How Hal­loween stoked our fears and mis­un­der­stand­ing of men­tal illness

“I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emo­tion­less face, and the black­est eyes. I spent eight years try­ing to reach him, and then anoth­er sev­en try­ing to keep him locked up, because I realised what was liv­ing behind that boy’s eyes was pure and sim­ply evil.”

These are the words of Sam Loomis, and the child he’s refer­ring to is no longer a child at this point in his life. He’s grown into the boil­er suit-clad killer whose knife appears on the poster for John Carpenter’s 1978 clas­sic, Hal­loween. Michael Myers is the ear­li­est incar­na­tion of what is now one of the most com­mon stock char­ac­ters in hor­ror. One that can’t be killed, can’t be stopped, and exists for one pur­pose – to kill. It rarely seems to mat­ter who the vic­tims are, as long as they live in a place that has some rela­tion to the killer, but the clear­est trait link­ing those char­ac­ters is the fact that they’ve been dehumanised.

Dur­ing his col­lege days Car­pen­ter vis­it­ed a men­tal insti­tu­tion. ​“It was very depress­ing. See­ing a guy, who just looked like the Dev­il. He was just men­tal­ly ill, but that’s what he looked like,” he has said of the expe­ri­ence. ​“That idea of evil, that’s where it came from. He’s not real­ly, but it appeared that way. The men­tal­ly ill are not evil. They’re just sad.”

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Carpenter’s own words and Loomis’ are obvi­ous, but there is one cru­cial omis­sion from the fic­tion­alised ver­sion – there is no sense of empa­thy. In fact, in the film men­tal ill­ness is pre­sent­ed unam­bigu­ous­ly as the rea­son Myers kills. And he’s not the only one – Fri­day the 13^th’s Jason Voorhees, Wolf Creek’s Mick Tay­lor and more recent hor­ror antag­o­nists such as Hered­i­tary​’s Char­lie all fall into this category.

The reg­u­lar­i­ty with which Myers has appeared on our screens down the years is tes­ta­ment to his effec­tive­ness as a boogey­man fig­ure. Aside from the odd­i­ty that is 1983’s Sea­son of the Witch, the char­ac­ter has fea­tured in every addi­tion to the Hal­loween fran­chise, typ­i­cal­ly oper­at­ing in the same mode. He moves slow­ly, yet some­how man­ages to relent­less­ly keep up with his vic­tims, and he always car­ries a large sharp kitchen knife. He has no dis­cernible emo­tion­al state to speak of, which is true of every char­ac­ter sub­se­quent­ly inspired by him.

When a direc­tor wants to show a character’s men­tal ill­ness, they usu­al­ly por­tray them as qui­et or mute, social­ly with­drawn or else show­ing a com­plete lack of inter­est in oth­ers. This says a lot, of course, not only about a film’s cre­ator but soci­ety as a whole – men­tal ill­ness is still viewed as some­thing inher­ent­ly wrong or threat­en­ing. In many hor­ror films, men­tal ill­ness is defined as intro­spec­tive by nature, and deeply pri­vate. It can nev­er be ful­ly explained (or rather, won’t be by the per­son suf­fer­ing from it) and thus it is impos­si­ble to ful­ly under­stand it. Direc­tors under­stand this, and very often use it to a less than altru­is­tic end.

One of the things I ask myself when­ev­er I watch a slash­er film is, ​‘What makes this antag­o­nist scary?’ And the answer is always the same: their unpre­dictabil­i­ty. This unpre­dictabil­i­ty stems from the influ­ence of films like Hal­loween, where men­tal­ly ill peo­ple are ​‘oth­ered’, forcibly sep­a­rat­ed from what most peo­ple con­sid­er every­day life. When that sep­a­ra­tion is dimin­ished, the hor­ror starts. It’s a con­cept which seems to con­nect with audi­ences, and it says a lot about how men­tal ill­ness is viewed on a cul­tur­al level.

It’s a trend we can see in the lat­est incar­na­tion of the Hal­loween saga. There’s a scene in the trail­er where a group of patients are chained to the ground, at a safe dis­tance apart, and sit­ting or stand­ing at odd angles: some are crouch­ing, oth­ers are con­tort­ing their backs in strange ways. They’re pre­sent­ed as tak­ing a per­verse glee in some­one bran­dish­ing Myers’ mask. Here the audi­ence is being told that these peo­ple see some­thing of them­selves in Myers, and they’re just as threat­en­ing as him.

It’s anoth­er instance of men­tal ill­ness being used as a fear tac­tic, much like it was in Carpenter’s orig­i­nal and so many of the films it has inspired. It’s a tired trope, one that appears to be going nowhere in hor­ror but which the world at large could do without.