Halloween

Youth Cinema and the Horrors of Growing Up

Mark Bernard

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351734158
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film History & Criticism

This book argues that Halloween need not be the first nor the most influential youth slasher film for it to hold a special place in the history of youth cinema.

John Carpenter's 1978 horror hit was once considered the be-all, end-all of teen slasher cinema and was regarded as the first, the best, and the most influential American slasher film. Recent revisions in film history, however, have challenged Halloween 's comfortable place in the canon of youth horror cinema. However, this book argues that the film, like no other, draws from the themes, imagery, and obsessions that fueled youth horror cinema since the 1950s—Gothic atmosphere, atomic dread, twisted psychology, and alienated teenage monsters—and ties them together in the deceptively simple story of a masked killer on Halloween night. Along the way, the film delivers a savage critique of social institutions and their failure to protect young people. Halloween also depicts a cadre of compelling and complicated youth characters: teenage babysitters watching over preadolescents as a killer, who is viciously avoiding the responsibilities of young adulthood, stalks them through the shadows.

This book explores all these aspects of Halloween, including the franchise it spawned, providing an invaluable insight into this iconic film for students and researchers alike.

1
I Was a Teenage Psycho Killer

Halloween and the History of Youth Horror Cinema

Halloween’s esteemed position in the history of youth horror cannot rely on it being the first teen slasher film. Black Christmas can more legitimately claim that title, not to mention the numerous proto-slasher films that predate both Halloween and Black Christmas, like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Nor is Halloween the most influential slasher film; Friday the 13th offered a template more closely followed and imitated by future slasher films than that of Halloween. While John Carpenter’s pedigree lends distinction to the film, Halloween is not the most highly regarded of Carpenter’s films; judging by various fan and critical discourses, his 1982 remake of The Thing likely holds that title.¹

This chapter argues that Halloween holds a privileged place in the history of youth horror because it offers a compendium of youth horror’s past while looking toward its future. The film’s plot is simple, adhering closely to unities of time, space, and action, but it also distills aspects of youth horror that made it so vital and exciting for several decades. Leeder identifies Halloween as ‘one of the earliest horror films to depict characters watching horror films’ (2014: 11), as youth horror’s past is remediated on television with the broadcast of Doctor Dementia’s Halloween movie marathon (see Figure 1.1). Scenes of preadolescents and teenagers watching 1950sera youth horror on television invite the viewer to consider Halloween in the history of youth horror cinema. While Halloween does not utilize overt intertextuality to draw attention to youth horror film conventions and/or satirically comment on them, it does synthesize many facets of youth horror into a potent mix.

Halloween is usually credited for kicking off the first teen slasher boom, a trend that lasted until 1981, with the second cycle beginning in 1984. But what often remains underexplored is how the film fits into the overall evolution of horror and youth cinema.² Peter Hutchings (2013: 198–199) and Murray Leeder (2014: 73) have noted in passing the film’s relationship with teenpics of the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter seeks to trace this linage in more detail, contextualizing Halloween in the history of youth horror. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, horror cinema was not associated with children’s entertainment. It was not until the 1940s that the horror film courted youth audiences. The marketing of horror to teen audiences exploded in the 1950s, the golden age of youth horror, and there has been a significant relationship between youth and horror ever since.

Figure 1.1 Tommy and Lindsey watch ‘Doctor Dementia’

This chapter looks at trends in youth horror that prefigured the thematic preoccupations of Halloween. Capturing the essence of youth horror’s past, Halloween is a revamped ‘weirdie,’ the name given to that odd hybridization of horror and science fiction tailored for drive-in youth audiences of the 1950s (Doherty 2002: 119). Halloween also embodies the dark turn youth horror took in the 1960s and 1970s. While synthesizing youth horror’s past, Halloween also looks toward its future, taking cues from contemporary blockbusters and signaling directions that both major studio and independent youth horror would take in the 1980s and 1990s. With this in mind, this chapter argues that, despite not being the first or most influential slasher film, Halloween nevertheless holds a privileged place in the history of horror cinema based on how it takes the disparate thematic threads of youth horror’s history and deftly ties them together in an economically precise narrative. In the deceptively simple story of a killer stalking teenage victims on Halloween night, Carpenter employs elements of youth horror’s past to great effect. More specifically, one can detect vestiges of the killer robot and atomic dread of 1950s sci-fi, the Gothic atmosphere of Hammer Films and AIP’s Poe adaptations, the dark psychology and its attendant violence of 1960s horror (but without the gore), and the female leads meant to appeal to growing female audiences in the 1970s. Further, this chapter maintains that Halloween was among the first low-budget, independent teenpics to employ blockbuster strategies that the major studios were in the process of adopting. Slick marketing made Halloween a youth horror brand name perfect for the multiplex era. As such, this chapter argues that Halloween is a culmination of three decades of drive-in youth horror and the beginning of youth horror during the age of the blockbuster.

