure in
the film—and unable to enter the adult world. Ultimately, the chapter argues
 A Triptych of Youth 51
that, while it cannot lay claim to being the first slasher film, Halloween pro-
vides a range of character types from which future slasher films would draw.

The Teenage Trinity: Laurie, Annie, and Lynda

One of the factors that led Yablans to commission a female teen-centric hor-
ror screenplay from Carpenter and Hill was the box office success of Carrie
two years previous, and some have compared Halloween’s characters to
those in Carrie, drawing conclusions about the characters in Halloween that
diverge and converge. Timothy Shary opines that Halloween ‘evacuate[s]
the expansive subgenre [of youth horror] of the character development seen
in Carrie’ (2005: 57). According to Shary, Carpenter’s film ‘[does] not pro-
vide much background on the featured characters other than their ages, their
senses of hedonism or puritanism (the four who are murdered have or are
planning to have sex, and the survivor is dutifully babysitting), and their
ignorance to the danger at hand’ (2014: 163–164). Danny Peary feels dif-
ferently. Writing in 1981, Peary calls Laurie, Annie, and Lynda some of
‘the most believable teenagers’ in film and writes, ‘[I]t’s a real treat watch-
ing these three Middle America teenagers jabber away about boys, school,
dates, sex, etc. They are witty . . . smart . . . and odd in a conventional
way’ (1981: 125). While Shary feels the characters in Carrie are more fully
realized, Peary argues that Carrie exudes a ‘hostility toward teenage girls’
that is absent in Halloween (ibid.). Shary and Peary do agree on one thing,
however: the deaths of the sexually active girls and the survival of the duti-
ful babysitter are problematic elements of Halloween. Shary’s description
of the film’s characters seems to divide them neatly into punished hedonists
and rewarded puritans (2014: 163), and Peary denounces the film’s ‘puri-
tanical “morality”’ (1981: 126).
Both of these viewpoints need nuance. Early academic analysis of the
slasher film by scholars such as Clover and Dika proposes that teenagers in
slasher films—including those in Halloween—can be neatly divided into
guilty victims and virginal survivors (Clover 1987; Dika 1990), but in many
slasher films, these divisions are not clear cut. Complex characterizations
are a part of the slasher film from the beginning. For instance, Clover argues
that the ‘Final Girl,’ that is, the boyish, virginal character who is rewarded
for her ‘purity’ by surviving until the end, is a staple of slasher cinema.
However, if one considers Black Christmas as the first slasher, Jess (Oliva
Hussey), a young woman pregnant by her unstable boyfriend (Keir Dullea)
and considering the termination of both the pregnancy and the relationship,
does not resemble the typical Final Girl.
Even though Halloween’s Laurie Strode more closely resembles the typical
Final Girl, Halloween’s characters are also more complex than they may first
52 A Triptych of Youth
appear, and the film’s group of teenagers merits examination that goes beyond
classifying them as hedonistic or puritanical. While Peary is correct that Hal-
loween is bereft of the monstrous female bullies of Carrie, there are tensions
among the group that cause them to fracture during a time of crisis. The victim
group in Halloween is a teenage version of the type of groups that find them-
selves under siege in Carpenter’s other films, which often feature a ‘small,
enclosed community . . . pitted against a seemingly irresistible and relentless
external force that is bent on its destruction’ (Smith 2004: 36). In films like
Assault on Precinct 13 and Prince of Darkness (1987), Carpenter’s ragtag
communities stick together and overcome the threat. However, Halloween
finds itself among films like Carpenter’s The Thing, in which the group is too
fragmented to defeat the threat. These fissures in Halloween’s victim group
make the film a more nuanced presentation of youth than its spartan plot
suggests, as it depicts the ways in which young people must navigate a hos-
tile world in which their cohort both supports and disappoints them. Before
proceeding to a more detailed examination of each member of Halloween’s
central trio, the Final Girl must be addressed, if for no other reason, because
she is likely the most well-known character archetype of the teen slasher.

Final Things First: Laurie as Prototypical ‘Final Girl’

Coined by Clover in 1987, the Final Girl is the rarest of creatures: a piece of
academic jargon that made its way into popular culture vernacular. Clover
observes that most slasher films feature a female protagonist who is the last
one left after all members of the victim group have been killed off. This
young woman survives long enough for help to arrive, or she defeats the
killer herself. Either way, she is the Final Girl, the last of the teen victim
group left alive. Clover notes that the Final Girl is differentiated from the
rest of the victim group in several ways. She is ‘presented from the outset
as the main character’ and is ‘the only character to be developed in any
psychological detail’ (2015: 88, 92). Unlike her friends, the Final Girl is a
bookish wallflower who is not sexually active (88).
Clover explores the possible function the Final Girl plays for slasher film
audiences, whom she assumes are mostly male. At first, the audience sees
the plot unfold from the perspective (the ‘I-camera’) of the killer, which is
coded as male (92). As the plot progresses, however, the perspective shifts
from the killer to the Final Girl, as the audience roots for her to defeat the
killer, a process Clover calls ‘cross-gender identification’ (93). Throughout
this process, the gender of both the killer and the Final Girl are fluid. From
the outset, both characters have masculine and feminine characteristics. For
instance, the Final Girl often possesses ‘boyish’ qualities, one of which is
her virginity; Clover argues that any sort of penetration would make her too
 A Triptych of Youth 53
uncomfortably feminine to act as a ‘congenial double for the adolescent
male’ (99). On the flipside, the killer’s virginity represents a lack of virility
that threatens to make him feminine. When the Final Girl wrests phallic
power away from the killer and defeats him in the end, she satisfies the
male audience because she has ‘not just manned herself . . . [S]he unmans
an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with’ (96). At the
same time, however, her femininity also plays an important role in this pro-
cess. Since she is a female character, the Final Girl is allowed to cry, whim-
per, and scream in abject terror, displaying emotions men are forbidden
to express in patriarchal culture (96–97). Thus, the young male spectators
sublimate their fears and anxieties about growing up as the Final Girl makes
the harrowing journey from fearfully feminine childhood to the masculine
mastery of adulthood in their place. Clover’s article framed academic dis-
course surrounding the slasher film for many years.
Clover’s taxonomy seems to align with Halloween, and Laurie, the book-
ish and sexually hesitant main character of the film, seems the ideal example
of Clover’s Final Girl. As the first character the audience encounters when
the film opens on present-day Haddonfield, she is marked as the main char-
acter. Shortly after her character is introduced, Michael sees her as she runs
an errand at the old Myers house and fixates on her, signaling that she will
be his main target. The film also stresses her bookish characteristics. When
called on in the classroom, Laurie answers the teacher’s question with ease
(even though a masked man lurking around outside the window spooks her),
leaving little doubt about her acumen as a student. As she and her friends
walk home from school, Laurie carries a huge pile of books, and Lynda
pokes fun at her: ‘Oh, look at you! Look at all the books you have! You need
a shopping cart to get home!’ Her intelligence interferes with her love life,
however. In regards to her lack of dates, Laurie says, ‘Guys think I’m too
smart.’ While Laurie is not ‘boyish’ (outside of her implied virginity), she
neatly fits Clover’s description of the typical Final Girl. The confrontation
between Laurie and Michael fits Clover’s schema as well; in fact, Clover
uses Laurie’s defeat of Michael as the example of the struggle for phal-
lic power that takes place between the Final Girl and the killer (96). In a
1980 interview, Carpenter seems to foreshadow Clover’s hypothesis: ‘[Lau-
rie’s] the one that’s killed him . . . because all the repressed sexual energy
starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy’ (quoted in
McCarthy 1980: 23–24). Indeed, it is difficult to overlook the phallic nature
of Michael’s attacks on his victims and how Laurie turns this power against
him by penetrating him with a knitting needle, a hanger, and his own knife
(see Figure 3.1). Clover says Laurie’s penetration of Michael stands in for
the sex act for the male viewer, who is now inaugurated into manhood via
the Final Girl.
54 A Triptych of Youth

Figure 3.1 Laurie, the final girl

While Clover’s formula offers a useful mode of analysis, there are sev-
eral blind spots in her argument, and addressing these blind spots forces
a consideration of the representation of youth in Halloween—specifically,
its representation of girlhood—from a different perspective. As discussed
in Chapter 1, Nowell notes that ‘there are . . . several economic factors
that point to the figure of the dynamic and heroic female being mobilized
to appeal . . . to female youth’ in the first slasher film cycle (2011: 128).
Clover’s argument is predicated on a majority of the slasher film’s audience
being male, which Nowell’s research demonstrates was not the case; great
pains were taken by slasher film producers to appeal to female audiences,
whose business was necessary for box office success. This drive to attract
female audiences would only increase as the slasher film cycle took off
after the release of Friday the 13th. Nowell points out that a majority of
heroines from these teen slashers—like Prom Night and Hell Night (DeSim-
one, 1981)—are quite different from the image of the virginal tomboy as
described by Clover. Actually, the teen slasher most often featured ‘heroines
that exhibited an abundance of traditionally feminine traits’ (207).
When Clover considers female slasher audiences in her analysis, she
hypothesizes that perhaps ‘females respond to the text (the literal) and males
the subtext (the figurative)’ (2015: 101). Even if this is the case, the text is
still worth examination since the text shows the plot and story elements
filmmakers utilized to attract female audiences (Nowell 2011: 70). As such,
it may be best at this point to depart from an analysis of the Final Girl, if
only because its focus on the virginal survivor runs the risk of dismissing
other female characters in the film as expendable bimbos. The next section,
focusing on Laurie in relation to Annie and Lynda, argues that, far from
being one-dimensional fodder for Michael’s knife, Annie and Lynda are
 A Triptych of Youth 55
more complicated than they first seem. Rather than focusing on Laurie as
the Final Girl in relation to the killer, this section will begin by considering
Laurie as a ‘nerd,’ a stereotypical character from the school film, in order
to unveil her relationship with Annie and Lynda and place her in a wider
context of the film’s teen characters, those literal elements of the films that
female audiences may enjoy most.

A Nerd Triumphant: Laurie Strode

Shary’s taxonomy of common character types in films featuring youths in
a school setting provides a useful framework for examining Halloween’s
teens. Shary argues that school films feature characters that generally fall
into one of five categories: the nerd, the delinquent, the rebel, the ‘popular’
type, and the athlete (2014: 34). The boundaries between these categories
are often challenged during the course of a film’s narrative, but they are
crossed and/or maintained only through great effort. Nerds must undertake
challenging journeys to be accepted by the popular crowd. Popular kids
must work hard to maintain their privileged position in the social hierarchy.
Laurie, Annie, and Lynda resemble the nerd, rebel, and ‘popular’ types,
respectively. However, Halloween is an atypical school film in that only
three scenes (all discussed in the previous chapter) take place in a school
setting. Outside of the school setting, the girls’ roles are less fixed, creating a
sense of fluidity as the nerd, rebel, and popular type interact with each other
across social categories. These border crossings make Halloween’s teens
more nuanced than they may initially appear.
Laurie, whom Clover would refer to as the Final Girl, often resembles
the nerd character type from 1980s school films, and focusing on Laurie as
a nerd rather than a Final Girl allows one to appreciate her in relation to her
other friends, not to the killer. Other teen characters poke fun at nerds for
‘blatant conformity to institutional expectations’ (37). Laurie strives to meet
expectations both inside and outside the classroom. The load of books she
totes home from school suggests that she excels in school. Outside of aca-
demics, she also strives to be a perfect babysitter. When babysitting Tommy,
Laurie brings a pumpkin, telling Annie that she plans to carve a jack-o-
lantern, the perfect, sanctioned Halloween activity. Annie quips, ‘I always
said you’d make a fabulous girl scout.’ Annie’s wisecracks aside, Laurie is
evidently babysitter extraordinaire, as evidenced by Tommy’s excitement to
be spending Halloween night with her. That morning, he excitedly rushes up
to her to barrage her with questions about what activities they will do that
night. Laurie clearly exceeds expectations at school and on the job. In their
pursuit of institutional perfection, nerds are often made fun of, picked on,
or bullied by fellow students, but things play out differently in Halloween.
56 A Triptych of Youth
Laurie’s character arc differs from the typical character trajectory of nerds in
school films. Shary argues that ‘in many ways, nerds face the greatest struggle
of all school characters because they must make the most forceful denials of
their true nature’ (ibid.). Conversely, Laurie never denies her true nature as she
strives to be an excellent student and the best babysitter in town. Her focus on
the job saves her life and, potentially, the lives of the children she watches over.
Immediately after Halloween’s release, many commentators accused the film
of conservatism since the character who performs her traditionally assigned
‘womanly duties’ (namely, keeping the household and watching the children)
survives while the other, sexually active characters are killed (Wood 1979a:
26; Rosenbaum 1979). However, Humphries suggests that the cinematic ‘girl
of eighteen [who wishes] to give priority to her studies over sex’ is the true
non-conformist (2002: 140). Similarly, Sue Short argues the slasher film is not
‘an attempt to regulate female sexuality’ but rather ‘a positive affirmation of
female capability [and] non-conformity’ whose ‘characterisation extols self-
realisation above conformity’ (2007: 46). Laurie is a self-realized nerd who
breaks from the conventions of the run-of-the-mill school film. Shary observes
that the only ‘option for all nerds’ is ‘change or perish’ (2014: 37), but Laurie
bucks this convention. She survives because she does not change.
Even though Laurie is a triumphant nerd, her agency is equivocated, but
even this shortcoming ultimately works to her advantage. To keep the nerdy
girl’s intelligence from becoming too intimidating for male characters,
school films often ‘alleviate [her smarts] through other liabilities,’ one of
which is often ‘shyness’ (38). Indeed, Laurie’s shyness and demure nature
temper the threat of her intelligence. As Laurie and Annie discuss Lau-
rie’s lack of a love life, Annie declares, ‘It’s tragic. You never go out. You
must have a small fortune stashed away from babysitting so much.’ Laurie
meekly responds, ‘Guys think I’m too smart.’ However, one may hear a hint
of jealousy in Annie’s voice when she speculates that Laurie could possibly
have stashed away some disposable income—that most cherished item of
a teenager’s world—because of babysitting duties. Thus, Laurie’s timidity
places her in a position where intelligence has forced her into hard work that
has paid off, turning her weakness into a strength. Miriam Forman-Brunell
argues that Laurie’s ‘autonomy [as a] female income [earner]’ makes her a
‘transgressor’ in patriarchal society (2002: 258). Perhaps Laurie’s transgres-
sive nature explains why she is best friends with Halloween’s rebel, Annie.

