Tracing The Shape 20: The Long Walk

Halloween is 92 minutes long. The opening and closing credits shave roughly five minutes off that, so we're talking about 87 minutes of story, more-or-less. Less than an hour and a half to lay out the complex backstory of a killer, put all the pieces in place for a massacre, and then deliver the goods. It is still the blueprint for maximal slasher cinema impact and efficiency.

And yet here, with less than half an hour to go and the body count climbing by the minute, John Carpenter offers us five minutes of quiet.

It's not silence, of course – the score is playing, and we hear things like creaks in the house and wind picking up outside – but it is very quiet. Once Laurie Strode leaves Tommy and Lindsey asleep upstairs and resolves to cross the street to the Wallace house, she encounters nothing and no one for five minutes. The walk from the Doyles' front door to the Wallaces' alone takes 90 seconds, and in those 90 seconds she's not even talking. She's just strolling forward, hesitant but resolute, convinced she has to check on everyone.

We just finished talking about Laurie Strode's remarkable interior life, and my feeling that she already knows something is very wrong even if she can't put a name to it, so I won't go over that again right now. What I will do is appreciate the patience of this, the nerve of putting this much quiet right in the middle of your third act. Maximizing tension before a climax is key in thriller filmmaking, of course, but what's especially gutsy about this choice is just how clear it is to everyone watching what's about to happen.

Yes, there are many, many nuances to Laurie's first true confrontation with Michael Myers, and we'll get to those shortly, but as an audience we are programmed by the cadence of this film to feel like we've been here before. Annie's death sequence alone gives us what feels like a perfect blueprint for Michael's modus operandi. To make things even more interesting, Carpenter uses at least half of this 90-second walk across the street to bring back the POV shot, the shot that introduced us to Michael. This time we're seeing through the eyes of Laurie as she approaches the Wallace house, but much of the rhythm is the same. She even walks past the jack-o'-lantern on the front porch railing so she can use the back door!

Everyone watching the movie is very aware that Michael is in that house, and we know by now what Michael will do to another living body who steps over that threshold. Laurie is walking into a trap, and for five excruciating minutes, we can only watch her.

It gets worse when she finally enters the house, passing the garage where Annie was killed and the kitchen were Bob was pinned to the door like an insect. She hears movement upstairs, and the more she hears it, and calls out for her friends, the more her efforts to convince herself that she's just the victim of a teenage prank are failing. She knew something was wrong before she even walked out the door. Why else would she come over here? A part of her cries out to know, to understand the silence of her friends, the weird lights across the street. Annie and Lynda are not the types to be this quiet, and she knows because she's always watching them, always pressing her face up to the glass of their world of sex and beer and boys.

The longer we spend walking across this quiet street and through this dark house with Laurie Strode, the more we come to understand that it was never about shouting for her friends. It was always about confronting whatever lurked on the other side of the street. Free of her sweater and her kitchen apron, free of the kids, free of anything other than concern and determination, she is ready to face whatever's really going on here. She won't be ready for it – how could she be? – but this is the moment she becomes the Final Girl. We know how movies work. We know that even if you can't kill The Boogeyman, you also can't kill Laurie Strode. The question is not her survival, it's how she fights back.

Next: Charnel House!