Tracing The Shape 7: Night Falls on Haddonfield
If you know anything about the production of Halloween, then you probably know that the film was shot not in Illinois in the fall, but in California in the spring. The streets of Haddonfield are quite verdant, the trees full of leaves, so to create some semblance of fall in the air, the production used bags of autumn leaves, scattered them around for key scenes, then carefully gathered them up again.
It's a clever and cheap way to create a sense not just of place, but of time. Despite all the greenery snaking through the town, Halloween does feel like a fall movie, but the more you watch it, the more you get a sense of a certain unreality. It doesn't make sense that Laurie Strode, leaving her house to catch a ride with Annie Brackett, is sitting amid autumn leaves while spring is clearly in bloom around her. It doesn't make sense that you can see shadows of graffiti along the retaining walls in this seemingly idyllic neighborhood. It doesn't make sense that, as they drive to their babysitting jobs for the night, Annie and Laurie are tailed by a car clearly emblazoned with a Smith's Grove emblem, a car that's no doubt been called in as stolen, and no one bats an eye.
This is the spell of the Boogeyman. This is dark magic. This is a veil between worlds thinning.
When you're a kid, and the sun's going down on Halloween night, that's a feeling you get. The streets are the same, but not really. Your neighbors are still there, but they're obscured by masks and capes and fake blood. The houses are the same color, but they're festooned with lights and pumpkins and skeletons. And even beyond what you can see, there's just something in the air, a sense of possibility. Yes, some of these little details in Halloween are due to a low-budget production making the best of a complicated situation, but if you buy the ticket and take the ride, you start to feel like the rational is slipping away from you, just a bit, as Annie and Laurie ride off into the night.
Along the way, over the course of just eight minutes, Carpenter and Hill's script peppers in lots of vital information very quickly, while never losing the momentum of the story. Someone robbed the hardware store! Dr. Loomis makes contact with Sheriff Brackett! Laurie has an honest-to-God crush on Ben Tramer! Annie is excited that Laurie has said crush! And of course, Michael came along and stole his sister's tombstone.
We will come back to the subject of Judith Myers' grave marker later, but for now I just want to revel a little bit in what good moviemaking all of this is. So many pieces fall into place so quickly, and most of the sequence is just a pair of high school girls driving around, smoking a joint, trading info that's important to the story while also just sounding like two friends talking. It's great, efficient, beautifully paced stuff.
And all the while, The Boogeyman is on their tale.
Transitional scenes in stories like this are challenging. The purpose of these eight minutes is to simply move characters into place for what's going to come in the second and third acts. Loomis has to discover the missing gravestone so he feels sure that Michael is back in Haddonfield and can thus go to the sheriff. Laurie and Annie need to get to their babysitting gigs, and Michael needs to know where they're going so that the rest of the plot works and he's not just trolling around Haddonfield all night, looking for the blonde girl and her friend he lost in traffic.
It's easy to imagine a version of the film that just takes some of this information as a given, right? This could all go just a bit faster, you could maybe cut straight to the girls arriving for their babysitting jobs, maybe shave down some of the Loomis stuff. You don't even really have to have Michael on their tail, you could just wave your hand and use Boogeyman magic to get him in place. These scenes are mostly just information...until you notice who's following Annie and Laurie this whole time.
It's not just that Michael needs to know where they are. It's that he needs to know he's in control, that his power is working while everyone else's is absent. There is an inherent sense of the unreal and the strange in the air on Halloween night, and Michael uses it to his advantage. He loses himself in the bustle of it, yes, but also in the possibility, the sense of this world becoming ever so slightly untethered. He glides through it all like those anachronistic leaves.
So all of these autumn leaves, and joints shared between friends, are consumed by slow-moving shadows. Trick-or-treaters are walking the streets, unaware that they are already in a world that's not their own, a world less safe than it was the day before. When night falls Michael Myers can do just about anything he wants.
And he does.
Next Time: Death has come to your little town!
