A Film Canon

Halloween is credited with inspiring the 80s slasher craze, but it's only a slasher film in the loosest sense. There's virtually no narrative, only a slasher iconography - a masked killer stalking teenage girls - and, unlike previous slasher films, this disburdening of narrative isn't a vehicle for voyeuristic gore either. Instead, Carpenter crystallises the slasher's apparent omniscience and invulnerability into that of a disembodied, distributed eye, present everywhere but visible nowhere. At the same time, he crystallises the slasher's mileu, which previously tended to combine urbanity with utter isolation, into suburbia. In doing so, he not only lays the foundation for his auteurist signature - a preoccupation with disembodied, distributed sight - but clarifies that there's something peculiarly suburban about that signature, and his whole body of work. It's this suburbanization of (horror) cinema that explains Halloween's legacy, and impact upon the 80s - a process that's not necessarily tied to literal depictions of suburbia, but to the convergence of suburban and cinematic infrastructure; that is, the multiplex. As a result, Carpenter's films - especially his 70s and 80s films - make most sense when seen in multiplexes, or when imagined as so many ciphers for multiplexes, and this convergence is most poetically considered in Halloween. In a series of suspenseful set pieces that extend the most lurid, experimental 50s suburban melodrama into horror - and very little extension is needed - Carpenter presents suburbia as a series of sight-lines, a geography that arranges gazes as much as bodies, and transforms the serial killer into somebody capable of traversing, or simply gazing across, supposedly incommensurable blocks of space. Given that these blocks of space tend to be parallel, or at least adjacent, Carpenter manages to imbue the most basic suburban vistas with an extraordinary depth, distending the spaces between houses, rooms and even opposite sides of a single room with a galactic, antarctic austerity - a televised broadcast of Hawks' The Thing From Another World rhythms the action - until the distance traversed by looking through a window and making a phone call become synonymous, and the distance between shots expands beyond screaming distance. As a result, every interface takes on both the translucence of a traversed window and the fuzz of an electrical threshold, thanks partly to Carpenter's cinematography, which takes Douglas Sirk's trademark tendency to interalize the very alternation between warm interiors and cool exteriors upon which more conventional suburban melodrama hangs, and reimagines it as the inside and outside of a Halloween pumpkin. Every interface, then, looks back with a malign agency - or, rather, the slasher's face only exists as the composite of suburban images that conclude the film, a gesture that Rob Zombie's remake takes up and explores - while the entire film feels first-person, continuous with the extraordinary opening shot, which adopts the point of view of the young slasher as he circles his family home, enters it and murders his sister. As a first-person film shot as a third-person film, then, Halloween is effectively an attempt to rein suburbia in to the ambit of a single gaze - an impossible enterprise, but one Carpenter and his slasher perhaps best evoke through the slightly curvaceous, distorting lens, which perpetually suggests something gleaming over the shoulder of the film's gridded sight-lines, something that's too elusive to be cornered, or to conform to the corners that those sight-lines designate as their own internalized blindspot, just as a moving windscreen curves whatever corner it's caressing, curves its own corners.