She’s a Rebel: Annie Brackett

Out of the main trio of teenagers, Annie is the rebel. Annie may not imme-
diately strike one as a rebel, but as Shary observes, the rebel is a ‘more
heterogeneous’ character type than others in the school film, appearing in
 A Triptych of Youth 57
many permutations (2014: 60). The fact that Annie’s father is the sheriff of
Haddonfield brings another dimension to Annie’s rebelliousness. In several
school films, rebels embody ‘demonstrative anger that seems to come from
the ignorance of wealthy parents’ (61). While Annie is not ‘angry’ exactly,
nor does she come from a wealthy family (being a police officer is most
often not a lucrative enterprise), a dynamic similar to this type of relation-
ship is at play between dope-smoking Annie and Sheriff Brackett. As dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, law enforcement is one of many institutions
that fails Haddonfield’s young people and leaves them in peril, so it stands
to reason that the child of the sheriff would be the most disenchanted and
cynical of the group.
Annie’s rebellious nature is clear from her first appearance as the trio of
girls walk home from school. Michael drives by in the station wagon he
stole from Smith’s Grove. He slows to a crawl as he passes, his shadowy
head craning to take a long look. The girls react to this moment in accor-
dance with their character types. Laurie is alert, being the first to notice the
car—the moment she sees it is emphasized as Carpenter’s theme begins to
play—and is nervous because she saw the car outside school earlier. Lynda
mistakes Michael for a male classmate whom she finds attractive, asking
‘Hey, isn’t that Devon Graham? . . . I think he’s cute.’ Irritated, Annie yells
at the car, ‘Hey jerk! Speed kills!’ Michael slams on the brakes and, with
a loud screech, brings the car to a halt. The girls are shaken by this abrupt
action and take a step back, in anticipation of what the driver may do next.
Annie is the first one to rebound and shift back into sarcastic mode, scoffing
‘God, can’t he take a joke?’ Laurie nervously scolds her, ‘You know, Annie,
someday you’re going to get us all in deep trouble,’ but Annie will not let
up, quipping, ‘I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor.’ Annie does
not change her demeanor for anyone, nor will she be silenced by anything,
including potential threats.
A careful look at the relationship between Annie and Laurie brings out
the richness of Annie’s characterization. Studies of the slasher film often
write off characters like Annie and Lynda as one-dimensional social types
and focus instead on binary relationships between the Final Girl and her
friends or the Final Girl and the killer (Dika 1990: 46–52). However, exact
binaries are difficult to come by in Halloween due to the permeable social
boundaries between character types in Haddonfield. Annie’s cocky atti-
tude, pot smoking, and active sexuality might suggest that she falls on an
entirely opposite side of the social spectrum as someone like nerdy Laurie,
but there are many ways in which the two overlap. During the girls’ walk
home from school, a small detail in the mise-en-scène suggests Laurie and
Annie are not entirely dissimilar. Laurie carries a stack of textbooks, but
Annie carries only one less than Laurie, as a bookless Lynda jokes, ‘Oh,
58 A Triptych of Youth
who needs books anyway?’ Annie is closer to Laurie on the intellectual
spectrum, casting into doubt the notion that Laurie is the binary opposite
of her friends. Another thing Annie and Laurie have in common is that they
are babysitters, even if they approach the vocation in extremely dissimilar
ways. Laurie takes a wholesome, interactive approach to babysitting; she
reads to Tommy, engages in various activities with him, and chides him,
in a motherly way, for reading comic books that he has hidden from his
parents. On the other hand, Annie’s approach is more hands-off and self-
centered; she plants Lindsey on the couch in front of the television so she
can talk on the phone.
Annie’s babysitting techniques become another manifestation of her
rebellion. Shary notes that rebels ‘are best defined by what they do not want
to do—conform—but if they are going to make it in society (or school)
they must find some means of surviving with their adamant individuality
intact, which necessitates the sophistication of their techniques’ (2014: 60).
This process describes Annie’s efforts to rebel while still functioning within
larger societal structures. Sexual rebellion is Annie’s primary motivation,
as she refuses to conform to the ideology of pre-marriage abstinence. She
uses her babysitting gigs as an opportunity to hook up with her boyfriend,
trysting in the bedrooms of unsuspecting couples trusting enough to leave
their children under her care. As Lynda puts it, the ‘only reason [Annie]
babysits is to have a place to . . .’ but is cut off before she can presum-
ably say ‘fuck.’ While her plan may be crude, Annie makes it work, as she
apparently amassed a great deal of sexual experience. When Laurie jokes
that Annie and Paul were ‘exploring uncharted territory’ in the boys’ locker
room, Lynda responds, ‘It’s been totally charted.’ Later, when Paul jokes
that sex is all Annie thinks about, she declares, ‘That’s not true. I think about
lots of things. Now why don’t we not stand here talking about them and get
down to doing them?’ Annie has mastered her domain. Her sophisticated
technique allows her to seemingly conform while retaining her rebellious
individuality, as she uses the babysitting business and all its attendant het-
eronormative practices of child-rearing and domestic maintenance to cloak
her sexual escapades.
Annie’s ability to shift gears and switch between different identities has
allowed her to thrive as a rebel in Haddonfield. There are several instances
of Annie’s expert transformations in the film. For instance, when Annie and
Laurie are driving along and sharing a joint, they run across Sheriff Brackett
investigating a break-in at the hardware store. Annie seems to lose her cool,
but only for a moment. She quickly recovers, instructs a coughing Laurie
to ‘be natural,’ and pulls up to her father, calmly and confidently. She even
cracks a couple of jokes at his expense. Annie exhibits similar dexterity
on the job. When Paul manages to sneak out of his parents’ home, Annie
 A Triptych of Youth 59
tells Lindsey that they are going to pick him up, but Lindsey resists. Irri-
tated, Annie says, ‘Look Lindsey, I thought we understood each other.’ This
exchange insinuates that Annie has carefully rehearsed and executed this
subterfuge with Lindsey before. Lindsey’s stubbornness poses a roadblock
for Annie, but she quickly steers around it, asking Lindsey if she would like
to watch television with Tommy and enticing her over to the Doyle resi-
dence, which leaves Laurie looking after both kids while Annie goes to pick
up Paul. Annie uses information gleaned from Laurie earlier in the evening
to bribe her into watching Lindsey, another bit of finesse that allows Annie
to pursue her own pleasure. Annie has the ability to maneuver and never lets
her guard down for long.
However, Annie does open up during an exchange with Laurie in an earlier
scene that may be the emotional center of Halloween. After their encounter
with Sheriff Brackett, the sun begins to set, and the two have a conversation
about the upcoming homecoming dance. Several visual cues suggest that
this exchange is of a different nature than ones earlier in the drive. Up to this
point, Carpenter shoots the car trip as a medium shot taken from a camera
mounted on the front of the car, which allows the viewer to see both Annie
and Laurie through the windshield (see Figure 3.2). Interspersed through-
out this master shot are cuts to medium close-ups on Annie and Laurie to
emphasize specific moments in their conversation. Carpenter deviates from
this three-shot pattern only twice with two shots taken from within the cab
of the car: one shot out the back window shows Michael’s station wagon fol-
lowing them, unbeknownst to the girls, and another shot taken from Annie’s
POV as they pull up to the hardware store to talk with Sheriff Brackett. For
the most part, however, Carpenter sticks with the three-shot pattern looking
through the car’s windshield.

Figure 3.2 Annie and Laurie drive to the job

60 A Triptych of Youth
Thus, when the camera significantly changes position and proximity to
the characters, the visual shift alone creates a different mood.2 The camera
sits in the back seat, shooting Annie and Laurie from behind. A master shot
captures the back of their heads in a medium close-up. Then, the sequence
settles into a shot/reverse shot pattern, cutting back and forth between close-
ups of Annie and Laurie at 45-degree angles looking over their shoulders.
The close-ups capture them in profile, which sometimes suggests aloof-
ness, but here the proximity conveys intimacy in Annie and Laurie’s friend-
ship. There is level of trust between them because Laurie allows herself to
be vulnerable here—a brave feat when dealing with a sarcastic cynic like
Annie—and Annie responds with what seems like genuine support. Laurie
asks Annie what she plans to wear to the dance. Annie replies, ‘I didn’t know
you thought about things like that, Laurie’ in her typical, teasing tone. Lau-
rie sits silently, glancing down at her lap. She then raises her eyes back to
Annie with a look of embarrassed longing, then looks back down. Laurie’s
silence and sad expression cause Annie to shift to an encouraging tone, say-
ing, ‘You know, you could ask somebody. . . . All you have to do is go up to
somebody and say, “Do you wanna go to the dance?”’ While there is a hint
of jocularity in Annie’s voice, this moment is the closest she comes to being
nurturing in the film. The sunlight coming through the windshield makes
her look almost angelic (see Figure 3.3). The conversation soon moves back
to the usual tone, with Annie teasing Laurie when she expresses romantic
interest in a classmate named Ben Tramer, but all the visual elements—the
proximity of the camera, the growing darkness in the car as day turns to
night, the sunset shining through the windshield and creating lens flares and
dappling the actors with bits of orange sunlight—give weight to this fleeting
moment of connection.

Figure 3.3 Annie’s advice

 A Triptych of Youth 61
The Labor of Popularity: Lynda
Neither Annie nor Laurie share a similar moment with Lynda, a character
who, out of the main trio of girls in Halloween, adheres most closely with a
recognizable character type in the typical school film: that of the ‘popular’
girl. Unlike Annie and Laurie, Lynda is not a babysitter, but that does not
mean she is not hard at work. She is busy with the task of being popular.
Lives of popular kids in school movies may seem effortless, but there is
‘the great effort involved in maintaining’ the status of being popular (Shary
2014: 74). The labor of being popular is noted early on in Halloween. Lynda
exits the school with Laurie and complains:

You know, it’s totally insane. We have three new cheers to learn in the
morning, the game is in the afternoon, I have to get my hair done at five,
and the dance is at eight! I’ll be totally wiped out!

Laurie jokes, ‘I don’t think you have enough to do tomorrow,’ to which

Lynda replies, ‘Totally!’ According to Lynda, being popular is exhausting
work. Lynda’s challenge of transforming from cheerleader into dancing
queen demonstrates how ‘popular students must appear and act acceptable
to a wide range of people’ (73).
Lynda boasts other features of the popular girl character type in terms of
looks and attitude (ibid.). She possesses the beauty of a typical popular girl.
Her long blonde hair and tall, slender frame set her apart from Laurie and
Annie. Lynda also has expensive taste in clothes. When Bob seductively says
he is going to rip her clothes off, Lynda pushes him away, yelling ‘Don’t rip
my blouse! It’s expensive, idiot!’ Lynda’s taste seems to square with Shary’s
observation that popular girls in film ‘usually come from wealthy back-
grounds’ (75).3 The viewer learns little about Lynda’s family—other than she
has a little brother—but her expensive blouse hints that she may come from a
well-off family, as does the fact that she does not seem to have a babysitting
job. For the most part, Lynda has the ‘agreeable attitude’ that Shary notices in
many popular kids in the movies (73). As played by Soles, Lynda is a lovable
character. Her winsome nature is epitomized by her constant use of the word
‘totally,’ which she peppers into her conversations to express a wide array of
emotions, ranging from exclamatory (‘I’ll be totally wiped out!’) to mischie-
vous (her chuckling ‘totally’ to Bob after they drunkenly outline a plan to
hook up) to angry (her ‘totally’ in support of Laurie’s comment that Annie’s
snarky attitude is going to get them into trouble one day) to orgasmic (her
breathy ‘that was fantastic . . . totally’ after having sex with Bob). Lynda’s
quirks and foibles separate her from popular girls in films who are sometimes
ultimately revealed to be mean and full of ‘ignorance and conceit’ (76).
62 A Triptych of Youth

Figure 3.4 ‘See anything you like?’

Lynda also gets to enjoy more deviance than some other popular girls,
even though she is still putting up appearances during these good times.
While some popular girls merely ‘[long] to be deviant’ (75), Lynda drinks
beer and has sex with Bob in the upstairs bedroom of the Wallace house.
However, one could argue that this sex is actually more performance, as
Lynda appears to climax after only a few seconds. Afterwards, Lynda
demands that Bob fetch a beer for her. As Bob is on this errand, Michael
attacks him in the kitchen, pinning him to the wall by running him through
with a butcher knife.4 Then, Michael, covered in a white sheet and wear-
ing Bob’s glasses, goes upstairs to Lynda who believes that it is Bob that
is under the sheet. As he stands silent in the doorway, Lynda exposes her
breasts and playfully asks, ‘See anything you like’ (see Figure 3.4)? Ever
the popular girl, Lynda continues to work. She offers her body to the gaze,
playing the role of sensual spectacle for both Bob/Michael and the viewer.
Even when in bed post-coitus, Lynda is still on the job.