A Brief Prehistory of Youth Horror

Horror cinema’s origins mainly come from three sources: Gothic literature; the Grand Guignol Theatre founded in Paris in 1894, which showcased brief ‘playlets’ featuring gory violence; and traveling carnival sideshows which often featured ‘freaks’ and ‘human oddities’ (Dixon 2010: 22; Skal 1993: 29–30). All these influences come together in the German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920), which tells the story of a carnival mounte-bank (Werner Krauss) who commands a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to do his evil bidding. Caligari was a product of German Expressionism, an artistic movement fueled by the Gothic’s dark, symbolic settings and twisted psychology. When it was released in the US in 1921, Caligari was a critical sensation, influencing American cinema throughout the 1920s, specifically the dark, dramatic films featuring actor Lon Chaney, who often played grotesque, deformed, or mutilated characters in films like Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925) and The Unknown (Browning, 1927). Decades later, Chaney became known as the first horror film star, but when his films were released, he ‘was known as a talented character actor who specialized in weird parts’ because horror did not exist as a recognizable film genre in the 1920s (Benshoff 2014: 218). At that time, horror film was in its ‘experimental stage, during which its conventions are isolated and established’ (Schatz 1981: 37 italics in the original).

These films were not made with the specific intention of attracting youth audiences, nor did they feature youths in prominent roles. Shary notes, ‘A tradition of movies related to the supernatural goes back to the earliest days of cinema, although rarely did these films address teenagers’ (2014: 187). After Caligari, Expressionist cinema in Germany continued to explore the fantastic, with the most celebrated of these films being the poetic vampire tale Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) and Metropolis (Lang, 1927), a dystopian fable. These films examined adult issues like unhappy marriages and dehumanization in a mechanized society. In the US, the ‘new morality’ of the Jazz Age emphasized ‘cynicism’ and ‘sexual license’ (Cook 2016: 134), and dark melodramas featuring Chaney, often playing twisted and deformed characters, reflected the traumatic aftermath of World War I (Skal 1993: 65–68). There was a ‘general dearth of films about adolescence’ (Shary 2005: 7). Whenever young people appeared in these films, the characters ‘were designed to exploit adult fears about youth rather than appeal to real youth audiences’ (6).

This trend continued in 1931 with the birth of the Classical horror film. Genres enter their ‘classic stage’ when their ‘conventions reach their “equilibrium” and are mutually understood by artist and audience’ (Schatz 1981: 37). Universal scored at the box office with Dracula (Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (Whale, 1931) while Paramount’s release of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931) received critical praise and won a Best Actor Oscar for Frederic March as the titular split personality. These films solidified horror cinema’s style, conventions, and themes. As the US was in the depths of the Great Depression and expendable money was scarce, Hollywood’s strategy was to appeal to the broadest audience possible. The vertically integrated Hollywood studio system was firmly established by the 1930s, mass-producing films to play in theaters they owned in downtown urban areas. During this time, ‘Film studios did not feel compelled to make products aimed at children, who generally had no income for entertainment, and who could be assumed to enjoy the same films their parents enjoyed’ (Shary 2005: 5).

Universal helped keep the habit of movie-going afloat during the Great Depression by making horror movies that appealed to the whole family. As one of the minor studios, Universal did not own a ‘chain of downtown first-run theaters and was forced to concentrate its production and distribution efforts on subsequent-run houses in suburban and rural areas’ (Cook 2016: 190), making it imperative for them to produce films for the whole family. The studio’s horror films were its biggest hits of the decade, and newspapers gave accounts of entire families attending Frankenstein (Browning 2014: 232), with adults too riveted to notice their children were terrified. Universal’s first wave of horror films lasted from 1931 to 1936, when Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), began to so strictly enforce the Code that making horror films was nearly impossible.³

