My brother and I settled into our seats. The theater was dark but still dimly lit as more people filed in excitedly. There was a bit of electricity in the air, almost as if the crisp autumn breeze outside had infiltrated the space, carrying with it a whiff of bonfire and a few scattered red leaves.
We didn’t talk much, rather prepared ourselves mentally for what we were about to see. The lights fell away and the screen lit up. It was happening. I grinned. A new Halloween movie was about to start.
Some twenty years before my brother and I sat down to watch yet another Halloween movie, my friends and I headed out to watch our very first. It was August and the summer was quickly setting, so every opportunity we had to go out somewhere, to do something together as a group, had an air of urgency about it. Going out to the movies was no different, especially an R-rated one.
Junior High was behind me. On the horizon? High School. Mere months had separated me from that big, daunting place that was to be my social station for the following four years and now it was just weeks- days really- before I would have to face it.
Fear and I didn’t get along too well. Dread and trepidation tended to follow my every neurotic decision, so I just assumed not have any part of it show up in the movies I watched for fun. Stemming from a haunting experience I had with Chucky’s battery-less actions in Child’s Play (1988) when I was six years old, I avoided horror as much as I could. That was, until the summer of 1998. Until a fateful sleepover involving Scream (1996) and the subsequent months of discovery that led me to Candyman (1992), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and, in the end, that would lead me to the world of Halloween.
Halloween: H20 (1998) looked, to my friends and I at least, to be a whole lot like Scream. A fun, glossy slasher with a pretty young cast, an anarchic attitude and some slashing for good measure. I was nervous, as years of avid avoidance are prone to linger, but excited all the same. It was a strange, new feeling that seemed to be unique to horror movies. One that, whether I cared to admit it to myself or not, I had been chasing since that sleepover several months before.
Still, whenever I was concerned, be it about an impending movie or a gargantuan shift in my social and educational life, it wasn’t just one fear that swirled around in the cosmos of my mind— it was all of them. However, before I had much time to dwell on my insecurities, the movie started. And as the kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun went in to investigate a dark house, I felt all of those fears about a new school and whether or not I’d fit in there slip away. What might happen didn’t matter and I was able to focus on what was happening.
By the time the opening credits began and John Ottman’s orchestral version of John Carpenter’s iconic theme kicked in, I was enthralled. Twenty years of Halloween history unfolded on screen, cuing me in to Michael Myer’s evil deeds and serving as the backdrop to my understanding of the character. Strange drawings of the killer on the wall and the disembodied voice of who I had assumed was the mass murderer’s doctor or psychiatrist told me what I needed to know. I was hooked.
Still, the film was not Scream. This was not a whodunnit, rather a movie where the killer is never a question, in some ways more of a ghost. A violent spirit haunting those it stalks in an eternal bind that follows regardless of whether those in his sights are near or far. There was something fascinating to me about that struggle and, although I had no context for the climactic battle which ensued between Jaimie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and her murderous brother Michael Myers, the gravity of the conclusion was not lost on me. It wasn’t just Michael she was standing up against, it was her fear, everything that was holding her back and pushing her down, and she wasn’t having it.
As we exited the theater and got back into the car, I felt lighter. My nerves were still there, my insecurities still firmly in place, but a release had occurred. Through all of the jumps, close-calls and bloody deaths in Halloween: H20, I had managed to exorcise something and, as my summer came to an end, so too, finally, did my active hostility toward horror.
High School arrived with a fury, upheaving my social life and casting me into a pool of thousands, all competing for a place to exist and feel seen. While facing it all certainly assuaged my more immediate terror when it came to something so vast and so new, it birthed entirely new ones. And, through it all, I started to watch more horror movies.
Movies were a big part of my life and horror was something I finally learned to enjoy, but I didn’t prioritize the genre. My friends and I would catch whatever was coming out in theaters (leading to an extensive familiarity with the J-horror remake cycle) and rent the occasional VHS at sleepovers, but that was the extent of it. All the while my life went through the ups and downs of adolescence, while I tried my best to keep myself together.
When the time for college inevitably arrived, I felt that familiar sickly sense of pervasive dread all over again. While my initial major of choice was unrelated to the movies, I decided to take one film course. Something to satisfy a general English credit and provide me with that special sort of cinematic escape that always seemed to help calm the tumultuous waters of my eternally worry-prone mind.
And it was in that class that I was sitting on the morning of October 31st, just a little over four years after I watched Laurie face down her brother with an axe, and there that I was finally brought back to the Halloween franchise. We sat down, the professor clicked off the overhead fluorescents and he started up the projector.
