ComingSoon continues its look back through the 50-year career of John Carpenter and arrives at the film that has defined it. The Night He Came Home is where Carpenter truly arrived.
There’s not a lot left to say about Halloween and its impact on John Carpenter’s career and the horror genre itself. It’s a game-changer; Carpenter and Debra Hill cooked up one of the most iconic slashers of all time, and it’s not hard to see why Michael Myers refuses to die 45 years on from the time he walked out of his house in Haddonfield.
There’s an aura to Myers that makes him stand out in a sea of slasher villains. Silent but for a bit of breathing difficulty, and despite repeated flirtation with the occult, just a regular person who is genuinely psychopathic. No wisecracks, no zombification, no Letterboxd account fervently preaching about the kills in famous horror movies. Just a manchild who killed his sister when he was a boy, and came back years later to kill again because…well, that’s a question, isn’t it?
Why does he kill? Loomis likes to give us his reasons, and his dismissal of Michael as anything other than a doll-eyed murder machine is a big part of the aura he has. Loomis has seen enough of what Michael is to give up on him. He doesn’t see a person; he sees a thing; a deadly, murderous thing.
Many have tried to alter who and what Michael is over the years, but in Halloween, there’s an unnerving purity to his brand of evil. On the surface, he seems to be out for very specific blood, but there’s a kind of randomness to what he does on this one fateful night he came home.
Laurie wins out, and ultimately it becomes a personal saga between her and Michael, but in the context of that first film, she’s just the one fortunate enough not to get murdered by Michael that night. had she not survived and slowed him down, who knows how large Myers’ body count would have been before he was stopped, or who would have been the ”Final Girl”. Everything about that night is fortune and misfortune.
Myers’ cold indifference married to his mysterious desire to return to his home town rocks Hadonfield under cover of darkness. he’s a force of nature that some unfortunate people got caught up in. Every time he’s just standing there, watching the residents of Haddonfield, we don’t know what he’s thinking, and that’s why he is such a frightening monster.
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