My girlfriend once asked me who my favorite horror movie icon is, and it took me a while to decide. I had a long list to sort through but ultimately I had to eliminate all the less-popular ones. If Richard Matheson were a little better known I would have said Emeric Belasco. But in the end, I named a good one. Michael Myers.
She later gave me a beautiful, hand-made print of Michael enduring the horror of being lovingly nuzzled by some lazy kittens. I'm looking at is as I type this in, and suffice to say that this is probably not a situation that John Carpenter ever pictured.
Michael Meyers is a creation with a lot of different elements in him, and they blend together so well that usually we can't even see them . But they make him what he is, and we feel them every time that we see him.
Look at Michael's face. It's made of stiff, spray-painted rubber. Touch it. It's cold and rough under your fingers. That face never changes. Its black, empty eyes never blink. The face is stark, dead, and unchanging. Michael moves at a steady, unhurried pace, always in a straight line toward his goal. One of the first episodes of Dr. Who that I saw contained a plot point called robophbia, a dread and paranoia caused by being around androids and their stiff, dead features for too long. Seeing something move like a person but that doesn't meeting the criteria of being a person pushes the bad buttons in us. Some half-assed research shows that there's no such thing as robophobia in this world we live in. But give it time. We communicate among our own kind with facial expression, and Michael only has one. Do you remember the scene in part two where Myers walks through a plate glass door without breaking that relentless, direct stride of his? What if, once we develop real, functioning androids, someone were to dress one in coveralls, hand it a carving knife, and program it to stalk and carve? How similar would that result be to what we see on the screen? Carpenter's Shape and Cameron's Terminator both draw from the same source of dread, and it won't run dry until the human race is a cold, dead echo.
Yet, Michael has two arms, two legs, and a head. He was born from a woman, ate food to grow up big and strong, and was even examined by multiple doctors. There's a man inside those dark, bland, coveralls, and that fact has implications. Because multiple writers invented and then reinvented Michael over the decades (damn I feel old) I'm going to distill my observation down to what I consider our topic's essence. The exact nature of that essence is unknown, and we'll cover more on that later. But let's look at this: Michael Myers is a fictional character, who has a physical form in the stories that he appears in, and that form is indistinguishable from a human male. He expresses himself with face to face murder. That's Mr. Myers 101. Curse of Thorn is iffy at best, so I'm not going to include it as a factor when I ask this question: what prevents you from picking up a knife, from stalking babysitters and horny teens? What prevents me from looking people in the eye, letting fear build, then killing them? Arrest? Imprisonment/execution? Homeowner with a twelve-gauge blasting a hole in me? Sorry but those are risks and possible consequences. The honest answer is nothing. If I want to dress up and kill, you can't prevent me, and I can't prevent you. It's an ugly reminder of the flip side of human potential. What took us to the moon can also take us into nightmares. That's what makes Myers a warning of what we are and what we can be.
But keep going deeper. Yes, there's a man inside that mask, but what's inside the man? Evil, according to Doctor Loomis.
(Am I the only one, though, who sees hint after hint that the good doctor lost his objectivity, and lost it early on? His pursuit of Myers drives him to mania, and if Loomis isn't trying to patiently explain to you why you need to do things his way, then he doesn't seem like a very pleasant person to be around. What would Loomis do without Myers? Maybe that's the most telling point about the doctor, and a significant point in our discussion. Because the likely answer is, not much that would grab our attention. There's no hint that he's naturally obsessive, in fact there's no hint of anything about him that doesn't relate to Myers. He's a part of the Shape that extends beyond the man's body)
Aside from Loomis' claims, we have no idea what goes on inside Myer's head. He doesn't speak any language except body language, and analyzing that yields nothing we can understand. His movements are simple, direct, and mechanical. We know he wants to kill his one special girl, anyone close to her, and anyone whose death will hurt her. He wants to hurt her, but we don't know why. His goals, sadly, are very human, and very male. But they are no less out of our reach of understanding. His drives are a black box, as black as his eyes.
That's where we come back to horror, because we've come back to fear. We already fear the unknown, and we'll fear it even more when it picks up thin, sharpened steel. If Freddy or Velma ever pulled off the Shape's mask and explained him, that would be the end. Not of murder, maybe. But of the sort of fear that we cultivate and harvest here. The magical sort of fear that traces its roots back to shapes in the darkened closet and unexplained sounds in the night.
If times were normal, this is probably where the post would end. But they aren't are they? If you're reading this when I post it, then you're living through an age that will be included in the next generations of history books. This post started because of a feeling I had that connected Michael Myers' flavor of fear to what we're all going through right now. But that idea is elusive, and needs some time to gel. I'll either put it up here, or I'll write a story from it, and later you may get to read my grousing that no publisher is willing to buy quality literature these days.
Still writing.
Black lives matter.
