Tracing The Shape 25: Loomis is Broken

Once Laurie has seemingly dealt with Michael, Carpenter briefly pivots the action back to Loomis. I say "action," but really he's not doing much of anything, and yet the way Donald Pleasence plays this brief scene says everything about where the character is right now.

We linger with the doctor for less than a minute, following him as he walks up and down Haddonfield's streets, searching for any sign of Michael beyond the Smith's Grove car he spotted minutes earlier. He has no idea that he just missed Michael chasing Laurie Strode across the street, he has no idea of anything, and when Sheriff Brackett pulls up, he can only tell him to go around the back of the house to try and flush Michael out. In these moments, half-hidden by shadow and falling leaves while the autumn wind cries around him, Loomis has never looked smaller. He hasn't fought the rest of this battle yet, and yet he already feels defeated.

I can't say enough good things about the way Pleasence plays this. His eyes are cast down, his gait is exhausted and hobbled, he strokes his goatee not in thought but in desperation. His right hand keeps wandering to his coat pocket, where his pistol is, in the vain hope that he'll find Michael behind a random tree and just be able to take care of business.

And just like the last time we saw Loomis, the tragedy is that he is already too late. No one else will die tonight (not until the sequel, anyway, but we're not talking about that). Three teenagers are dead on his watch. He does not know this, and yet he seems to feel it, sense that something has already gone horribly wrong and he was powerless to even sniff it out, let alone stop it.

I love this scene, however brief, because it adds to the vision of Loomis as a damned soul, a man adrift in a sea of evil he's convinced only he can navigate. This entire night has been a test for him, a chance to see if he could actually respond when the chips were down after years of warning anyone who'd listen that something like this could happen.

He came into Haddonfield so confidently, so convinced of how right he was, how clearheaded he could be about Michael Myers, and now he's adrift. He didn't see the car until minutes ago, even though it was right down the street. He didn't think to examine Michael's motives beyond a visit to his childhood home, or if he did, he didn't think those motives would involve that much legwork on his part. This is a man who knows exactly what Michael is, or at least thinks he does, but not a man who knows how to handle Michael unmoored.

No one knows how to do that, of course, but Loomis is the man who's supposed to know, damn it. He's given his life to this pursuit, to keeping a monster caged, and while he wasn't really wrong about that pursuit, he is still just a psychiatrist with a pistol and a head full of fear. He doesn't know what to do next any more than Laurie does, and here at the end, when Michael's power is greater than ever before, when Haddonfield is blustering around him, he really feels like he should know, like something should kick in.

Instead he's just an old man wandering around town, gun in his pocket, desperate for a clue. When he finally gets one, it will not make anything easier, because no matter how hard Sam Loomis fights to truly understand and therefore defeat Michael Myers, he will not solve this mystery. His is the most cosmic of the horror stories at work in this film, because he is trying to know the unknowable, and soon it will lead him into an entirely new kind of hell.

Next Time: Michael Myers and kids!