Betrayal and Miscommunication: The Trinity Is Broken

Laurie, Annie, and Lynda are busy with the task of being teenage girls in
Haddonfield. Laurie has her hands full with school and babysitting. Annie
balances a babysitting career with sexual autonomy. Lynda’s labor to
be popular extends from the ballfield to the bedroom. Haddonfield can be
an inhospitable place for young people, but they are making it work. The
girls resemble ragtag groups in Carpenter’s other films. These groups are
often made up of outsiders, isolated from society at large, but when a threat
emerges, these loners can often band together and overcome it. However, in
some of Carpenter’s films, ‘the threat . . . isolates the members of the group
 A Triptych of Youth 63
rather than brings them together’ (Grant 2004: 13). Halloween is an example
of this type of Carpenter film. Initially, the three girls get along, even though
they come from different social strata, but there are fissures in the group that
worsen when Michael sneaks into their lives. The group splinters and leaves
Laurie, the most beleaguered member of the group, isolated.
Early micro-aggressions aimed at Laurie foreshadow the group’s dis-
solution. After Lynda complains about her day packed with social com-
mitments, Laurie dejectedly says, ‘As usual I have nothing to do.’ Lynda
curtly replies, ‘It’s your own fault and I don’t feel a bit sorry for you.’ Annie
rags on Laurie’s lack of a romantic life. When Laurie sees Michael lurking
behind a hedge, Annie investigates and finds nothing. She teases, ‘Laurie
dear, he wants to talk to you. He wants to take you out tonight.’ When
Laurie sees no one is there, Annie mockingly chides, ‘Poor Laurie. Scared
another one away.’ Later, on the phone, Annie tells Laurie she’s ‘losing it’
because she keeps seeing someone stalking her. Laurie says she has already
‘lost it,’ to which Annie replies, ‘Doubt that,’ mocking Laurie’s virginity.
Something prophetic happens during the beginning of that phone call. Lau-
rie sees Michael out the back window of her house, standing amongst bed-
sheets pinned to clotheslines and flapping in the wind. Laurie slowly backs
away from the window and is surprised by a ringing phone. Shaken, Lau-
rie answers it, hears nothing but indistinct, wet-sounding noises, and slams
down the phone. It immediately rings again. Laurie picks it up, and on the
other end, Annie asks, ‘Why’d you hang up on me?’ Annie explains that she
was eating and could not speak. Laurie says she thought it was an obscene
phone call, and Annie exclaims, ‘Now you’re hearing obscene chewing!
You’re losing it, Laurie.’ This communication breakdown between Laurie
and Annie foreshadows how the group will be lethally infiltrated through
division and increasing isolation.
The solidarity of the group dissolves when Annie betrays Laurie’s trust.
After Paul calls asking Annie to pick him up, Annie asks Laurie to cover for
her and take care of Lindsey. Laurie resists, but Annie blackmails her, weap-
onizing Laurie’s earlier confession about Ben Tramer. It turns out Annie has
already told Ben about Laurie’s crush, much to Laurie’s mortification. She
groans, ‘Oh Annie, please tell me you didn’t. How could you do that? . . . I
can’t tell you anything.’ To get Laurie to watch Lindsey so she can hook up
with Paul, she bribes Laurie, telling her that if she agrees to watch Lindsey
she will ‘consider talking to Ben Tramer in the morning’ and let Laurie
off the hook. Annie’s impromptu plan to hook up with Paul leads her to
betray Laurie and take advantage of her. This exchange resembles the type
of relationship one may see in typical school films which often find ‘cool’
kids ‘exploit[ing] nerds’ skills’ (Shary 2014: 37). This type of exchange
usually involves the cool kids getting nerds to do their homework or tutor
64 A Triptych of Youth
them in a particular subject, but since Halloween mostly takes place outside
the school in a world preoccupied with work, Annie exploits Laurie’s voca-
tional skills.
Visual cues juxtapose this scene of betrayal with an earlier scene of trust
when Laurie tells Annie about her crush. In that scene, Annie and Laurie are
shot in profile from the shady backseat of the car with the sunset through
the windshield backlighting their profile. Now, as Annie teases Laurie about
Ben, they stand in a doorframe entering the kitchen of the Doyle house.
The camera, placed in an unlit dining room, captures Annie and Laurie in
a medium close-up, with backlight emanating from the kitchen. As in the
earlier scene, the girls are shot in profile and lit from the back. However,
the secret shared in the earlier scene is now exploited, distancing Annie and
Laurie. As if to acknowledge this shift, they move positions. Annie walks
off screen to the left on her way to the door, and the camera pans with Laurie
as she follows. They pause to share a few more words. They are framed by
the entryway into the Doyles’ dining room. The camera remains in the din-
ing room, but this time, Annie and Laurie are lit from the back by a lamp
in the living room. A more significant difference, however, is the change
in distance between the characters. In the first set up, they are inches from
each other, so close that Annie places a piece of popcorn in Laurie’s mouth
without fully extending her arm. In the second set up, now in a medium shot,
they stand about a meter from each other (see Figure 3.5). There are no acri-
monious words—in fact, Laurie seems relieved that her crush on Ben Tra-
mer will now remain a secret—but the placement of the characters suggests
Annie’s betrayal places distance between them, distance enough, at least,
for Michael to infiltrate. He kills Annie when she gets in the car. Michael
could have attacked many times before, but he does not strike until the
group fragments, when one member betrays and takes advantage of another.

Figure 3.5 Space between friends

 A Triptych of Youth 65
With the bond between Laurie and Annie severed, the circle is destroyed,
so when Lynda and Bob arrive at the Wallace house, drunk and horny, their
deaths are a fait accompli. When they realize no one is home, Lynda calls
the Doyle house, and Laurie answers. Lynda asks, ‘What’s up?’ Exhausted,
Laurie sighs, ‘I’m just sitting down for the first time tonight.’ Lynda flip-
pantly giggles in response and moves on to other business, not bothered by
Laurie’s imbalanced workload, and she and Bob are murdered shortly there-
after. The fates of Annie and Lynda seem to confirm Shary’s claim that the
pleasure of teenage girls in 1970s cinema is often ‘ultimately destructive’
(2005: 51). Many have read the fates of Annie and Lynda as evidence of the
slasher film’s punishment of female sexuality, but it is equally possible that
Annie and Lynda die because they pursue their own self-interests at Laurie’s
expense, thereby causing the dissolution of the group. After all, in Carpenter’s
films, the group must stick together if they hope to defeat the threat. Consider-
ing Halloween in the context of Carpenter’s oeuvre produces a reading that
runs contrary to assessments of the slasher film that condemn the death of
characters like Annie and Lynda as punishment for their sexuality. Annie and
Lynda do not die because they break patriarchal society’s rules; rather, they
die because their actions undermine the solidarity of the (all-female) group.
Lynda’s murder completes a circle of miscommunication that isolates
each member of the group and allows Michael to infiltrate their ranks. When
Michael enters the bedroom under a sheet, Lynda assumes he is Bob and
jokes with him. However, Michael does not react; his silence symbolizes
how the communication loop among the group has been disrupted. Frus-
trated by Bob-Michael’s silence, Lynda turns to the phone and calls Laurie.
Behind her back, Michael creeps up behind her, his incremental movements
accentuated by Carpenter’s score. When Laurie answers, Michael suddenly
wraps the phone cord around Lynda’s throat and begins to strangle her. Lau-
rie can only hear Lynda’s muffled shrieks. Thinking it is a prank call, Laurie
asks, ‘All right, Annie, first I get your famous chewing, now I get your
famous squealing?’ referring to the earlier scene when Laurie is unable to
hear Annie on the phone. These two scenes bookend the group’s deteriora-
tion as Michael corrodes their ability to communicate. The prominence of
the phone in these scenes underscores the terror of broken communication.
In babysitting stories ranging from urban legends to film to young adult
fiction, the telephone often emerges as a ‘symbolic threat’ (Forman-Brunell
2002: 258), a connotation Debra Hill had in mind when writing the film.
She explains that she wanted to explore the ‘irony’ of how ‘the very thing
that teenage girls know and love best, which is the telephone, becomes an
instrument of death’ (Anchor Bay 2013a).
The failure of the phone to connect corresponds with Michael’s emer-
gence as a monster. Earlier, before Laurie is unable to hear Annie, she sees
66 A Triptych of Youth

Figure 3.6 Michael, miscommunication, and murder

Michael outside the window. He stands by a clothesline with ghostly sheets

flapping around him and disappears before Laurie’s eyes. As Michael stifles
Lynda’s screams, she pulls the sheet off of him, revealing the first close-up
of Michael’s masked visage as he places the receiver up to his ear and listens
to Laurie (see Figure 3.6). As such, the bookend scenes depict Michael in
ghostly armaments. He disappears into the clothesline, becoming immate-
rial long enough to impede the girls’ communication, then rematerializes
after causing enough static in the telephone line to disrupt communication
between the girls.

Preadolescence and Maturation: Tommy and Lindsey

While the teenage group at least begins in solidarity, no such camaraderie
ever exists in the preadolescent group, as made clear by Tommy’s tribula-
tions. The viewer first encounters Tommy when he sees Laurie on the way
to school and asks about their plans for the evening. Laurie reciprocates
Tommy’s fondness, showing he has a good relationship with someone out-
side his age group. Tommy’s relationships within his youth group, however,
are not so pleasant. When Laurie stops to drop off a key at the Myers house
for her realtor father, Tommy warns her not to go near the house because it is
haunted, information Tommy gleaned from Lonnie Elam (Brent Le Page), a
schoolmate: ‘Lonnie Elam said never to go up there. Lonnie Elam said that’s
a haunted house. He said awful stuff happened there once.’ Laurie dismisses
Lonnie as someone who ‘probably won’t get out of the sixth grade,’ but
Lonnie is not so easy to dismiss in person. Later, at school, Tommy is bul-
lied by Lonnie and two other classmates. Tommy wobbles along, carrying a
 A Triptych of Youth 67
large pumpkin, while Lonnie and two other boys, Richie (Mickey Yablans)5
and Keith (Adam Hollander), taunt him. They make fun of his ‘little pump-
kin’ and ask, ‘How’s the little witches?’ When Tommy demands that they
leave him alone, they chant ‘He’s gonna get you’ which Lonnie punctuates
by announcing ‘The boogeyman is coming.’ Lonnie asks, ‘Don’t you know
what happens on Halloween?’ Tommy, mustering up some courage, replies,
‘Yeah, we get candy!’ The bullies mock Tommy’s apparent naiveté. When
he attempts to escape, they trip him, and he falls on the pumpkin, smashing
it and his innocent dreams of a Halloween full of candy and bereft of terror.
The scene reveals not only divisions and hostility among the preadoles-
cent group, but also shows the complicated stages of belief and maturation
in Halloween. The film does not present a binary of belief/disbelief in the
supernatural that easily corresponds with innocence/experience. The bul-
lying scene shows that there are many stages of maturation. There is the
preadolescent like Tommy who believes in a kindly, magical Halloween—
supernatural but not scary—bringing with it a bounty of candy. Next, there
is the sinister stage of preadolescent belief inhabited by Lonnie and his
accomplices. They make fun of Tommy not because he believes in the
supernatural, but because he believes in its benevolence. Apparently, they
know better, that the supernatural is a malevolent force to be feared. Their
belief is confirmed later in the film when they show up at the Myers house.
Even without a Tommy to bully, dissent among the preadolescent ranks still
exists. Richie taunts Lonnie, daring him to enter the Myers house. Keith
encourages him, but Lonnie is still hesitant. Loomis, who is hiding and
waiting for Michael, shoos them away by whispering from the bushes, ‘Hey
Lonnie, get your ass away from there.’ The three boys flee, as if they all
believe in the danger of the spirit world. However, the exact relationship
with the supernatural that accompanies their beliefs varies. Does Richie
dare Lonnie to enter the Myers house because he is more afraid or less?
These disagreements suggest a spectrum of belief in the supernatural that
cannot be pinned down by one’s age.
Ostensibly, teenagers are at a stage where they no longer believe in the
supernatural—either benevolent or malevolent—but these positions on the
spectrum of belief and disbelief in Halloween are not immutably fixed. Lau-
rie seems to be the model of mature skepticism. When Tommy tells her that
Richie said the boogeyman was coming for him, she rationally explains:
‘Tommy, Halloween night is when people play tricks on each other. It’s all
make believe. I think Richie was just trying to scare you.’ When Tommy
remains uncertain, she assures him that, as the mature person in charge, she
will take care of him if anything happens: ‘The boogeyman can only come
out on Halloween night, right? . . . Well, I’m here tonight. I’m not about
to let anything happen to you.’ However, Laurie’s position as a rational
68 A Triptych of Youth
disbeliever is not stable. Earlier in the film, when startled by noises that turn
out to be preadolescent trick-or-treaters next door, Laurie wistfully chides
herself, ‘Well kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition.’ However, she is
less wistful when he sees Michael in her backyard. She whispers to herself,
‘Calm down. This is ridiculous,’ as she lies down on a bed that looks too
small for her, as if she is regressing in age. Laurie’s fearful tremors demon-
strate how a teen can regress into petrified preadolescence at a moment’s
notice. After her encounter with Michael, she regresses again. Like a ter-
rified child, she sits on the floor, cries, and looks up at Loomis, meekly
asking, ‘Was that the boogeyman?’ If Laurie regresses into preadolescence,
Tommy attempts to move in the opposite direction. Bored by Laurie’s read-
ing of a King Arthur children’s book, Tommy shows off his maturing taste
in literature, displaying a stash of comic books hidden from his mother
(see Figure 3.7). With no bullies around, Tommy becomes the tormentor as
he tries to scare Lindsey by hiding behind a curtain and whispering her name
and grabbing her from behind and threatening ‘He’s gonna getcha!’ Like
Laurie, however, Tommy returns to a state of child-like terror when he sees
Michael outside. Tommy demonstrates the complicated, nonlinear process
of growing up depicted in Halloween.
While Tommy undergoes a dynamic journey, oscillating between poles
on the youth spectrum, Lindsey, his prepubescent counterpart, is relegated
to a comparatively static position. If Halloween gives precedence to its
female teenage characters over males, the opposite is true for its preado-
lescent characters. In this way, Halloween is typical of coming-of-age
stories that focus on male experiences and their ‘dominant connection to
the public sphere’ (Kearney 2002: 126). Tommy interacts with the public
sphere through his relationship with his peers at school and grapples with

Figure 3.7 Tommy’s maturing tastes

 A Triptych of Youth 69
questions of fear and belief. Conversely, the film does not depict Lindsey’s
interactions with the public sphere, nor does it delve into her inner struggles.
While Tommy talks with Laurie and asks questions, Lindsey sits silently
frozen on the couch watching television, an occasional victim of Tommy’s
scare tactics. Like female characters from traditional coming-of-age sto-
ries, Lindsey is associated with the private, domestic sphere (126–127).
These stories are also structured around the girl’s ‘involvement in romance’
(127). In this vein, the most agency Lindsey exhibits in the film is when
she makes the choice to pair with Tommy and support him. Annie’s scheme
to leave the Wallace house to pick up Paul only works because Lindsey
jumps at the chance to watch television with Tommy. Her allegiance with
Tommy is confirmed later when he attempts to scare her. He sneaks behind
a curtain and whispers her name. As he is hiding, he sees Michael outside,
backs away from the window, and bumps into Lindsey. They both scream,
and Tommy hysterically yells, ‘The boogeyman’s outside!’ Laurie rushes
into the room, wraps her arms around Lindsey, and reprimands Tommy. He
plops on the couch and whines, ‘Nobody believes me.’ Lindsey declares, ‘I
believe you, Tommy,’ steps away from Laurie, and sits beside him. Lindsey
seems to have already decided to be Tommy’s unwavering partner.
Lindsey’s devotion reflects the speed with which girls are expected to
mature into women in traditional coming-of-age stories. Mary Celeste Kear-
ney argues that ‘the swift transformation of a girl into a woman’ in these
stories leads female characters from being dependent upon their parents to
being dependent upon their husbands (126). Indeed, when Laurie later looks
in on Tommy and Lindsey after she has put them to bed in the Doyles’ mas-
ter bedroom, they look like an old married couple. Earlier in the film, Bob
makes a disturbing joke. Before he and Lynda storm into the Wallace house,
Bob explains, ‘First, I rip your clothes off . . . then you rip my clothes off,
then we rip Lindsey’s clothes off.’ It is a throwaway joke—albeit a disturb-
ing one about sexually assaulting a preadolescent—but it also reflects the
pressure placed on girls to quickly become women so that they can support
and edify their male partners. Halloween’s trio of teenagers reflects the pres-
sure on women to grow up and support the family (Laurie) and satiate men’s
desires (Annie and Lynda). In Haddonfield, girls must mature quickly.

