In the credits for Halloween, the camera tracks in on the carved eye of a pumpkin. The connotation of the shot is that what we are about to see in the rest of the film will come from a different, more sinister viewpoint. As well as being about murder, the film will be about the ways that we see the world. This may seem to be a lot to draw from one shot, but as I hope will become apparent, Halloween, like most horror films has a constant iconic imagery of eyes and seeing- the glasses the killer wears over the sheet when he goes to kill the second girl and the eye that Laurie stabs him in are just two examples.

At the start of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film Psycho, which is the main influence on Halloween, the camera slowly tracks in through a window of a seedy hotel room so that we see two lovers. When it was made in 1960 this opening had a very voyeuristic feel. Voyeurism is the pleasure that people get from watching secretly other people’s private and sexual moments. It is the kind of enjoyment that few people would admit to and is therefore mixed with guilt but if you think about it, it is the centre of much that we see in the media- when we watch a sex scene in a film or even a Haagen Daaz commercial, the characters never look at the camera, it is as if they are unaware that we are spies in the room with them.

At the start of Halloween, there is a less subtle imitation of the opening of Psycho. We are instantly aware that we are looking through the eyes of a killer as the hand-held camera bobs up and down. This identification with a murderer gives us the thrill of the forbidden- because it is "just a film" we can allow ourselves to enjoy the killers viewpoint for a few moments. We watch as he looks through the window and sense his frustration as the couple he sees on the sofa go upstairs out of sight. Then, when he goes upstairs and sees his sister naked in her room, are we meant to share his voyeuristic enjoyment too- if we are, this association is quickly knocked out of us by the way he kills her- her death is not funny like those later in the film, it is simply shocking- it seems as if it has been filmed in this way in order to shock us out of our empathy with the killer. It is almost as if the director is saying to us; "how can you be so sick as to watch all of that, can’t you see what that kind of perversion leads to?" If that sounds like an unsubtle moral message it is because it is. Halloween like much horror is very moralistic with simple messages of what is right and wrong for its teenage audience.

It is worth considering for a moment more what this moral message is- what was so wrong with the voyeurism that we were all enjoying a moment before, why did it lead to murder like that. This may become clearer if we consider another voyeuristic scene in the film when the now grown up Michael stands outside a house watching one of the teenagers undress. When she has finally got changed, he smashes a plant-pot so that she knows that he is there. The voyeuristic killer in this film would love to communicate, but something is holding him back. Instead, because he cannot relate to them as people, his frustration leads him to treat them as objects and destroy them.

This may sound like second-rate psychology but this is the way his character is presented in the film- he kills because he fails to see properly. If we return to the opening of the film you can think of the young Michael as seeing the adult world through a child’s confused eyes and making a decision not to become a part of it, but instead to destroy it. The film presents this as a failure of vision on his part and to underline this at this point, the camera helps us to disassociate from him by cutting away from his viewpoint and showing us what he is- a child with blank, staring eyes. After this the camera rises up as if in judgement over his head.

If Michael is suffering from a failure of vision then he is not alone. There is a constant theme in the film of people missing what is in front of them. On the most basic level, this refers to whether or not they are aware of the killer. The teenagers are constantly unaware of his presence while the camera never allows us to forget that he might be around- we frequently watch a sort of repetition of the opening tracking shot as the camera moves slowly behind or ahead of him. Once again we are placed as the voyeur, sometimes watching from his viewpoint, sometimes even more guiltily in the position of an accomplice looking over his shoulder.

This particular kind of shot is interesting because it highlights the shifting position of the audience- at times like this we are being made to see from the killer’s perspective, at others we watch from a horrified distance as when the girl is strangled and we are cut off from seeing properly by the steamed up glass, At other times we are in the position of the teenagers themselves, unaware of what is going on. It is as if the film is letting us try out versions of how we should see, letting us experiment with different people’s perspectives on what is going on and then presenting us with the right answer at the end as we take on Laurie’s perspective.

The representation of the killer himself fits in with the confusion of what can and can’t be seen. The film is like a gradual strip-tease as we see more and more of him and yet still know nothing of him. When we finally get a clear glimpse of his mask it looks like the face of a dead man and reveals nothing, then as the film ends, Laurie rips off his mask and we see him at last as he is- a pathetic, frightened looking man- her clear view of him destroys his power- at this point, to ram the idea of his powerlessness home, he is shot. As well as making him unknowable, the lack of shots of a face stops us from empathising with him too much. The teenage victims similarly get few close up shots while we frequently see Laurie. The camera, and therefore our eyes, tell us who to sympathise with.

However, if we can return to the film’s moralistic ideology, it is not just the killer which the teenagers fail to see. They are suffering from a lack of vision in a deeper sense. They are represented as not being able to see what is important about life and what isn’t, so, through the distancing of the camera and the alternative presented to us in the character of Laurie, we laugh as outsiders at their obsession with sex and parties. This is actually related to the way that they are unaware of the killer’s presence. Judith, his sister doesn’t notice him coming in because she is looking vainly in the mirror, later Linda is so sex-obsessed that she tries to seduce him, thinking he is her boyfriend. The killer may have reduced them to objects through his lack of vision but in the morality of the film they have done the same thing to themselves- they have lost their right to live through their own inability to see what is important. Once again there is nothing subtle about the ways that this is presented. The teenagers have stupid whining voices and sing ridiculous songs about the boys they are in love with. They don’t do their homework while Laurie does. As if this wasn’t bad enough they cannot attract our sympathy because they do not actually do anything to move the story on- they don’t react to the killer or fight him because they don’t see him, they just passively die.

