Halloween

by Mark Bernard

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 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.

106 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

Mark Bernard is the author of Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film and co-author of a forthcoming book on horror film performance and cult reception.

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

At just under 100 pages this book demonstrates Halloween's importance as a horror film for it's representation of institutional failures and teenage/preadolescent identity while also capitalizing on the type of audiences viewing movies at the time - thus setting of a slasher horror craze. The last chapter goes into Halloween's 'sequels' up to 2018's Halloween to demonstrate how the franchise's flexibility offered new ways to appeal to audiences and youth, even if they were occasionally critically panned. The book also offers a thorough overview of slasher horror's origins, and horror film's origins more broadly, with quick glances at films like Dracula, The Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, and Black Christmas (hooray for Canadian representation).

[Bill Weaver · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more, but I am too much of a purist and perhaps too much of a fan. Academics are so desperate to apply rational analysis to these films but they sometimes get the basic facts from the text of the film entirely wrong. Then they start to say ridiculous things. Do the editors of these books and peer reviewers actually watch the movies? I sometimes wonder because at least one mistake in here, a misquote, should have jumped out at anyone who knows this film well enough to review a book about it. If it was a book only about the Rob Zombie remakes I could understand but this is a misquote from John Carpenter’s original classic film. How can you get that wrong? A pivotal scene, the climax of the film really, the scene that cemented this film in the mind of anyone who saw it at the time….!? How can such a crucial scene to the meaning of the film be flubbed? And once you notice this it throws the rest of the author’s analysis into doubt. On page 68 he gets the line like this: “After [Laurie’s] encounter with Michael, . . . [l]ike a terrified child, she sits on the floor, cries, and looks up at Loomis, meekly asking, ‘Was that the boogeyman?’” This is wrong. That’s not the line. The exchange between Loomis and Laurie goes like this:
Laurie: It was the boogeyman.
Loomis [nods]: As a matter of fact, it was.
How can I trust these academics when they continually mess this up?! The entire point of the first original movie (John Carpenter’s Halloween) is that yes it WAS the boogeyman! The boogeyman is real you dumb grown-ups! You can’t control everything! Evil exists and it is outside your ability (and the ability of your social systems) to control! It is like staring these academics right in the face but they refuse to see it. They have their heads shoved too far up their own analysis. I am sorry but no matter how good the rest of your theory about the meaning of this film is, when you flub such an essential quotation from the film’s text, it unspools the remaining threads of your analysis. It’s like again I find myself asking, did this guy even watch the film?! Did any of the peer reviewers and editors who worked on this book even watch the film? I somehow tend to doubt it. So I will give this two stars for a lot of the information here helped me work on my own paper, but really I cannot get to three with such shoddy attention to detail.