Extended Adolescence and Criminal Justice:

Michael Myers as Young Adult
No other youth character in Halloween resists growing up as much as
Michael. Readings of Michael as a child trapped in a man’s body often con-
nect Michael with Tommy. Wood argues that Michael projects himself into
Tommy’s preadolescent body when he first sees Tommy and Laurie when
70 A Triptych of Youth
they stop at the Myers house. According to Wood, Michael views Laurie
as ‘the reincarnation of the sister he murdered as a child’ because he sees
her with Tommy, ‘who resembles him as he was’ when he murdered Judith
(1979a: 26). Leeder agrees with this reading, calling Michael ‘an over-
grown, arrested child’ who does not harm Tommy because he ‘[identifies]
with him instead’ (Leeder 2014: 79). But this equation has some problems.
Laurie is an odd substitute for Judith given how dissimilar they are. Actu-
ally, after Michael’s killing spree, Annie is the one he puts in Judith’s place
when he ceremoniously displays her dead body, lying on a bed with Judith’s
stolen tombstone resting above her head. After Tommy and Laurie split up,
Michael does take Tommy’s place by Laurie’s side on her morning journey
as he trails her to Haddonfield High and spies on her. However, Michael
briefly interrupts his day-long surveillance of Laurie to make a detour to
Tommy’s school in a scene that suggests (through visual details, as is Car-
penter’s method) Michael is unable to completely identify with Tommy.
After the bullies trip Tommy, causing him to smash his pumpkin, they run
away. Richie exits through an entryway in a chain-link fence around the
school. He cuts left and runs directly into Michael, the impact emphasized
by a sting from Carpenter’s score. Michael stops Richie by grabbing his
shoulders. Shocked, Richie looks up at Michael, then turns and runs the
other way. Michael does not pursue him but instead watches Tommy. In the
background of the shot, a dejected Tommy abandons his smashed pumpkin
and begins walking to the left. In the foreground, Michael walks alongside
him, nearly parallel. It seems as if Tommy and Michael are in sync, which
may suggest identification, but during the entire tracking shot, the chain-
link fence stands between them, as if to suggest a barrier that Michael can-
not cross (see Figure 3.8). Michael may want to identify with Tommy, but
Michael’s emerging adulthood keeps him from completely doing so.

Figure 3.8 Michael stalks Tommy

 A Triptych of Youth 71
It may be more accurate to classify Michael as a ‘young adult,’ a youth
category that has become more prominent in US culture during the past
couple of decades. In early studies of youth cinema, ‘youth’ usually extends
from ages 12 to 20 (Shary 2014: 19). However, the window widened in the
1990s, as several popular culture studies defined ‘youth’ as ranging from
12 to the mid-20s (23). Currently, the ceiling has risen even further. David
Pimentel argues that various societal shifts have extended adolescence, as a
majority of ‘emerging adults remain in a dependent relationship with their
parents well into their twenties’ (Pimentel 2013: 82). In contemporary cul-
ture, ‘Twenty-five is the new 18, and delayed adolescence is no longer a
theory, but a reality’ (Stetka 2017). While these attitudes were not prominent
in 1978, looking at Halloween from this perspective throws into relief the
image of Michael as a young adult driven by a violent desire to flee from
the shackles of adulthood.
Considering Michael as a young adult rather than a man-child stuck in
arrested development reveals possible motivations behind Michael’s mur-
derous behavior. Explanations of Michael’s motives generally fall into one
of two categories: Either Michael’s actions are the result of festering psycho-
logical traumas engendered by sexual repression vis-à-vis the incest taboo,
or Michael, as Loomis insists, is the embodiment of pure evil. Looking at
Michael as a young adult—an individual whose age suggests he should be
mature but whose behaviors are still given to youthful impulses—provides
a third explanation in line with the film’s depiction of the failure of social
institutions. Perhaps the criminal justice system attempts to treat Michael
as an adult before he is willing—or mentally able—to accept this respon-
sibility. In retaliation, Michael defiantly acts like a cruel child. Pimental
contends that juvenile justice institutions should take extended adolescence
into account when sentencing young people to ‘regain its focus on reclaim-
ing and rehabilitating wayward kids’ and abandon ‘the highly retributive
adult system that will only give up on their potential and lock them away
for the bulk of their lives’ (2013: 74). By neglecting to consider changes in
cultural attitudes toward youth and forcing young adults to take account-
ability for wrongdoings that they may not fully understand—thus building
up resentment rather than reform—a continuing reliance on the ‘retributive
adult system’ creates more problems than it solves.
By not considering Michael’s delayed adolescence, the criminal justice
system creates a warped young adult stuck in a liminal space between child-
hood and maturity. Michael’s reign of terror begins when his passage from
childhood to adulthood is commemorated by his transportation to stand trial
as an adult. The paradigm of the ‘highly retributive’ system of justice is at
work. On the ride to pick up Michael, Loomis declares he ‘never, never,
never’ wants Michael to be released from custody. Taking Michael to stand
72 A Triptych of Youth
trial is a formality for him. Michael escapes, stealing the station wagon
meant to transport him, and drives toward Haddonfield, just as a young adult
may flee from the responsibilities of impending adulthood. Michael’s ability
to drive is one of the film’s biggest mysteries. Wood calls it ‘a bit of mean-
ingless mystification’ (1979a: 26), but there may be more to it. His ability
to drive may symbolize that the juvenile justice system in which he was
imprisoned taught him the ostensible skills of adulthood (like driving), but
little else. After Michael’s escape, Loomis complains to Dr. Wynn that they
did not take the danger posed by Michael seriously enough. When Loomis
insists that Michael is headed for Haddonfield, Wynn declares that is impos-
sible because Michael is unable to drive. Loomis angrily yells, ‘He was
doing very well last night! Maybe someone around here gave him lessons.’
Loomis’s sarcasm may reveal the deficiencies of a juvenile justice system
that teaches its inmates nothing but the most hollow, rote, and mechanical
aspects of being an adult—like learning to drive a car—and then turns them
out when they reach an arbitrarily determined legal age. In the interim, the
child’s mind and body physically grow, but nothing is placed in the new
spaces of the youth’s consciousness. So these new spaces remain vacant,
leaving the youth with only the flimsy appearance of adulthood. Michael’s
mask is the perfect metonymic signifier of his subjectivity. The shape of a
human is there—for all of Loomis’s talk of Michael being inhuman, Michael
still picks a human mask, as opposed to a werewolf or other creature—but
without the expression, feeling, and emotion a person typically learns in
their youth.
The stolen sanitarium station wagon becomes a symbol of the institution-
alization that took away Michael’s youth and continues to imprison him.
When the school day ends for Tommy, Michael first follows Tommy on
foot, with the fence separating the imprisoned Michael from his childhood.
Michael gets into the station wagon and slowly drives behind Tommy as he
walks along the sidewalk. The automobile puts even more distance between
Michael and Tommy. The scene is shot from the backseat of the station
wagon behind a wire grid screen separating the front and backseat, so that
Tommy appears behind the bars of the grid. Technically, Michael, sitting in
the front seat behind the wheel, is on the same side of the bars as Tommy,
but graphically, the image recalls the fence that separated them on foot and
the bars that separated Michael from his youth. Michael pulls up beside
Tommy, and for a moment, the camera’s view is unobscured. However,
Tommy never turns his head to notice, much less recognize, Michael. If
Michael is seeking a look of recognition from Tommy, he does not receive
it. When Tommy does finally see Michael, his reaction is one of horror, not
identification. The only time that Laurie, Annie, and Lynda all see Michael
is when he drives by and slows to a crawl in the station wagon. Due to the
 A Triptych of Youth 73
automotive signifier, Lynda and Annie both mistake Michael for a peer.
Laurie suspects that the driver is someone who is both socially unequipped
to deal with adolescent emotions and too old to be hitting on high school
girls. Having missed out on his adolescence, Michael is thrust unprepared
into young adulthood. He is the monster reincarnation of the juvenile delin-
quent of youth cinema’s past.

Conclusion
This chapter argues that with its six youth characters—three teenagers,
two preadolescents, and one young adult—Halloween addresses a wide
spectrum of youth themes. While the three teenage main characters are not
incredibly developed, analyzing them using Shary’s taxonomy of character
types in school films allows a fuller appreciation of how Carpenter and
Hill economically craft their personas with just a few lines of dialogue and
some subtle visual cues, like those during Laurie and Annie’s conversation
during their dusk-time commute. The preadolescent characters they watch
over during babysitting duties add another layer to Halloween’s depiction
of youth. This chapter maintains that the film uses its preadolescent char-
acters to explore the complexities of emotional maturation and fear, find-
ing that there is no straight line from childish belief in the supernatural to
adult skepticism. Rather, Halloween finds characters oscillating between the
two. Finally, the chapter contends that Michael is best understood not as an
overgrown man-child, but instead as a young adult warped by an ineffective
justice system that, rather than rehabilitating him, made him into a killing
machine.
In exploring Halloween’s triptych of youth, this chapter demonstrates how
Carpenter’s film provides future slasher films with a rich cadre of character
types from which to draw. Many teen slasher films draw from the sense of
camaraderie between Laurie, Annie, and Lynda, while also imitating the
type of divisions that arise amongst the teen group; Michael infiltrates the
trio when two members of the group take advantage of the responsible one.
In a similar fashion, other teenage groups in slasher films break apart based
on issues of betrayal, jealousy, peer pressure, and/or irritation. From a plot
perspective, these divisions come in handy, splitting up the group so the
killer can pick them off.
Some youth character types featured in Halloween are typical of slasher
films that followed, while others are less so. The presence of preadolescents
in Halloween is atypical of films of the first slasher cycle. Preadolescent
characters did not play a prominent role in any slasher films until Friday
the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984), released after the first slasher film
cycle. The success of this film and A Nightmare on Elm Street a few months
74 A Triptych of Youth
later kicked off a second slasher cycle (Nowell 2011: 249). The next two
films in the Friday series—Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann,
1985) and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)—
would feature preadolescent characters, as would subsequent entries in the
Halloween franchise like Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little,
1988) and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard,
1989). More typical of slasher films that followed in the wake of Hallow-
een is the mixed-up young adult who ends up being the masked killer. Both
Terror Train and My Bloody Valentine feature this type of character. The
hyperbolic Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1983), released months before the
beginning of the second slasher cycle, combines the preadolescent char-
acter with the mixed-up killer to create one of the slasher subgenre’s most
bizarre climaxes. However, no future slasher films would so prominently
meld together the preadolescent with the killer as director Rob Zombie’s
2007 Halloween remake and its sequel two years later. Before arriving at
this destination, the Halloween franchise’s depiction of youth is an intrigu-
ing journey, coalescing with some trends and departing from others. The
next chapter examines the Halloween franchise and its evolving depictions
of youth.

Notes
1 While Nick Castle plays Michael for a majority of the film with production de-
signer/editor Tommy Lee Wallace handling many of the inserts, Tony Moran pro-
vided a face for 21-year-old Michael when Laurie rips off his mask.
2 According to Carpenter (Anchor Bay 2013b), Debra Hill directed this scene.
3 In 1981, Carpenter shot additional scenes to use in Halloween’s network broad-
cast debut. One of these scenes reveals that Lynda borrowed the blouse from
Laurie.
4 This scene contains what is perhaps the most iconic nuance of Castle’s perfor-
mance as Michael. After pinning Bob to the wall, Michael pauses for a moment to
look at him. Michael tilts his head back and forth, as if admiring his handiwork.
In 2018’s Halloween, Castle retuned to perform this head tilt in one scene.
5 Son of producer Irwin Yablans.
4 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
The Halloween Franchise

When Loomis finds that Michael’s body has disappeared after falling from
the second story of the Doyle house, the film ends with a sequence of shots
of the domestic spaces Michael has infiltrated. As the film presents a series
of tableaus from the Doyle and Wallace households—the rooms and stair-
cases now eerily vacant—the sound of Michael’s heavy breathing pulsates
on the soundtrack, increasing in volume over Carpenter’s manic theme. The
sequence concludes with a shot of the Myers house and then cuts to black. It
is a spectacular ending, rich with connotation. The ending is also dynamite
from a commercial perspective. Halloween has what Carolyn Jess-Cooke
calls ‘sequel logic,’ that is, a film containing ‘the possibility of a sequel
within the primary narrative’ (2009: 10). While Carpenter had no intention
of making a sequel, Halloween’s franchise potential was infinite, and after
the sleeper success of the film, a sequel was inevitable. During this time,
sequels were becoming more prevalent, especially among horror films; the
summer of 1978 saw the release of Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978) and Damien:
The Omen II (Taylor and Hodges, 1978). Halloween financiers Yablans and
Akkad were set to make a sequel ‘with or without’ his and Hill’s participa-
tion, so he and Hill decided to oversee the production of the sequel (Anchor
Bay 2013a). The result, 1981’s Halloween II, was followed immediately by
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982), an attempt to reimagine
the franchise as an anthology series. The film bombed and was followed by
five more sequels, a remake, the remake’s sequel, and finally, in 2018, a film
that acted as a direct sequel to the first film, ignoring all other entries. All
told, there are 11 entries in the Halloween franchise.
This chapter offers an overview of the sequels and remakes of the Hal-
loween franchise, arguing that the franchise has, with a few exceptions,
adapted to youth horror trends. Halloween films generally fare well when
box office conditions are favorable for youth horror, but the franchise often
cannot overcome an adverse market. This chapter argues that, regardless of
box office, the franchise’s depiction of youth characters has evolved over
76 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
the past few decades and resulted in some surprising representations of
youth in slasher cinema, with perhaps the most unique being the prominent
roles played by preadolescents in later films, something foreshadowed by
the role of preadolescents in the first film. This chapter concludes that the
Halloween films create a mise en abyme of youth, an infinitely recurring
cycle of young characters to keep the franchise alive for generations.

