First off, here is a pre-emptive apology to all my Christian and Jewish friends. Hopefully, all is forgiven when I say, Halloween is the best holiday of the year. Halloween is the best because there is something for everyone, no matter their background or upbringing. As a kid, you dress up in cool costumes, go door to door, and you get free candy. You get candy because of a veiled threat to a total stranger, Trick 'r Treat? Choose wisely. Halloween is a great holiday for adults as well. You still get to wear costumes, you go out looking for a good time, and you get...let's just call it candy.
The current celebration of Halloween is a blending of pagan rituals and urban traditions from 1920's America. The festival of Sam Hain, was a celebration of the gathering of the harvest before winter and a night when the realms between the living and the dead were nonexistant. People dressed up in costumes to fool evil spirits and they celebrated all night long. Hence, wearing costumes on Halloween. The tradition of going door to door to receive candy, is an American tradition from the 1920's. Essentially, inner city kids (mostly orphans) would vandalize homes on Halloween, which was then known as Devil's Night. Finally tiring of this yearly tradition, a small community in New York City placed treats outside their homes on Halloween. The kids were so delighted that they did not vandalize homes that placed treats outside of them. This idea spread across the country and eventually became a way for communities to come together. Hence, the practice and why it is referred to as, Trick 'r Treat. The real question is why we do we still celebrate this holiday with the vigor that we do?
Many scholars and horror enthusiasts, Clive Barker comes to mind, theorize that it is the one night of the year when you do not have to be yourself. You can become that person you always wanted to be, you can let out your inner demon or animal, and it is completely acceptable. For men, you can become the hero you worshipped as a kid, or that dark character you wish you could be like. For women, it seems they can become the girl that every father wishes their daughter would not turn into. The reason for the holiday could be something more simpler. Simply put, maybe people just enjoy being scared.
There is nothing like a good scare, simply because we do not experience that emotion as often as other emotions, like happiness or sadness. One of the ways to experience this emotion is by watching horror films. This is especially true during Halloween. This has also become more socially acceptable with the increase in production of such films and television events like AMC FearFest. Horror movies are a good source for feeling fear but they are so much more. These types of movies can have greater social context for where we are as a society and the fear that is the uncertainty of the future. Many film critics argue that there is no social context in horror films. They reason that these movies exist to corrupt our youth with scenes of extreme violence and nudity. I respectfully disagree. Two films, provide social context of the times in which they were made and they still relate to this day and age. Both still have the raw power to shock us and to make us think. It helps that they are two of the genres earliest examples and set off a wave of imitators and amateurs, but have never been equaled. John Carpenter's Halloween and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is credited with creating the modern slasher genre of horror films. This film spawned hundreds of other movies and dozens of copy cat slashers, ranging from Jason Voorhees to Freddy Krueger. The movie takes place over the course of a single halloween night and is about an escaped mental patient (Michael Myers), who comes home. The Shape (as he is credited at the end of the movie) has no real motive or desires and is considered to be evil in a physical form. The location of evil is a constant theme in horror movies. There is a social context to this movie but it is not what everyone thinks. Many people credit this film with creating the horror movie rules. These morality rules determine who lives and who dies. They have governed every slasher film from the early eighties to the late nineties. Anyone who is a horror movie fan or has seen Scream (1997), knows what I am talking about. Most people believe that these rules are derived from John Carpenters Halloween and this is the social context of that movie. What most people do not know is that this assumption is erroneous. In Scream, a character in the movie, Randy, spells out these rules to his friends while watching Halloween at a party. The rules are, if you want to live, you cannot consume alcohol or drugs and you cannot have sex. These are the sure signs that you are going to die (in a movie that is). At the beginning of Halloween, Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is being driven home from school by her friend Annie. During this drive, both of them are smoking weed. A clear violation of the rules, yet, Laurie survives at the end. Annie is the first teen killed in the movie but she does not violate any of the rules, unless you count the one that Laurie breaks as well. Examining the horror movie rules is necessary because this sets a precedent for every horror movie that followed Halloween.
This set a precedent for every future movie because it establishe the rule, which is if you behave badly, you will be killed. That was not set up with Halloween nor was it ever the intention of the director. John Carpenter states, in an interview, that his assignment for this movie was to make a slasher film about babysitters who are stalked and murdered by a psychopath. The adding of Halloween and the creation of Michael Myers is all him, but he never intended for there to be a morality clause to this movie. The reasoning behind the deaths in this movie helps to create the social context. This was the first movie to examine a phenomenon that sociologists refer to as, the white flight of suburbia. This is a phenomena that describes the mass exodus of people (mostly whites) from cities to the suburbs. The reasons vary as to why, but they come down to a better living condition for families and safety. Carpenter points out that all the teens who are killed were so assured of the safety of the suburbs and believed that nothing would change in their little town. This belief did not allow them to see that something strange was going on. Namely, that a killer was skulking around the neighborhood. This illusion, as he describes this feeling, is at fault because the location of evil can be anywhere. The ending to Halloween is one of the great cliffhangers in modern cinema. Michael disappears after he has been shot and flung off a balcony. Not because of a sequel, but because Carpenter wanted people to go home (hopefully to the suburbs) that night, and wonder if Michael had followed them home.
George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (NOTLD) is a true classic and the harbinger of the social revolution phase in horror movies. NOTLD is not a zombie movie, in the traditional definition of the phrase. For one, the word zombie is never mentioned in the movie. Secondly, the real danger in the movie is not the living dead, but the people who cannot trust each other long enough to get out of this situation. The living dead are slow moving and in a constant state of decay. They are not the real threat, there is something more dangerous out there. Romero says, "Our worst enemies are the people next door". The living dead is a metaphor for a vast upheaval in the social order. The reason why the dead coming back to life represents this change is because Romero decided that this would be the scariest thing to deal with, the dead coming back to life and they have a craving for living flesh. In an interview he states, "My movies are about people and how they deal with upheaval, how they don't deal with it, how they deal with it badly, and even how they deal with it stupidly". Stupidity reigns supreme in this movie. A group of people are trapped in a rural house and their deaths are not the fault of the dead, but of the living. At the end, the lone survivor (a black character) emerges from the cellar and thinks that the worst is over. He is shot in the head by a posse member, who is led by a redneck sheriff. The final images of the movie are the black character being dragged by hooks and thrown into a bonfire.
If you break down NOTLD, the movie is a metaphor for change and how people deal with this change. Change is frightening and people, generally, do not want to deal with or accept it. Some people, have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Dawn of the Dead is the sequel to NOTLD, and was remade by Zach Snyder in 2004. Romero's critique of the movie,"the first twenty minutes are spectacular but the rest of the movie turned into a video game". The zombies can run and are ruthless killing machines. They are the threat, the people trapped in a shopping mall, are not. There is no more social context, just a straight up survival story that looks awesome.
Halloween and horror movies are much more than they seem. The location of evil can be anywhere and our worst enemies can be those we least suspect. They can provide a clearer view of where we are as a society and possibly, where we are going. This year, have fun, be merry, and realize that fear, is not such a bad thing.
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