The opening shot of Halloween (1978) was a revelation. Beyond the tone and atmosphere it was able to evoke, the technical accomplishment of it floored me. I watched wide eyed and jaw agape right up until the moment that the teacher stood up and stopped the film just a handful of minutes into its runtime. He transitioned from the clip to a brief description of the film’s history, explaining how writer and director John Carpenter had made the project in a matter of only a few weeks with little crew and money. Moreover, he impressed upon us how influential it was and how the horror genre as we know it today would not be the same were it not for Halloween.
I left the class and headed straight to the video store. It was a small, dank space packed to the seams with VHS tapes and DVDs, its walls and countertops lined with old posters, movie knick knacks and snacks for days. I marched straight up to the guy at the counter and asked where the horror section was. He grinned and showed me over. Terrified that all the copies would be checked out given what day it was, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a DVD of Halloween staring at me from the top of the shelf, as though waiting for me to pick it up.
The guy nodded in approval. “Right on,” he said.
Thirty minutes later I was back at my dorm with a friend and pressing play. Far from the impressive size and quality of the projection screen I had seen the opening shot on only an hour or so before, my roommate’s 22’’ tube TV still did a shockingly admirable job. The movie was a machine, a perfect engine constructed image by image to generate dread. Every decision was purposeful, every angle masterful and there was little more disturbing than seeing the expressionless face of Michael Myers staring straight ahead. Watching. Waiting.
Again, I experienced that feeling. The euphoria that occurs when the mind can just give in to an experience. When the visual becomes the visceral and dread emanates from each passing frame, each resounding note of score and each whisper of the empty man who stares from the periphery. Something clicked in my dorm room that Halloween morning and horror became all the more important. As the credits rolled I headed back out to the campus video store once more, the day was young and I was willing to bet that the guy at the counter (Jake, as I would come to know him) would have plenty of recommendations for a burgeoning horror fan on Halloween night.
The following year I returned home. Driven by my ever increasing passion for film and the arts, I decided to pursue a major in that vein. The college I had been attending offered no such path, so a semester or two back in my old bedroom, attending a local community college seemed to be the best option as I sifted through the immense weight that accompanied the decision of what to do for the rest of my life.
My anxiety at an all time high, I couldn’t help but feel trapped by the endless recurrence of what felt like unyielding dread. So it was, as the fall loomed, I decided to give myself completely over to horror that year, spending every waking moment seeking out anything and everything that I hadn’t yet seen.
At the same time, as my younger brother was still living at home, my brother and I started to watch these movies together. We had run in different circles before, so these watches became a uniting factor for the two of us. So it was one Saturday afternoon in October that we both found ourselves lazily flipping through TV channels with nothing particular in mind to watch.
He stopped abruptly as Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis stood small in the frame, holding a gun. I had shown my brother Halloween earlier that year, so the sight of the man made him do a double take. We quickly realized that the movie was not Halloween, but a Halloween certainly. Still, he put the remote down and we decided to give it a shot. We were aware that the series involved a slew of sequels, but assumed they were not up to par with the original’s level of quality, so we had not sought them out.
A commercial break informed us minutes later that we were watching Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) on AMC’s FearFest. We rolled our eyes and joked about watching this one without having seen the second or even third entry, but we didn’t change the channel. The commercial break ended and soon we had met little Danielle Harris’ Jamie Lloyd, the niece of Michael Myers, and before we knew it, we were popping popcorn and rooting for her and her step-sister Rachel to escape Myers as they climbed precariously across a rooftop in the darkness.
When the movie ended and Jamie stood atop the staircase, garbed in the same style clown costume little Michael had been wearing at the start of the first film, all the while backed by Donald Pleasence’s blood-curdling screams, my brother and I sat staring transfixed at the television. A title card appeared announcing the day’s remaining line-up: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) up next, followed by Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) and then, to cap it all off, Halloween II (1981).
My brother gave me a look and said, “we doing this?” My response: “absolutely.”
We were in and out of the room throughout the day, catching bits of certain movies here and there and all the while trying to make sense of the convoluted mythology. Hell, making sense of it all was half the fun. The high of seeing Jamie Lloyd emerge as the next in line to don the mask was followed immediately by the low of realizing the series did not have the gumption to follow through with the promise of Halloween 4’s spectacular conclusion. And, yet, for every disappointment that Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers lobbed, there was an elaborate set piece to latch onto, such as Jamie’s harrowing journey through the duct work near the film’s finale.