Xerox and Anti-Xerox: Halloween II and Halloween III

Carpenter and Hill went to great lengths to tie the sequel to the original:
They wrote the screenplay and produced; Curtis and Pleasence revisited
their leading roles; and Dean Cundy, the first film’s cinematographer,
returned to maintain the original’s palette and lighting design. The main
personnel change was a new director, Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter and Hill
decided to have the film begin immediately after the conclusion of the first
film and sought to seamlessly suture the sequel to the original. However,
the union is not entirely seamless, as there are elements that differentiate the
two films, one of which is the deemphasis of youth characters. The major-
ity of the film takes place at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where Laurie
is taken for care after the events of the first film. Michael (Dick Warlock)
randomly murders a teenager (Anne Bruner) on his way to the hospital to
kill Laurie. The film reveals that Laurie is Michael’s sister, and this is the
reason he targeted her. However, Laurie is catatonic for most of the film,
lying in a hospital bed. The film’s victim group is mainly made up of hos-
pital employees like Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), the night shift manager,
and Janet (Ana Alicia), a buttoned-down nurse. While a couple of characters
like Jill (Tawney Moyer), a nurse, and Jimmy (Lance Guest), an ambulance
driver, are close to Laurie’s age, the rest of the hospital staff have adult
demeanors. Rather than chatting about boys, school, and other teenage top-
ics, these characters are stressed about getting to work on time. At the time,
teen slasher films were seeing rapidly diminishing returns at the box office,
while other types of horror films continued to perform well (Nowell 2011:
230–231), which may explain why Carpenter and Hill recalibrated their
approach, deemphasizing youth and making Halloween II feel like a horror
film but not a teen slasher.1 Halloween II was a hit and firmly established
the brand. However, Carpenter later revealed that working on the film was
a chore for him and bemoaned that the writing process felt like ‘Xerox-
ing’ (Anchor Bay 2013a). Carpenter and Hill drastically veered away from
Xeroxing with the next film in the franchise, Halloween III: Season of the
Witch, which he would co-produce with Hill (while also doing some uncred-
ited rewrites and co-scoring the film with Alan Howarth). If Halloween II
was a Xerox, III would be an anti-Xerox.
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 77
Carpenter and Hill attempted to redefine the franchise with Halloween III,
but the rebranding failed. Growing tired of the slasher film narrative (and
no doubt noting that slasher films were dying at the box office), Carpenter
and Hill jettisoned the scenario of Michael Myers stalking victims in Had-
donfield and instead sought to transform the franchise into an anthology
series with each film based around the Halloween holiday (Carlomagno
1982: 8). Wallace’s film tells the bizarre story of a doctor (Tom Atkins)
and the daughter of one of his deceased patients (Stacey Nelkin) who find
themselves in the middle of a plot by toy company owner Conal Cochran
(Dan O’Herlihy), who manufactures incredibly popular, faddish Halloween
masks. Cochran’s mysterious corporation plans to broadcast a signal via a
watch-and-win commercial on Halloween night that will kill every child
wearing the trendy mask, causing their heads to melt into a mess of snakes
and insects. The outlandish film failed to connect with audiences, especially
those expecting a new installment of the story of Michael Myers.
Eschewing the previous films’ logo and color scheme, Halloween III’s
poster features a red demonic face hovering above three preadolescent chil-
dren, an apt image since the only youth characters in the film are anonymous
preadolescents who are potential fodder for the toymaker’s master plan.
With no teenagers around, the only preadolescent character with any depth
is Buddy (Bradley Schacter), a spoiled brat who offers the toymaker—in a
manner reminiscent of a Bond villain—an opportunity to demonstrate the
lethality of his deadly masks to the captured protagonists. Despite Hallow-
een III’s quirky, B-movie charm, the film’s $14.4 million US gross was a
disappointment compared with the first two films. Carpenter and Hill had
a hit with Halloween II, which featured more mature characters than the
original film, but the failure of Halloween III suggested it was unwise to do
away with teenagers altogether, not to mention ditching the brand identity.
While the popularity and profitability of teen slashers had dwindled by late
1982, the third entry in Paramount’s decidedly on-brand Friday the 13th
series was a hit, perhaps suggesting that another slasher-style Halloween
could have been a hit. Instead, an off-brand film derailed the Halloween
series, and the franchise lay dormant throughout the mid-1980s.

‘A Distasteful Display of Cinematic Child Abuse’:

Return, Revenge, and Curse
Beginning in 1984, the second slasher cycle was in full swing when, in
1986, 89 horror films went into production, a number that grew to 93 in
1987 (Kendrick 2014: 311). In 1986, mini-major Cannon Films approached
Carpenter about making a fourth Halloween film. Carpenter and Hill still
owned rights to the franchise, along with Moustapha Akkad, who took over
78 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
Yablans’s share after the release of Halloween III when their partnership
ended and they divided the assets (Yablans 2012: 199). Carpenter and Hill
commissioned a screenplay from Dennis Etchison, who brought back the
franchise’s focus on teens as his story centered around Tommy and Lind-
sey from the first film, now teenagers (Assip 2017). After Akkad rejected
Etchison’s script, Carpenter and Hill sold their portion of the franchise to
Akkad, whose company Trancas International now held sole stewardship
of the series. Trancas produced Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
and released it on 21 October 1988. The ten-year anniversary of the original
figured prominently in both the film’s story and its marketing, with a poster
that featured the classic Halloween logo and prominently featured the pale
visage of Michael’s mask, which was now the most recognizable signifier
of the franchise.
Oddly enough, Halloween 4 features a small teenage victim group. There
are only three teens in the film’s cast: Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell),
her romantic interest Brady (Sasha Jenson), and Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont),
who has romantic designs on Brady. Kelly swoops in for a tryst with Brady
when Rachel has to cancel a Halloween night date with him in order to
watch Jamie (Danielle Harris), her 8-year-old adopted sister. Jamie is Laurie
Strode’s daughter, orphaned after her mother died in an automobile accident
and recently adopted by the Carruthers. When Michael (George P. Wilbur)
arrives in Haddonfield, he sets his sights on his niece Jamie, making her
the focal point of the film. The narrative is built around a series of cat-and-
mouse chases as Jamie is pursued by Michael and protected by Rachel and
Loomis (again played by Donald Pleasence). As such, the teenage romantic
triangle between Rachel, Brady, and Kelly is subordinated to Loomis’s mis-
sion to capture Michael and Michael’s obsessive quest to murder Jamie. One
could argue that Halloween 4 is not a dramatic departure from the slasher
formula and that Rachel comfortably fits the Final Girl mold, but Rachel is
rarely, if ever, the sole focus of the audience’s empathy. Among the film’s
various chases of the film’s final act, Jamie is the constant. She even has
the ambiguously gendered name that Clover argues is characteristic of Final
Girls (2015: 88).
It is possible to see the relatively significant role that preadolescents
played in the original Halloween foreshadowing the emergence of Jamie, a
preadolescent, as a prominent character in the franchise. If, as Yablans had
argued during the height of the first teen slasher cycle, preadolescents made
up a large contingent of the slasher film audience, his claim would be even
more true during the late 1980s, when home video gave youth audiences
under 17 years old easier access to films ‘with no ratings restrictions’ (Shary
2005: 56; Rockoff 2002: 2). Sue Short connects the stalking of younger vic-
tims in slashers to anxieties of the possible effects these films may have on
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 79
preteens in the video era (2007: 57). For whatever reason, Trancas chose to
emphasize Jamie as they moved forward with the franchise.
Halloween 4 rode the wave of the second slasher cycle to $17.7 million in
US box office, a huge hit by Trancas’ standards. Trancas immediately began
production on Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers with a story
that centered mostly around Jamie. The film’s opening finds her residing at
a children’s hospital where she is recovering from the trauma caused by the
events of the previous film, which have struck her mute. Rachel returns but
is killed off 20 minutes into the film. Between scenes of Jamie being fright-
ened by horrific visions due to a psychic link she now shares with him and
hounded by Loomis who is seeking to use her to catch Michael, the audience
is introduced to a quartet of teenagers whose deaths at Michael’s hands seem
perfunctory. One character, Mikey (Jonathan Chapin), is killed off after only
one scene. Out of the group, Rachel’s friend Tina (Wendy Kaplan), is the
only one given any development, but she falls prey to Michael’s knife before
the final act. The film’s climax takes place in the old Myers house, as Loo-
mis and the police set up a sting operation to capture Michael. They use
Jamie as bait, strategically placing her in an upstairs window. Predictably,
things do not go as planned, and after Michael takes out Loomis and a police
officer, Jamie must fend for herself, becoming the Final Girl who outsmarts
Michael and survives long enough to be saved by a revived Loomis.
Halloween 5 was not the first slasher film to feature a preadolescent char-
acter in a substantial role—a 12-year-old (Corey Feldman) squared off with
Jason in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter—but the decision to feature
a preadolescent character as a main character and the Final Girl may have
been too much for some audiences. Even Fangoria was turned off by the
film, with one reviewer describing Michael’s attacks on Jamie as ‘a distaste-
ful display of cinematic child abuse’ (‘Halloween 5’ 1990: 37). For whatever
reason, the film failed to connect with audiences and would end up becom-
ing the lowest grossing film of the Halloween franchise with $11.6 million
in US box office, a letdown after the previous film’s $17.7 million domestic
take. Halloween 4 was able to catch the wave as the second slasher cycle
peaked in 1988, but in 1989, franchise fatigue plagued youth horror cinema.
That summer, Paramount and New Line released the lowest grossing entries
in, respectively, the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises.
The novelty of a preadolescent protagonist was unable to lift the Halloween
franchise out of the morass of a stagnant market. Halloween 5 ended on a
cliffhanger, but the fates of Michael and Jamie would have to wait for a
stronger youth horror market to sustain them.
The market for youth horror was not much better six years later when
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995), was released.
The theatrical market for youth horror was at a low point,2 and Curse seems
80 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
to be flailing around, looking for direction. The making of the film, from
script stage to post-production, was arduous and wracked with disagree-
ments between Trancas and Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who had purchased
partial ownership of the franchise and planned to distribute the film through
Dimension Films, the genre label of Miramax Films.3 The behind-the-scenes
struggles are reflected in the film’s odd premise. Jamie is captured by a dru-
idic cult that gives Michael his supernatural ability to overcome death. Six
years later, the cult impregnates Jamie (J.C. Brandy), who gives birth to a
baby boy. Jamie escapes with the baby, and Michael pursues her, eventually
catching and killing her. Michael intends to return the baby to the cult, but
Jamie successfully hides the baby from him before she is killed. The infant
is found by Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), the young boy whom Laurie Strode
was babysitting in the first film. Now in his early 20s, Tommy has become
obsessed with researching Michael and his possible motivations. He lives
in a boarding house across the street from the old Myers house, which is
currently inhabited by John Strode (Bradford English), the brother of Laurie
Strode’s adoptive father, and his family. John is abusive toward the family,
especially his daughter, Kara (Marianne Hagan), who is in her mid-20s and
has a young son, Danny (Devin Gardner), both of whom recently moved
in with John and the family. Tommy keeps his eye on Kara and Danny
from afar, suspecting that Michael will one day return for them since the
cult’s ancient rituals require that Michael sacrifice all of his relatives. After
Tommy rescues Jamie’s infant son, he knows that Michael will soon follow
and approaches Kara and Danny, hoping to keep them safe. Michael and the
cult eventually kidnap Kara, Danny, and the infant and take them back to
their stronghold at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, leaving Tommy to team up
with Loomis to rescue them.
Michael’s victim group in Curse ranges from the middle-aged (Kara’s
parents) to young adult (an offensive radio shock-jock looking to broad-
cast live from the Myers house on Halloween night) to college age (Kara’s
brother and his girlfriend) and younger (Jamie), and the core victim group
is made up of a range of youths. As a college-aged young mother, Kara
makes for an odd Final Girl, perhaps further solidifying Nowell’s point that
the character type is actually not that prevalent. The male characters make
up a mise en abyme of youth characters. In his mid-20s and still obsessed
with Michael to the point of living across the street from the Myers house,
Tommy is a man-child, and his preadolescence is reflected in Danny, who
is the same age as Tommy was when he was first threatened by Michael.
Further still, there is Stephen, the infant boy, who may represent the infi-
nite regeneration and recycling of youth victims in Halloween films and,
perhaps, the slasher film in general. An early scene shows the infant during
a ritual, shot from a bird’s eye angle. As the camera hovers over the scene
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 81
and cranes in, the naked infant lies on an altar as a druid ceremoniously
draws the cult’s runic symbol in blood upon the baby’s chest, a composition
that gives the viewer a queasy sense of circularity. Tommy’s voice-over
ominously assures the viewer that evil never dies but merely rests a while
before returning, as if the film is aware that its scenarios have been played
out many times before. Curse could not overcome youth horror’s dry spell
and underperformed at the US box office with a $15.1 million gross, but its
self-awareness prefigures the next direction that the teen slasher would take,
a direction that would benefit the Halloween franchise.