Horror was not dormant for long, however, and it was during the second wave of Universal’s horror films that the sleeping giant of youth horror began to awake. In 1938, an internal review of the PCA conducted by Francis C. Harmon, the PCA’s chief vice president, found that Breen had over-extended his authority, and ‘Breen’s position was comparatively weakened’ (Vasey 1997: 223). Around the same time, a nation-wide double-bill re-release of Dracula and Frankenstein netted Universal half a million dollars (Weaver et al. 2007: 183). With Breen’s strict approach now perceived as a liability that would hamper big box office from horror films (Bernard 2014: 43), it was not surprising that the Code was loosened. This relaxed regulation likely inspired Universal to begin production on Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939), their third Frankenstein film. Son does not have the low-key, moody, and Expressionistic atmospherics of Universal’s previous horror films. This time around, the mad scientist (Basil Rathbone) has a curly-haired toddler son, Peter (Donnie Dunagan), who offers cute comic relief. Peter is one of very few preadolescents featured in 1930s horror cinema.

Son was indicative of the direction Universal would take with horror during the 1940s. Rick Worland explains that while ‘Frankenstein et al. had been pitched to adults, the sequels were increasingly aimed at juvenile audiences’ (2007: 69). The difference between the 1930s version of The Mummy (Freund, 1932) and 1940s The Mummy’s Hand (Cabanne, 1940) offers an example. The first film tells a story of exotic danger, as the resurrected Imhotep (Boris Karloff) seeks to win the love of an Egyptian woman (Zita Johann) whom he believes is his resurrected lover. The Mummy’s Hand is a proto-Indiana Jones tale about a group of adventurous archeologists on an expedition to Egypt running afoul of an evil cult in control of a mindless mummy, a story ‘tailor-made for the action house trade’ (Weaver et al. 2007: 229). Films of this type were similar to action serials from Poverty Row studios being produced at the same time for ‘children and juveniles for Saturday matinee shows’ (Tzioumakis 2017: 69). While there is a ‘perceived aesthetic decline of the horror in the 1940s’ (Worland 2007: 71), it would be a mistake to write off all 1940s horror as juvenile fare, as the decade did produce several sophisticated horror films.⁴ However, Universal’s ‘kiddie-oriented fright flick[s]’ like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943), House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944), and House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945) demonstrated that youth horror had gained a toehold in the film industry (Weaver et al. 2007: 509).

1950s: Birth of Youth Horror

The 1950s was a transformative decade for the film industry that saw a huge shift in audience demographics. After a peak year in 1946, movie attendance began dropping dramatically and would continue to do so until the early 1970s (Cook 2016: 334–335). However, one demographic began attending the movies in droves: teenagers. As the post-World War II economy strengthened in the early 1950s, Americans began leaving the city and moving to the suburbs, where affordable houses were plenty. Living outside the cities, many homeowners now had to commute to work, so car sales skyrocketed, leading to the prevalence of car culture. During this time, ‘Teenagers began buying (or at least driving) cars’ and tended to meet up with other friends in cars and ‘congregate around a single hangout’ (Shary 2005: 17). One of the most prominent hangouts for teens in the 1950s was the drive-in movie theater, an exhibition venue that exploded in popularity between 1946 and 1953 when 2,976 drive-in theaters opened in the US (Davis 2012: 36). The drive-in offered teens a dark space to engage in a variety of activities, and the running time of the films—most drive-ins offered double bills—gave teens a good excuse for being gone for three or four hours. The youth market became the most significant audience for the movies in the 1950s, eventually making up 52.6 percent of movie-goers (39).

When young people became the dominant movie-going demographic, major studios attempted to tap into this audience through the production of several science fiction films. The genre had proven itself to be the ‘preferred fantasy form’ of young audiences in the early 1950s (Doherty 2002: 117). Thomas Doherty argues that sci-fi films of this era possessed a potent sub-text: fear of the hydrogen bomb. With the first H-Bomb being tested on 1 November 1952, atomic dread was the ‘essential subject’ of sci-fi teenpics (ibid.). Major studios turned to sci-fi in hopes of securing profits during uncertain times as the film industry underwent significant reconfiguration. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Paramount, et al. in 1948 stripped the vertically integrated Hollywood studios of their theaters, making it prudent for major studios, since they no longer had guaranteed theatrical prospects, to roll back production and ‘[focus] on maximizing profits through fewer and costlier releases’ (Heffernan 2004: 5). Another method of increasing revenues was the implementation of 3-D technology, which paired well with sci-fi’s emphasis on special effects. John Carpenter cites Universal’s It Came from Outer Space (Arnold, 1953), one of the films from this cycle, as sparking his interest in filmmaking (Anchor Bay 2013a).

Unfortunately for the majors, their attempt to tap into the y...