By the time we reached Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, we were throwing out the most insane theories we could think of regarding the Man in Black and his plans for the Myers family (and, yes, aliens did come up). Dr. Samuel Loomis had become one of our favorite movie heroes of all time and we were in for even the most inane plot diversions, Cults of Thorn and all— excepting of course with the sixth’s lack of Danielle Harris and her character’s unceremonious disposal. Circling back to Halloween II, we were reminded of the artistry on display in the original and the sobering brutality that a night containing Michael Myers’ reign of terror would inflict upon a small town.
It occurred to me then that I only knew that Myers was Laurie Strode’s brother because of Halloween: H20 and that it was in Halloween II where the plot point was established. When I asked my brother about it, he just shrugged and said he must’ve picked the knowledge up somewhere, as if by pop-culture osmosis, as such is the pervasive sticking power of the franchise and its many, sometimes perplexing, goings on. And yet, that too was a part of its charm. When it was all said and done, my brother and I sat there and recapped what we had picked up, attempting to explain the plot in as rational a way possible, a feat that almost always ended in snickering and laughter. To be clear, we were not laughing at it, we were reveling in it.
We spent the next several months traversing the various Best Buys, Suncoasts and Circuit Cities around us in an effort to find DVDs of the films in the Halloween franchise, deciding that it was paramount my brother and I had the ability to travel through them all at will. Pooling what little money we had, we slowly pieced together the franchise, which at that time capped out at eight entries with Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Once complete we ran through them, discovering that Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982) had nothing to do with Michael Myers while being a fantastic seasonal outing in its own right and that Resurrection, amongst its other crimes, unceremoniously killed off Laurie Strode for the second time in the series, this time on screen.
We ranked and rated and compared and contrasted as though making up for lost time, obsessing over the films in a manic way that we might’ve done when we were younger and more impressionable. We scoured internet chat-rooms for information on lost cuts and forgotten edits, even ordering a bootleg DVD of the ever-elusive Producer’s Cut of Halloween 6 off of eBay, resulting in a screening of a barely visible, barely audible flick that my brother and I spent months joyfully attempting to decipher. We were there for Rob Zombie’s outings and on the phone celebrating together when Scream Factory announced its major Blu-ray box set, uniting the franchise on home disc for the first time and, yes, finally, providing us with a copy of the Producer’s Cut that was, indeed, watchable.
At that point, the Halloween franchise was the first full horror franchise I had ever watched and suddenly the fandoms constructed around such things made sense. Not only that, it felt to be an extension of one’s love of the genre in general.
A great horror franchise, like Halloween, serves as the ideal sampling platter for genre cinema, united by a common thread and just as easily digestible because of it. Horror at its best can change and adjust in a chameleonic fashion to meet the mood of the horror fan seeking it out. After all, there are days where I so desire a masterclass in visual tension and others where I seek nothing more than a pagan cult Hellbent on reclaiming the heir to their evil lineage of mindless murderers.
It took a handful of years for me to realize it, but the Halloween franchise was there every step of the way on my road to finding the horror genre. From the glossy teen slasher of the late 90s, to the sparse acuity of late 70s tales of tension to the distractingly tangled mythos of the behemoth 80s horror franchise, Halloween was my guide.
It was less a place to find fear, anxiety and terror and more a place to distill it. At times to experience such things, at other times to laugh at them and, in some instances, to simply let go of those feelings entirely. The horror genre in a nutshell; exactly what I needed as my life continued to transition into something new as it had, and always would, continue to do.
Sitting there waiting for Halloween (2018) to begin, my brother by my side, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the nerves that hit as I watched Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s body laid out with an ice skate impaled in his skull twenty years before. I couldn’t help but think back to the awe that overtook me as I saw Halloween’s opening tracking shot unfold on the screen in my classroom and then again an hour later on the small TV in the corner of my dorm room. I couldn’t help but see my brother and I, not in reclining, red theater chairs, but sprawled out on my family’s old couch, our finger hovering over the channel button on the remote as Donald Pleasence opened fire upon a bandaged man in a service station.
We had found the Halloween movies and the horror genre as the movies often found themselves: out of order and out of time. Evidenced by, if nothing else, the movie we were about to watch, a sequel to its 40 year old counterpart, featuring Jaimie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode who had herself been killed two times prior by the ever shifting sands of the series’ amorphous continuity. And, you know something, we couldn’t have been more excited.
Like the twenty years that had passed since Halloween and Halloween: H20, my twenty years had seen me traverse all of those things of which I was most afraid would destroy me. But, like most of us, I made it through, grew stronger and was now facing the next phase of my life, not as a student, but as a professional, not as an adolescent, but as a father— but, now and forever more, as a horror fan. Like the inevitability of a new franchise entry, that’s one thing that will not change.
And, for that, I thank Halloween. Every last one of them.