Teenage Soap Horror: H20 and Resurrection

Although Curse was a miss for Dimension when it debuted in October 1995,
the studio would score with another slasher film just over a year later with
the release of Scream (Craven, 1996) in December 1996. Grossing over
$100 million in the US, Scream was the first hit teen slasher film in almost
a decade. Scream was novel to audiences at the time because of its self-
awareness, with characters who comment on the conventions of the story in
which they exist. As Andrew Tudor notes, while Scream ‘did not introduce
self-consciousness about genre convention’ into horror cinema, the film was
the first ‘highly commercial (and therefore influential)’ horror film to fore-
ground this type of ‘knowing reflexivity’ (2002: 110). Tudor also observes
that Scream’s ‘self-consciousness is contained: an occasion for humour
and joyous audience involvement, but not a mechanism for questioning the
workings of the horror movie as such’ (ibid.). In other words, Scream never
becomes parodic, and its references to past horror and slasher films pro-
vide comedic relief or accentuate moments of suspense. During one scene,
Randy (Jamie Kennedy), a horror movie buff, watches a slasher film on
television. As the killer sneaks up behind the victim on screen, Randy yells
at the television, imploring the victim to turn around, and fails to realize that
a killer is sneaking up behind him.
Scream’s screenplay, written by Kevin Williamson, was bolstered by a
cast of hot young superstars, including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell
from the television series Party of Five (1994–2000), and Courteney Cox
from the show Friends (1994–2004). In the wake of Scream’s success fol-
lowed a flood of teen slasher films featuring young television stars and
glossy production values. During this time, Trancas was developing a direct-
to-video Halloween sequel.4 However, the Weinsteins, no doubt inspired by
the success of Scream and its follow-ups, decided to make a high-profile
Halloween sequel that would meld the post-Scream teen slasher film with
Halloween’s status as the ur-text of the teen slasher (after all, Halloween is
the film Randy is watching on television in Scream).
82 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
The result, Halloween H20:20 Years Later (Miner, 1998), is a film that
is unique among post-Scream teen slasher films, while also being typical of
the trend. Out of the multitude of teen slashers that followed Scream in the
late 1990s, H20 is the only sequel to a previously established slasher fran-
chise, evidence of the franchise’s ability to adapt to trends in youth horror.
The film’s sequel status is foundational to its premise. Dimension wanted to
capitalize on the franchise’s legacy by emphasizing that the release of H20
coincided with the 20-year anniversary of the original film’s release. The
film also recalled the original by bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise
the role of Laurie Strode, who had last appeared in Halloween II. H20 cre-
ates a new continuity that ignores the events of the fourth, fifth, and sixth
film, which were predicated on the idea that Laurie had died in an automo-
bile accident. Instead, H20 finds Laurie as the headmistress of a California
boarding school, living under the name Keri Tate. She is divorced, has a son,
John (Josh Hartnett), and has turned to alcohol to stave off the PTSD she
suffers as a result of Michael’s attack on her 20 years before.
H20 fits in comfortably with films that Peter Hutchings argues were mar-
keted as ‘being like Scream,’ but only superficially resembling Scream and
rarely including the copious ‘knowing references to old horror films’ to the
extent that Scream does (2013: 212). This is the case with H20: Outside of
references to previous Halloween films (which should be expected from
a sequel), the film is only peppered with minor nods to films like Psycho
(Janet Leigh appears in a cameo that recalls her role as Marion) and the
Friday the 13th films (in one jump scare, a character pops up wearing a
hockey mask). For the most part, the film resembles other teen horror films
of its time, which Hutchings describes as ‘teenage soap horror’ (215). The
two teen leads are young actors being groomed for stardom. Male lead Josh
Hartnett was also filming The Faculty (Rodriguez, 1998), another teen hor-
ror film under production with Dimension, while making H20. Michelle
Williams, who plays Molly, Hartnett’s love interest, was also a lead actor
on Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), a hit youth television show, created by
Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, that premiered six months before
H20’s release (see Figure 4.1).
Perhaps to demonstrate the acting chops of up-and-coming stars, teen-
age soap horror offers ‘more developed characterisations’ than slasher films
of the past (Hutchings 2013: 216), which is the case with H20. The film
fleshes out the strained relationship between Keri and John, as Keri’s fear
of Michael’s return has led to her being overbearing and John chafing under
her protectiveness. Besides John and Molly, the film features only two other
teen characters, another couple (Adam Hann-Byrd and Jodi Lyn O’Keefe)
who are friends with John and Molly. Fewer characters allow for ‘greater
focus on the interpersonal dynamics’ of the youth group, which Hutchings
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 83

Figure 4.1 ‘Teenage soap horror’: Halloween H20

cites as a hallmark of teenage soap horror (214). All three members of

John’s teenage cohort are invested in his rebellion against his mother’s
restrictions, a connection to the main plot of Keri’s confrontation with her
greatest fear—Michael’s return—that keeps the teen characters from getting
lost in the shuffle like they do in Halloween 5’s overly busy plot. Keri’s fear
of Michael’s return and for John’s life directly relates to another character-
istic Hutchings notes in teenage soap horror: the need for alertness. These
films feature characters who must ‘probe into the past . . . to make sense of
the present and then to be able to act decisively’ (215). Accordingly, Keri
stresses that John be vigilant in case Michael returns. John does not heed her
warning, and even though he survives when Michael invades a Halloween
sleepover he and his friends have at the school, it is chance, not strategy,
that allows him to survive until Keri arrives to save him and Molly. Hutch-
ings notes that with the focus on intergroup dynamics and more developed
characters, the role of the Final Girl is diminished in teenage soap horror.
However, this is not the case in H20, as long as one can consider, as Short
does, Keri as one of a group of grown-up Final Girls in late ’90s cinema
who must continue to take steps toward full maturity even after they have
children of their own (Short 2007: 58–60). The film and its characters fit
comfortably in the ‘teenage soap’ cycle, and H20 grossed $55 million in box
office, becoming the highest grossing film of the Halloween series, second
only to the original when adjusted for inflation.
The success of H20 guaranteed a follow-up, and with the next film in the
series, Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002), the franchise adopted
another mode that had proven successful for at least one horror film: found
footage. The sleeper success of the low-budget found footage film The Blair
84 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
Witch Project (Sanchez and Myrick, 1999) was a media sensation, but as
Rick Worland notes, the ‘reality-based’ style of the film was ‘less related to
the horror film’ and more in tune with reality-based television programming
of the time (2007: 114). Halloween: Resurrection was the first high-profile
horror film to adopt the found footage mode and nested it within a narra-
tive that also connected the film to the reality-based entertainment craze of the
early 2000s and the rise of the Internet. In the film, reality show entrepreneur
Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) launches a web series titled Dangertain-
ment. He recruits a group of six college students, equipped with webcams,
to spend a night in the Myers house, exploring the ruined house to discover
Michael’s motivation for killing (with phony evidence planted by Freddie).
Unfortunately, Michael shows up and begins picking off the contestants.
Resurrection’s premise plays off of the ‘game’ aspect that Vera Dika (1990)
argues is integral to the slasher film, while also demonstrating the impor-
tance of being ‘aware of the rules of the game’ that Hutchings notes in teen-
age soap horror (2013: 216). The film shoehorns in a smorgasbord of youth
trends—Brennan Klein describes the film as ‘a top-to-bottom exercise in
attempting to rip from the headlines of TigerBeat magazine’ (Klein 2018)—
but the film could not transcend declining interest in youth horror, which, by
this point, was being parodied by the Scary Movie franchise (2000–2013).
Again, the franchise moved with the trend, and Resurrection’s box office
take dropped $25 million from H20’s in the US.

Return to Preadolescence: Rob Zombie’s Halloween

and Halloween II
In October 2003, the box office success of The Texas Chainsaw Massa-
cre remake (Nispel, 2003) set off a trend of remakes of high-profile horror
titles.5 Trancas and The Weinstein Company (the Weinsteins took Dimen-
sion with them when they departed Miramax) revisited the Halloween fran-
chise, recruiting heavy metal musician-turned-director Rob Zombie to write
and direct a film that could ‘reboot’ the series, that is, give the franchise a
fresh start and establish ground for future installments (Proctor 2012: 4–5).
Zombie’s Halloween (2007) would end up being ‘perhaps the most noto-
rious, polarizing horror remake’ of the time (Nelson 2010: 120). Zombie
made dramatic changes to the Halloween mythos, many of which related
to the film’s depiction of youth, more specifically, the revised origin of
Michael Myers.
Michael’s youth is pushed to the foreground in Zombie’s version, a depic-
tion some argue is ideologically potent. The original film elides Michael’s
childhood, only suggesting that Michael hails from a suburban middle
class background, but Zombie spends significant amount of time exploring
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 85

Figure 4.2 Michael Myers: Abandoned child

Michael’s youth, beginning when Michael (Daeg Faerch) is 10 years old

(see Figure 4.2). As discussed in Chapter 2, Robin Wood was frustrated by
the original film, arguing that it suggests Michael is an embodiment of ‘pure
evil’ and neglects to develop the possibility that Michael is a construct of his
socioeconomic position in the capitalist patriarchy. However, Andrew Pat-
rick Nelson argues that the type of criticism offered by Wood is ‘explicitly
built into’ Zombie’s remake (2010: 129). According to Nelson, Michael’s
‘traumatic childhood [back-story]’ in Zombie’s film is ‘so apparent’ that it
makes ‘the application of any psychoanalytic theory redundant’ (ibid.). In
other words, everything Wood is looking for in the original—the ultimate
family horror film, the violent release of repressed sexuality—is abundant
in the remake. David Roche agrees, writing that Halloween is ‘the most
political’ horror remake of the 2000s and is tantamount to an academic essay
that ‘follow[s] Robin Wood’s advice’ and ‘read[s] the whole film against
[Dr. Loomis]’ (2014: 35, 46).
Zombie goes about this reading by offering an extended look at Michael’s
childhood. Zombie’s previous films featured killers and murderers who
come from underclass, ‘white trash’ environments (Bernard 2014: 123–132).
Zombie’s Michael is a product of this type of beleaguered background. He
is abused by his stepfather (William Forsythe), ignored by his sister (Hanna
Hall), and bullied at school. He seems to have a nurturing relationship with
his mother (Sherri Moon Zombie), but she is too overwhelmed with work
(as an exotic dancer) and other responsibilities to spend much time with
him. The film’s narrative ‘strongly insists on the environmental and famil-
ial factors that seem to have come into play’ when Michael explodes and
murders a school bully (Daryl Sabara), his stepfather, his sister, and her
86 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
boyfriend (Adam Weisman) (Roche 2014: 47). After Michael is institution-
alized, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) works with him, trying to make
what seems like a genuine connection. However, his efforts are undermined
by his tendency to diagnose and catalog Michael’s condition in a sensation-
alistic manner, which recalls the institutional failure depicted in the original
film. Michael continues to emotionally retreat, eventually refusing to speak,
and murders a nurse (Sybil Danning). Distraught and defeated, Michael’s
mother commits suicide, and Loomis gives up on Michael and monetizes
their relationship by writing a lurid book about him. When grown-up
Michael (Tyler Mane) escapes, Loomis follows and catches up with him as
he is about to murder Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), his younger sister.
Loomis begs him to let her go, pleading, ‘Look, it’s not her fault. Michael,
it’s my fault. I failed you.’ Loomis’s admission, coupled with the film’s con-
clusion, which returns to Michael’s childhood via 8mm home movies inter-
spersed through the closing credits, reinforce the notion that institutional
failure and preadolescent trauma combine to create a monster like Michael.
As such, Zombie’s films replies to both Tudor’s and Wood’s readings of
the film. The image of the preadolescent in the Halloween franchise travels
along a peculiar trajectory, from bystanders like Tommy in the original film,
to preadolescent Final Girl Jamie in the fifth, to murderer in Zombie’s film.
Teenage characters also play an important role in Zombie’s depictions
of youth in his ideological transformation of the Halloween story. If Car-
penter disavowed the possibility that Michael could be the product of Had-
donfield, Zombie makes it clear how Haddonfield could create Michael.
Zombie gives the main trio of girls—Laurie, Annie (Danielle Harris),6 and
Lynda (Kristina Klebe)—savage ‘mean girl’ makeovers that convey Had-
donfield’s abrasiveness. The difference between the original Lynda and
Zombie’s Lynda offers an example. Unlike the ‘popular girl’ of the original
film, Lynda does not care about maintaining appearances, like learning new
cheers or getting her hair done. During cheerleading practice, she jokes that
the squad should ‘rock it commando’ and ‘flash some snatch’ for the audi-
ence rather than learn a new cheer and is angry when the coach—whom she
refers to as a ‘dried up fuckin’ bitch’—contacts her father.7 Beyond giving
her father the ‘Miss sweetie-pants princess suck-up routine’ to keep out of
trouble, Lynda does not seem inclined to put up a performance for anyone
else, including her boyfriend (Nick Mennell) with whom she is brutally hon-
est about his lack of sexual prowess. Annie (Danielle Harris), once the rebel,
is now aligned with authority, as represented by her father (Brad Dourif).
On their walk home from school, Laurie, Annie, and Lynda see Michael
watching them from across the street. Instead of throwing sarcastic barbs,
Annie threatens him with the law: ‘Hey asshole, my daddy’s the sheriff!
Why don’t you crawl back under your fucking rock?’ Haddonfield’s youth
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 87
are no longer united against authority but now collude with it to threaten
those who have been ostracized by social institutions. Finally, Laurie is far
from the classic ‘nerd,’ obsessed with academics and hesitant to engage in
relationships. Her academics are never mentioned, and when Annie tries to
set her up with Ben Tramer, she is not horrified but excited by the prospect.
Laurie is also no longer the nurturing babysitter, a sign that young people
no longer look out for each other in Zombie’s Haddonfield. When Tommy
Doyle (Skyler Gisondo) spots her on her walk to school, she groans, ‘Oh
god, leave me alone, Tommy.’ When he later confides in Laurie about his
fear of the boogeyman, Laurie does not give him a motherly talk but instead
makes fun of him. In the original film, death is able to infiltrate the youth
group only after betrayal breaks the group apart, a dissolution that begins
with Annie blackmailing Laurie. In Zombie’s Halloween, however, betrayal
and hostility are present from the beginning, before Halloween night begins.
In her first scene, Annie badgers Laurie into taking care of Lindsey so she
can hook up with Paul, and she later calls Lynda a ‘slut.’ Lynda reveals
to Laurie later on the phone that Annie hurt her feelings. Lynda says, ‘I
don’t give a shit about what Annie thinks anyway,’ suggesting that there
has been tension between the two for a while. Before hanging up, Lynda
tells Laurie that she cares what Laurie thinks about her, but this exchange
reveals the rifts that already exist in their circle. If Carpenter’s Haddonfield
was an environment in which youths are failed and abandoned by social
institutions, Zombie’s Haddonfield is a place where young people fail and
abandon each other.
Despite the mixed reaction to Zombie’s Halloween, the film performed
well at the box office with a $58.2 million gross, leading to a sequel, written
and directed by Zombie and released in 2009. With Halloween II, Zombie
continues his bleak, critical autopsy of Haddonfield, digging deeper into
themes introduced in the first film. Loomis is now an opportunistic media
personality shamelessly promoting yet another book about Michael. The
boundaries between ‘normality/Haddonfield’ and ‘the Monster/Michael’
erode as Laurie has a psychological breakdown. She suffers from PTSD
after the events of the previous film and lives with Sheriff Brackett and
Annie, who, like Laurie, barely survived Michael’s attack and is dealing
with the residual trauma. Laurie makes a couple of new young friends (Brea
Grant and Angela Trimbur), but their friendship is not developed as much
as Laurie’s psychological struggle and tragically deteriorating relationship
with Annie. Laurie has hallucinations about Michael and his mother, and her
psychological recovery is derailed when she learns from Loomis’s new book
that she is Michael’s biological sister and was adopted by the Strodes as an
infant. Meanwhile, Michael escapes from the authorities after the events of
the first film and hides out in the woods. He has visions of his mother as well
88 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
and, conjuring an image of himself in preadolescence, communicates with
her. He waits until Halloween to wreak bloody vengeance upon Haddon-
field. This time around, Annie and Loomis do not survive their encounters
with him. Laurie goes insane and is institutionalized. Haddonfield, with its
savage values masquerading behind a bourgeois veneer, has created another
monster. The film is relentlessly bleak, which may explain its disappointing
box office performance. For the first time, the Halloween franchise’s finan-
cial performance diverged from the trend. Usually, the performance of Hal-
loween films tracked with comparable titles. However, in 2009, high-profile
horror remakes like My Bloody Valentine 3-D (Lussier, 2009) and Friday
the 13th (Nispel, 2009) did healthy business,8 but Halloween II brought in
$33.3 million, a little over half the gross of the previous film. While Hal-
loween II’s underwhelming business could be attributed to several factors,
the film’s unrelenting atmosphere and dark depiction of youth did not help.