In contrast to all of this is Laurie- the character who sees to an extent. She is aware of the killer from the start of the film and is always wary of him. Also, moralistically, she is the virtuous character- the one who sees what is right (doing your schoolwork) and what is wrong (boys). The film shows her view of the world being put to the test- she is aware of the killer early in the film but her friends make her doubt what she has seen and heard. Similarly she is aware of the goodness of homework, but her friends very nearly tempt her- (shock-horror!) to go out with a boy. However, by the end of the film, she has seen what is right and wrong and is rewarded like a good fairy tale heroine with her life.

The camera goes along with this, as she grows in awareness, it almost rewards her with more reaction shots and as she prepares to go over to the house to actually confront the monster, the audience is prepared for her final victory by a shot held for several seconds of her looking pensive and intelligent. As she then walks towards the house, the camera imitates the opening tracking shot of the film but this time we are seeing through her eyes- the message is clear- we are changing sides- we can no longer enjoy the killer’s voyeurism, like Laurie it is time for us to grow up and see what is really going on. As she confronts the monster the camera now focuses constantly on her reactions and even though she makes many mistakes that may distance us from her (we never believe for example that Michael is really dead) she still has our sympathy because she is active. Part of the moral seems to be that if you see the world properly, you will act on what you see- this is what separates her from her friends. By acting, she gains our sympathy and also frees herself from the power of the monster who can no longer treat her simply as an object.

The casting also has bearing on this- Laurie seems important and worthy of respect because she is played by a famous actress who is also the daughter of Janet Leigh who starred in Psycho. The other teenagers are all unknowns. In later examples of the genre the same pattern of one known actress and a load of unknown victims has been repeated sometimes even with Jamie Leigh Curtis again using some of her genre persona from this film. We may recognise all of this but even if we don’t, we know that she is important because we see her face more often than anyone else’s. The frequent close ups validate her as a person. On the other hand we do not see the killer watching her as often as we do with the victims, so he is not able to voyeuristically turn her into an object.

I have been repeatedly talking here about the ideology behind Halloween and I would like to clarify this a little by making reference to other examples of the horror genre. In the film Aliens, the little girl Newt who has been saved by the character Ripley says- "my mummy always said there are no monsters….no real ones….but there are."

As a child in the film, as often in horror, she has been able to see what the adults couldn’t and therefore survive the monsters. The same is true in the Shining where the boy Danny is psychic and sees everything that is going to happen. In Halloween also, Tommy, the little boy, has the most awareness of what is really going on. But this is more than just another cliché of the genre, it is central to the ideology of much horror. The audience of horror is primarily made up of teenagers who are precisely at the age when they are leaving behind the childish view of the world that sees monsters all around and instead turning towards the adult world of sexuality. It is a time when they can make choices that will affect the rest of their lives- they can treat others like object like Michael Myers, they can see the world as a pleasure palace without any dangers like the teenage victims, or they can choose Laurie’s more suspicious and mature view of the world.

Horror films seem to have the message to them that they should slow down and not close their eyes to the real dangers around them. In films such as The Shining and Aliens this message can fairly easily be ignored, because the situation is fairly distant from the audience’s experience and is fantastical, but in films like Halloween which are set in everyday American towns with everyday American teenagers, the message is much clearer, more direct and unsubtle (and patronising?)

I say films "like Halloween" because Halloween began a sub-genre of horror which could be called the Stalker film. Between 1978 and 1981 there were eleven successful films which very closely followed the narrative and themes of this genre defining moment. One of these, Friday the 13^th has itself been followed by a host of sequels. Within this genre, there are immense similarities- all of the films broadly follow the following narrative structure:

The teenagers do something wrong

The killer sees something he doesn’t like - often sexual

The killer experiences a loss

The killer kills the guilty teenagers

Something happens to commemorate what went on before

The killer’s destructive side is re-activated

Someone who knows what is going on warns the young people

They ignore the warning

The killer stalks the young people

He kills some of them

The heroine sees the murders

The heroine sees the killer

The heroine fights the killer

The heroine subdues the killer

The heroine survives but is not free- she is now trapped by her knowledge of what the world is really like.

This is an considerable amount of similarity for so many films in such a short time so why was it such a popular formula? Why also do these films now seem so dated and unsubtle in their moralising? Often the key to looking at ideology in the media is to consider what was happening at the time:

In America during the sixties and seventies society had been through a period of freedom and rebellion when teenagers had more than ever before questioned the values of their parents. By 1980, however, a backlash had started against all this freedom and the election of Ronald Reagan was a signal that many people wanted to return to old fashioned morality and clear religious family values. Maybe it isn’t too surprising that in the first years of the eighties, these films which teach about the importance of family and which show a fear of what can happen when a community ignores what is going on, should have been so popular.

Perhaps analysis of one final scene can show how this plays out in Halloween. At one point, early in the film, Laurie and her friend Annie are driving in a car smoking a joint when they spot the latter’s father, a policeman, ahead. There is a comic scene where they try successfully to hide what they are doing from him. For the teenage audience of the film, this is an enjoyable moment when the kids get one over on the older generation, but as the message of the whole film becomes clear, this becomes just another instant when the adults of the community are seen as paying insufficient attention to what is happening in their children’s lives. This kind of confusion leads to a similar confusion in the ways that people analyse horror films. The sex, violence and swearing which are at the centre of many horror films, tend to make the genre the one that is most disapproved of by many older people and enjoyed by teenagers and yet paradoxically these films are often more in tune with the ways that parents look at the world than a reflection of the true feelings of their teenage audience.