The Boogeyman Comes Home

Last night I went to see the film Halloween Kills at the Senator Theater, one of our cherished historic local movie houses in Baltimore.

For decades The Senator was a single movie house, but now they have divided it into four. I wished they hadn’t. I loved the old large-scale theater with the curtain that would open to unveil the movie screen. 

However, I don’t run the Senator, and they need revenue to keep the place open, and not too long ago there was a very real possibility that they would close, so I am glad they are still with us. But I digress.

The film was a continuation of the 2018 release Halloween, where the protagonist Laurie Strode, her daughter and granddaughter fought against the infamous Michael Myers.

The original 1978 film begins in the year 1963, when six-year-old Michael kills his sister on Halloween night. He was apprehended by police and placed in Smith’s Grove, a sanitarium.

Fifteen years later, Michael’s psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis, played by the late great Donald Pleasance, comes to the facility with a colleague to escort Michael to a court hearing, in the hopes of committing Michael to Smith’s Grove for the rest of his life. During the transport, Michael overwhelms them, steals their car and escapes.

This begins the horror of the serial killer, the madman, or as we learned, something much worse.

We also learn that Laurie, who is the alleged target but manages to escape the knife-wielding Michael, is his baby sister.

In the 2018 film, the trio manages to lock Michael in the basement of Laurie’s retrofitted home and set it on fire. Then they rush Laurie to the hospital, who during the incident is stabbed in the abdomen and pushed over a balcony by Michael. They believe finally the 40-year long horror has ended.

But in this latest installment, as all things unforeseen and befitting sequels, firefighters are called to put out the blaze. They unwittingly free Michael, who emerges from the house and slaughters all of the first responders, and continues his reign of terror.

Filmmaker John Carpenter who created the Halloween series maintains its musical and visual aesthetics, and builds on the theme of pure evil. It is Michael, outfitted with a blue mechanic’s uniform and white Halloween mask with hollowed eyes, and behind it – nothing. To paraphrase Dr. Loomis in the original 1978 film, he is evil personified.

But this film goes further to show what evil represents for humans – chaos. Michael’s evil brings out the worst in the citizens of Haddonfield, Illinois. They turn on each other and kill an innocent man in the pursuit of The Boogeyman, as he is known. According to Laurie, he evokes their fears, and the people transform themselves into beings they do not recognize.

But again, is it the monster that exists, or is it the monster that is created? As I shared in a previous post, Dr. Frankenstein was the true monster, not the one he created. Laurie says that she created Michael, which she does not explain in this film – I imagine we will learn this in next year’s installment, Halloween Ends.

We will see. The interrogation will continue. Do we learn what really happened to Michael between his birth and when he murdered his sister? Moreover, is his evil constructed, or is it inherent?

There is a significant theme that films across genres focus on: small towns that hide big secrets. In Salem’s Lot, based on the novel by Stephen King, it is not the vampire who casts the darkness of the town, but Hubie Marsten, “a horrible man who killed many people,” who eventually kills his wife then himself – though in the novel Marsten had a 12-year correspondence with the vampire known as Kurt Barlow. Thus, the Marsten house becomes that personification of evil.

It is the whispers, the lies, the deeds in the shadows by the townspeople that set the tone, and it is in fact a lone greedy businessman that invites the dark lord into their humble town.

So, does destroying the monster destroy evil, or does it make room for another monster?

We create the society that breeds the people who perform the nefarious acts of which we detest. They do not come out of the blue, or are self-made. We made them, both by our acts of abuse and neglect. They are integrated into our history, and though they must be brought to justice, it does not end there.

The sigh of relief from watching them in orange jumpsuits being escorted by bailiffs is short lived. There is another one around the corner, one who has been manufactured by our system, which is not broken by the way. It works just fine. The questions are, for whom does it work, and for whom does it not?

The monsters that sit in courtroom chairs come from somewhere: one home or a few homes (the average foster child will have lived in six homes by the time they emancipate), parents or guardians, neighborhoods, and communities. They were influenced, touched, handled by others with good and bad intentions. They were subjected to things that have been kept secret to this day, by simultaneous pointed fingers and tight lips. 

The town tells on the monster, but never tells on itself.

It is our fantasy, portrayed in movies, that eventually the truth wills out and the bad people get their just due. In real life, many secrets go to the grave.

The dark eyes of the villain are a metaphor for the darkness that inhabits all of us on some level or another, the spectrum ranging from subtle to gross. So, when the townspeople beat, stab and shoot Michael, they are not just trying to kill the personified evil, they are trying to kill the evil within themselves.

Yes, even the most despicable human creatures in our history represent the evil that our social laboratory created. It is a rude and cruel fact from which we run and hide. We relish in the grandeur and splendor of our beautiful creations, dancing on the floor of our accomplishments, while in the padlocked door of the sub-basement exists the grotesqueness in glass jars and full-length encasements filled with preserving liquid, the reanimations on tables hooked to machines.

What I have experienced and learned is that our character is revealed in times of adversity, of crisis, and of life and death situations. It is when we have to confront the boogeyman, when we need to have those hard conversations, when we must face those who test our morals and ethics, we find out who we really are.

There is no right place and time for any of this. It happens when it happens. How we respond to it is what matters. Our light and dark within us determines how we show up, and what we say and do.

Michael returns to his boyhood home each time he completes a killing spree, walks upstairs to his sister’s room, and stares at his reflection in the window. No one knows what is going through his mind as he peers at his image through those dark eyes. The question for us is, what are we seeing when we look at our own reflection, and how much of it do we hide?