The Night Carpenter Came Home

Halloween fans celebrated when it was announced in May 2016 that John
Carpenter was returning to the franchise. As an executive producer, he
would work with Trancas, Miramax (Dimension lost rights to the property
in 2016 [Miska 2015]), and Blumhouse Productions and would help choose
the screenplay and director. The pitch that ultimately won out was from
an unlikely team; writer/director David Gordon Green, who had directed
mostly comedies and low-budget dramas, and writing partners, Danny
McBride, best known as a comedic actor, and Jeff Fradley scored the gig. It
was Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions who approached Green about
submitting a pitch (Artz 2017). Blum had proven to have a keen commercial
sense; specializing in low-budget horror, Blumhouse had delivered a string
of commercial and critical hits over the past decade, from Paranormal
Activity (Peli, 2009) to Get Out (Peele, 2017). His solicitation of Green’s
pitch turned out to be another profitable enterprise, as Green and company’s
pitch evolved into a hit film that would end up being the top grossing film
of the franchise and the highest grossing slasher film ever (Sprague 2018).
While the original film was still more profitable in adjusted dollars, Green’s
film came close.
Green’s Halloween ignored all other sequels and picked up the storyline
40 years after the events of the original film. Curtis returned to play Laurie.
This iteration of the character is not Michael’s sister but a random victim
of his attack 40 years ago. Laurie’s experience drove her into becoming a
reclusive survivalist, residing in a fenced-in compound, complete with sur-
veillance cameras and an arsenal of firearms. Michael (James Jude Court-
ney) has been incarcerated for the past 40 years. Laurie’s paranoia about his
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 89
possible escape has ruined two marriages and estranged her from her adult
daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), who, in turn, keeps her teenage daughter,
Allyson (Andi Matichak), from having a relationship with Laurie. When
Michael escapes during a prison transfer, Laurie’s fears are realized. Michael
murders his way through Haddonfield and finds Allyson. The conclusion of
the film finds Laurie, Karen, and Allyson at Laurie’s compound in a final
showdown with Michael, with the three women emerging triumphant. They
lure Michael into a trap designed by Laurie and set the house on fire, leaving
Michael to burn alive. The final shot of the film shows the women riding
away from the burning house in the bed of a pickup truck. Laurie rests her
head on Karen’s shoulder to the left and locks arms on the right with Ally-
son. All three women hold bloody hands that rest in Laurie’s lap.
The success of 2018’s Halloween seemingly places it far away from the
financial and critical disappointment of 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of
Michael Myers on the franchise’s spectrum, but comparing the two films
offers insight into the franchise’s relationship with the larger youth horror
cinema marketplace. Both films demonstrate how the Halloween franchise,
for the most part, moves with larger market trends. The youth horror market
was stagnant and directionless at the time of Curse’s release in 1995, a lack
of direction evident in the film’s convoluted story. In 2018, the market for
youth horror was holding steady, accounting for around ten of the year’s top
100 grossing films. 2018’s Halloween no doubt benefited from this interest
in youth horror, but it likely benefited even more from audiences’ interest in
familiar titles and properties. In 2018, sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and adapta-
tions of pre-existing media properties made up 16 of the year’s top 20 grossing
films. 2018’s Halloween, with its nebulous status as sequel, remake, and/or
reboot, was perfect for this market and was the 21st highest grossing film of
the year in the US with $159 million. By comparison, in 1995, only six of the
year’s top 20 films were sequels; Curse clocked in at 96 in the year’s top 100.
As Chapter 1 argued, much of the success of the original film was due to
how it fell in line with blockbuster-style filmmaking and high concept mar-
keting techniques emerging in youth cinema at that time. From that point
on, Halloween closely melded with trends in youth horror, so much so that
the success of each Halloween film depended on the state of youth horror
at the time of its release. Two exceptions are the disappointing releases of
1982’s Halloween III and Zombie’s Halloween II in 2009. With the former
film, Carpenter and Hill were trying to avoid the slasher film’s diminishing
returns at the box office—and their creative fatigue with the concept—by
moving away from the subgenre, but they were not able to escape the slasher
brand name established by the success of the first two films. In the case of
Halloween II, Zombie’s take on the franchise may have grown too abrasive
for audiences to handle.
90 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
However dissimilar they are, 2018’s Halloween and 1995’s Curse illuminate
an aspect of the Halloween franchise that sets it apart from most other hor-
ror franchises: both films illustrate Halloween’s mise en abyme—its endlessly
recurring sequence—of youth. The triad of Laurie, Karen, and Allyson is a
reverse-gender reflection of the trans-generational triangle of Tommy, Danny,
and infant Stephen in Curse. While family tension and trauma are themes that
run throughout horror cinema, no other horror franchise focuses on genera-
tional tension as exhaustively as the Halloween films: Michael chases his sister
Laurie and then his niece Jamie, Laurie (as Keri) fights her son John, Michael’s
stepfather abuses him in the remake, and so on. As this chain winds its way
throughout these films, the viewer encounters a metamorphic image of youth.
The presence of young adults, teens, preadolescents, and infants suggests the
vitality of Halloween, a franchise that continues to be reborn.

Conclusion
This chapter examined the Halloween franchise and made two principal
observations. First, the success or failure of individual films in the Hal-
loween franchise suggests the state of youth horror at the time of the film’s
release. Second, as the franchise has evolved, it has produced a wide array
of youth characters and will probably continue to do so as the franchise con-
tinues to be reborn and rejuvenate itself. Similar to the original film, sequel
logic is built into the conclusion of the 2018 version. As the trio ride along
in the truck bed, the camera cranes over and tracks in on Allyson’s other
hand, which still clutches a bloody knife she grabbed during the fight. Does
Allyson still clutch the knife because she somehow intuits that she will need
to defend herself when Michael returns? If the Halloween franchise’s past
is any indication of its future, she will. Halloween is a resilient franchise,
constantly regenerating itself every ten years or so. Each rebirth seems to
bring a new timeline that variously designates past entries of the franchise
as canonical or apocryphal. Claire Parody writes that for fans of a franchise,
‘Shifting between “canons” and narrative realities . . . [is] often a rewarding
form of mastery over a franchise text, not a source of tension’ (2011: 216).
The Halloween franchise provides its followers with this type of experi-
ence, with many fans having fun with the franchise’s multiple worlds and
continuities. On 18 October 2018, The Horrors of Halloween blog featured
an overview of the different ways in which online fans had attempted to map
out the franchise’s various timelines. The post featured no fewer than five
charts, one of which, created by blogger Marcus Alexander Hart, re-imaged
the franchise as a huge ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, harkening back
to the popular children’s gamebook series from the 1980s and 1990s that
allowed readers to make decisions at key points in the narrative and chart
 The Mise en Abyme of Youth 91
their own course through the fictional world (‘Halloween Choose . . .’ 2018)
(see Figure 4.3). As a franchise that continues to be reborn over and over
again, Halloween will undoubtedly continue to offer young and adventurous
viewers multiple worlds to explore. Some will be familiar; others may be
strange. But they will all be infused with an eerie atmosphere that recalls the
horror of growing up common to all.

Figure 4.3 Choose your own adventure

Image courtesy of Marcus Alexander Hart, OldPalMarcus.com
92 The Mise en Abyme of Youth
Notes
1 Note also the lack of a knife on Halloween II’s poster discussed in Chapter 1.
2 From 1990 to 1995, there were around 31 horror films total that broke the top
100 grossing films in the year of their release. Only around eight of these films
(counting Curse) were slashers. With only a few exceptions, these films placed in
the bottom half of the top 100 of their respective years.
3 Trancas preferred a significantly different version of the film, known among fans
as ‘The Producers Cut.’ Dimension and the director preferred a cut that removed
some exposition and was more violent and gory. Their version was released the-
atrically. In 2013, both versions were released on home video by Scream Factory.
4 See Scream Factory (2013).
5 The title of the original 1974 film is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but this
unique spelling of “chainsaw” has not been retained for any other films in the
franchise.
6 Harris played Jamie in Halloween 4 and 5, so her casting evokes the franchise’s
history.
7 An extended version of this scene in Zombie’s workprint shows Lynda bullying a
couple of students, yelling at them, and pouring a drink on one’s head.
8 Grossing $51.5 million and $65 million, respectively.
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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures on the corresponding page.

3-D technology 6 Bava, Mario 9
Black Christmas xvi, 1, 12, 13, 15,
academia see film studies 47n1, 51
Ackerman, Forrest J. 8 Black Sunday 9
Akkad, Moustapha xiii, 19, 75, 77, 78; Blair Witch Project, The 83–84
see also Trancas International Bloch, Robert 8
alcohol xv, 36, 62, 65, 82 blockbuster marketing and release xvii,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents 8 2, 3, 11, 20–24
Alien 29 Blood and Black Lace 9
Allied Artists 20 Blood Feast 9
All the President’s Men 35 Blum, Jason 88
Altman, Rick xv Blumhouse Productions see Blum, Jason
American Graffiti 12 Breen, Joseph 4
American International Pictures (AIP): Brides of Dracula, The 7
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations 2, 9, 17, Britton, Andrew 26, 30, 32
25n5; ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ 12, 13; bullying 13, 18, 66–67, 92n7
‘weirdies’ 7, 12, 18; youth cinema
xiii, 7, 8, 11 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The 3
Arkoff, Sam see American International camp 17
Pictures (AIP) Campbell, Neve 81
Assault on Precinct 13 xiii, 43, 52 car culture 5–6
atomic dread 2, 6, 16, 24 carnival sideshows 3
Attack of the Crab Monsters 20 Carpenter, John: and Assault on
Precinct 13 xiii, 43, 52; career xvi,
‘Babysitter Murders, The’ see Yablans, xixn5, 1; ‘Carpenteresque’ xvi, 25n1;
Irwin childhood fandom 8; comparison
babysitting: concept of the film xiii, 13, to Howard Hawks 42–43; critical
50; in Halloween 37–38, 51, 55, 56, reputation xv–xvi, 1; critique of
58; in Halloween (2007) 87 social institutions 43, 47; and Dark
Bad Seed, The 9, 31, 32 Star 16; directing Halloween 2, 18–19,
Barrymore, Drew 81 59–60; divesting his share of the
100 Index
Halloween franchise 78; executive Cronenberg, David 29, 30, 31
producing Halloween (2018) 88; and Crown International 13
Ghosts of Mars 25n8; Golden Coach Cundy, Dean 76
Award xvi; Hammer influence 16; Cunningham, Sean 11, 23
pre-production on Halloween 4 Curse of Frankenstein, The 7, 17
78; and Prince of Darkness 52; Curtis, Jamie Lee xiv, 23, 76, 82, 88
producing Halloween III 76–77; Cushing, Peter 7, 16, 17
reviewed by Robin Wood 26–27, 30,
33; science fiction influences 6, 15– Damien: The Omen II 75
16; scoring Halloween 15–16, 17, 21, Dark Star 16
57, 70; siege narratives 52, 62–63, Dawn of the Dead 29
65; and Starman 25n8; and The Thing Dawson’s Creek 82
1, 25n1; thoughts on Halloween 53; Deathdream 26
visual style 21, 39, 40, 41, 47; writing Deep Red 18
Halloween xiii, xiv, xvi, 12–13, 42, De Laurentiis, Dino 21
49, 51, 73; writing Halloween II demonic child cycle 32, 35
(1981) 75, 76, 89 Dimension Films 80, 81, 82, 88
Carrie 13, 26, 51, 52 Doctor Dementia xii, xiii, 1, 15, 24
Castle, Nick 25n7, 74n1 doppelganger motif 17–18
Castle, William 8, 9, 17, 18 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 4
Castle of Otranto, The 16 Dracula 4
Chaney, Lon 3 drive-in theaters 2, 5–6, 8, 19,
cheerleading 61, 86 20, 21
child as monstrous ‘Other’ 31–35 driving xii–xiii, 39, 43, 44, 57, 58–60,
Chicago 20 72–73
Children of the Damned 31, 32 drugs xv, 36, 43, 44, 58
Choose Your Own Adventure 90, 91
CinemaScope 9 Ebert, Roger xv, 21
Clark, Bob 15, 47n1 Etchison, Dennis 78
class: in Halloween 34, 38–39, 47, 57, ‘evil’ children see child as monstrous
61; in Halloween (2007) 84–85; and ‘Other’
Marxism 27; in They Live 43 exhibition venues 4, 5–6, 9–10, 19,
Clover, Carol J.: and the ‘Final Girl’ 20–21, 22
xvii–xviii, 52–55, 78; on the teen Exorcist, The 11, 12, 20, 26, 32, 35
slasher 8, 36, 37, 51
Cohen, Larry 29, 32, 33 Faculty, The 82
Columbia Pictures see television family: as audience 4; in Halloween
comic books 58, 68 xvii, 33–35, 42, 46, 57, 61,
Compass International xiii, xixn1, 21, 69; in Halloween (2007) 85; in
23, 75 Halloween: The Curse of Michael
Cook, David xvi Myers 80; in House of Usher
Corman, Roger 9, 16, 17, 25n5 9; in horror cinema 27, 38, 90;
counterculture 10, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35 in It’s Alive 32; in ‘Reaganite
Courtney, James Jude 25n6 entertainment’ 30
Cox, Courteney 81 Famous Monsters of Filmland 8
Craven, Wes 11 Fangoria 17, 79
 Index 101
feminism 27–28 Halloween III: Season of the Witch
film ratings 11–12, 19, 78 76–77
film studies: and Halloween xv, xvii, Halloween 4 74, 78, 79, 90, 92n6
37; and horror cinema 28; origins Halloween 5 74, 79, 90, 92n6
26, 27–28; see also Tudor, Andrew; Halloween, film: in academic
Wood, Robin discourses xv, 30–31, 33, 36–37;
‘Final Girl’, the see Clover, Carol J. budget of xiv, xviii–xixn1;
Forbidden Planet xiii, 6, 15, 16 canonical status of xv–xvi; casting
Fradley, Jeff 88 16; child as monstrous ‘Other’ in
Frankenstein 4 33–35; compared to Friday the 13th
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman 5 xv, xvi, xvii, 22–23; and Curse of
Friday the 13th, film: Betsy Palmer Frankenstein 17–18; depiction of
featured in 17; critical perception of xv, violence in 18–19; and the ‘Final
xvi; influence on the teen slasher cycle Girl’ 52–55; and the first teen
xvi–xvii, 1, 54; marketing of 22, 23 slasher cycle xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 22–23,
Friday the 13th, franchise: box office 73; Gothic elements of xv, 16–17;
decline of 79; Friday the 13th (2009 influence of Black Christmas on
remake) 88; Friday the 13th: A New xvi, 12–13; influence of Carrie
Beginning 74; Friday the 13th: The on 13; influence of Italian horror
Final Chapter 73; Friday the 13th on 18; influence of The Pom Pom
Part 2 23; Friday the 13th Part VI: Girls on 13; influence of Psycho
Jason Lives 74; marketing of 23; on 18; initial concept of xiii–xiv;
preadolescent characters in 73–74; and I Was a Teenage Werewolf 18;
referenced in Halloween H20; masked killer in 15, 63, 65–66,
success of 23, 73, 77 69–73; ‘nerd’ character type xviii,
Friends 81 50, 55–56, 57, 63, 87; as ‘paranoid’
Fromme, Allan 8 horror 38–40; plot summary of xiv;
‘popular girl’ character type in xviii,
German Expressionism 3 50, 55, 61–62, 86; preadolescent
Get Out 88 characters in 66–69; production
Ghosts of Mars 25n8 of xiv; release of 20–21; ‘rebel’
Ghoulardi see television character type in xviii, 50, 55,
Godfather, The 20 56–58; science-fiction elements in
God Told Me To 29 15–16; score 15–16, 17, 21, 57, 70;
Gothic: in film 2, 16; in literature xv, screenplay xiii, xiv, xvi, 13, 49, 51,
3, 16 65, 73
Grand Guignol Theatre 3 Halloween, franchise xviii, 74, 90–91
Granger, Farley 17 Halloween H20: 20 Years Later 81–83,
Great Depression 4 84, 90
Green, David Gordon 88 Halloween holiday xiv, 14–15, 22,
25n7, 77
Halloween (2007) 84–87, 90 Halloween: Resurrection 83–84
Halloween (2018) 88–89, 90 Halloween: The Curse of Michael
Halloween II (1981) 21, 23–24, 75, 76, Myers 79–81, 89, 90, 92n2
77, 82 Hammer Films 2, 7, 8, 16, 18
Halloween II (2009) 87–88 Harmon, Francis C. 4
102 Index
Harris, Danielle 92n6 Joseph Burstyn v. Wilson,
Hart, Marcus Alexander 90, 91, 91 Commissioner of New York 7, 19
Hartnett, Josh 82 juvenile delinquency 71–73
Haunting, The 9
Hawks, Howard 42 Kansas City 20
high concept marketing xvii, 10, 20,
21–22, 24 Last House on the Left 11, 19, 26
Hill, Debra: directing a scene in Lee, Christopher 7, 16
Halloween 74n3; divesting her Leeder, Murray xvii, 1, 25n6, 15, 16,
share of the Halloween franchise 48n9
78; pre-production on Halloween 4 Levin, Ira 10
78; producing Halloween xiii, xiv, Lewis, Herschell Gordon 9
19; producing Halloween II (1981) Lewton, Val 18
75, 76; producing Halloween III 77; Lippe, Richard 26, 28
on violence in Halloween 18–19; Love Story 12
writing Halloween xiii, xiv, xvi, 13,
49, 51, 65, 73; writing Halloween II Magnum Force 12
(1981) 76, 89 McBride, Danny 88
Hitchcock, Alfred 8–9, 18 Metropolis 3
Hooper, Tobe 12 Miller v. California 19
horror genre xv, 3, 4, 28–29, 31, 36–37; Miramax Films 80, 84, 88
see also teen slasher film mise en abyme 76, 80, 90
Horrors of Halloween blog 90 mise-en-scène 39, 41, 57–58
House of Dracula 5 misogyny 36–37
House of Frankenstein 5 Motion Picture Association of America
House of Usher 9 (MPAA) 11, 12, 19, 23
House of Wax 6, 24 multiplex theaters 3, 19, 22, 23, 24
Howarth, Alan 76 Mummy, The 5
Hutchings, Peter 1, 10, 82, 83, 84 Mummy’s Hand, The 5
My Bloody Valentine 23, 74
incest 16, 25n10 My Bloody Valentine 3D 88
Innocents, The 9, 18
institutions: educational 40–41; law ‘nerd’ character type xviii, 50, 55–56,
enforcement 41–44, 45–46, 50, 57, 63, 87
71–72, 73; mental health 44–46 Nicholson, James see American
Internet, the 84 International Pictures (AIP)
Internet Movie Database xvi Nightmare on Elm Street, A film 24, 73
It Came from Outer Space 6, 24 Nightmare on Elm Street, A franchise
It Lives Again 32 xviii, 79
It’s Alive 26, 29, 32, 33 Night of the Living Dead 10, 11, 18,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf 7, 18 29, 32
Nosferatu 3
Jacobellis v. Ohio 9–10, 19 Nowell, Richard xvi, xvii, 13,
Jaws 20, 21, 26 21–23, 54
Jaws 2 75
Johnson, Ben 17 Omen, The 21, 29, 32, 35
 Index 103
Palmer, Betsy 17 Prince of Darkness 52
Paramount Pictures 4, 10, 23, 77, 79; Production Code Administration 4
see also United States v. Paramount, Prom Night xv, 23
et al. Prowler, The 17
Paranormal Activity 88 Psycho xv, xvi, 1, 8–9, 18, 82
parents: absence in Halloween 42, 43, psychoanalytic film theory xvii, 26,
45; as audience members 4; in The 27–28, 37; see also Wood, Robin
Bad Seed 32; and film ratings 11, psychology see institutions
77; in Halloween 33–35, 39, 41–43,
57, 58; in Halloween (2007) 85, 86; Rabid 29
in Halloween II (2009) 87–88; in race 27; see also whiteness
Halloween: The Curse of Michael ‘Reaganite entertainment’ 30, 35, 36
Myers 80; in horror cinema xviii; in Rear Window 8
narratives of girlhood 69; in Night of ‘rebel’ character type xviii, 50, 55,
the Living Dead 10, 32; and young 56–58
adults 71 rebellion 30, 40, 82–83; see also ‘rebel’
Party of Five 81 character type
patriarchy: in culture 28, 37, 46, 53, Red River 42–43
56; and Halloween xvii, 34, 35, 36, repression see Wood, Robin
42–44, 65, 85; in horror cinema 27, ‘Return of the Repressed’ see Wood,
29; in ‘Reaganite entertainment’ 30; Robin
see also family; parents Rocky 35
Peary, Danny 18, 51, 52 Romero, George A. 10, 29
Phantom of the Opera 3 Rosemary’s Baby 10, 21
Pit and the Pendulum, The 25n5 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 36
platform release 12, 20 Rosenthal, Rick 76
Pleasence, Donald 16–17, 76
Poe, Edgar Allan see American saturation release 20, 21, 23
International Pictures (AIP) Scary Movie 84
Polanski, Roman 10 science fiction genre: elements in
Pom Pom Girls, The 13 Halloween 15–16; popularity with
‘popular girl’ character type xviii, 50, youth audiences 6; themes 6
55, 61–62, 86 Scream 81, 82
Possession of Joel Delaney, The 27 Scream Factory 92n3
Poverty Row 5 Screen Gems see television
preadolescents: as audiences 24, 50, sex: and Annie in Halloween 57, 58;
78–79; boyhood in Halloween in culture 27; in Halloween 33, 34,
66–68; girlhood in Halloween 36, 47, 51, 65, 71; in Halloween
68–69; in Halloween (2007) 85–86, (2007) 85, 86–87; in horror cinema
87; in Halloween II (2009) 88; in 29, 31; and Laurie in Halloween 53,
Halloween III 77; in Halloween 4 56; and Lynda in Halloween 61, 62,
78; in Halloween 5 79; in Halloween: 65; and ‘the new morality’ 3; and
The Curse of Michael Myers 80, preadolescence in Halloween 69; in
90; in slasher films 73–74; in Son of teen slasher films xv, 36, 37, 52; and
Frankenstein 5 virginity 52, 53, 63
Price, Vincent 9, 16, 25n5 Shary, Timothy 50, 51, 55
104 Index
Shivers 29 Tudor, Andrew: on Halloween 38;
‘Shock Pictures’ see television on horror cinema 9, 27, 47; on
Siskel, Gene xv, 21 ‘paranoid’ horror 38, 41, 44, 48; on
Sleepaway Camp 74 ‘secure’ horror 38, 44, 48
Soles, P.J. 61 Turtle Films see Yablans, Irwin
Son of Frankenstein 4–5
‘Son of Shock’ see television United Artists 13
South Pasadena xiv, xviii United States v. Paramount, et al. 6,
Star Wars 21 19, 24
Starman 25n8 Universal Pictures 4–5, 6, 7, 20, 21
Steele, Barbara 9, 25n5 Unknown, The 3
Suspiria 18
Vampira see television
teenagers: as audiences xiii, 2, 5–6, Variety 6, 23
12–13; on-screen representations Vietnam 26, 28, 29, 30
in teen slashers 27, 36–37, 50–55, Village of the Damned 9, 31, 32
73 voyeurism 33, 34, 37, 52
teen slasher film: character types 27,
36–37, 50–55, 73–74; first teen Walpole, Horace 16
slasher cycle xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 22–23, Warner Bros. 6, 7, 12
25n2, 54, 73, 78; origins xvi; second Watergate 28, 29
teen slasher cycle 1, 73–74, 77, 79; Way We Were, The 12
as subgenre xv, xixn4; ‘teenage soap Weinstein, Bob and Harvey 80, 81, 84
horror’ 81–84 ‘weirdies’: content of 2, 6–7, 12, 24;
telephones 63, 65–66 distribution of 20; influence on
television: broadcast of youth horror Halloween 15, 16, 18
films 7–8, 15, 24; influence on West Hollywood xiv
1990s youth horror cinema 81, 82; Westworld 15
reality-based programs 84; role in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 9
Halloween xii–xiii, 16, 58, 59, 69 whiteness 28, 34, 85
Tenser, Marilyn 13 Williams, Michelle 82
Terror Train xv, 17, 23, 74 Williams, Tony 26
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974) Williamson, Kevin 81, 82
xvi, 1, 11–12, 29, 92n5 Wolf, Joseph xixn1, 25n9
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (2003) Wood, Robin: on David Cronenberg
84 29, 30; on Halloween xvii, 26–27,
They Live 43 30–31, 47, 85; on Halloween’s
Thing, The 1, 25n1, 52 depiction of teenagers 36; on
Thing from Another World, The xii, Halloween’s depiction of the
15, 16 evil child 31, 33, 34–36, 45; on
Through the Lens xvi Halloween’s depiction of the family
TigerBeat 84 38, 40, 42, 46; on horror cinema
Timpone, Tony 17 26, 28–29; on Larry Cohen 29, 32,
To Catch a Thief 8 33; on ‘progressive’ horror 29; on
Trancas International 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, Psycho 8; on ‘reactionary’ horror 29;
88, 92n3 on teen slashers 16, 36–37
 Index 105
World War I 3 Films xiii; partnership with Moustapha
World War II 5 Akkad xiii, 19, 75, 77–78; son’s
appearance in Halloween 67, 74n5
Yablans, Irwin: concern with film ratings young adulthood xvii, 50, 71, 73
19; creating Halloween xiii–xiv, ‘youths in school’ films 50
xviiin1, 12–13, 50, 51; distributing
Halloween 20–21; marketing Zombie, Rob 48n7, 74, 84–85, 86, 87,
Halloween 21–22; owner of Turtle 89, 92n7