Birth.Movies.Death. Halloween Commemorative Issue
By Jim Braden @jbraden6
“It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!” – Kyle Reese, THE TERMINATOR
In his genre treatise DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King identifies three brands of fear: gross-out (standard B-movie blood and guts), horror (the unnatural — zombies, deformed beasts, etc.) and, at the top of the pyramid, terror. The purest form of fear, terror is the ephemeral dread that lurks in the lizard brain, a fear against which we have no defense. The kind of fear that stays with you after the last page is turned and the end credits roll. And in the world of genre cinema, few sources of fear can match the terror induced by the unstoppable killing machine.
In 1951, audiences were introduced to a particularly menacing antagonist that embodied this specific brand of terror. THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, later remade as John Carpenter’s THE THING, concerned a group of arctic scientists who discover an ancient spaceship buried under the ice and, driven by ill-advised curiosity, thaw its pilot. In doing so, they inadvertently unleash a slow-moving carnivorous plant man (just go with it) that stalks them mercilessly, eliminating them one by one with no apparent urgency or purpose. It moves with the confidence that comes from knowing that its prey is confined, defenseless and, like the audience, terrified. Bullets have no effect on it, fire merely slows it down; in the end, the few surviving protagonists manage to electrocute the creature, but its seed pods remain a threat — it is a pyrrhic victory at best. The remake’s resolution is even more ambiguous, with the two surviving characters (one of whom may or may not be the shapeshifting alien in human form) left to freeze to death in a final face-off. The audience never finds out if one of them is the monster, and the alien’s motive remains forever unknown. This is the deep-seated terror King described, the kind that leaves a lasting scar on the viewer’s psyche.
Though some classic characters in this vein — Jason Voorhees being a prime example — are slow, unstoppable killers, their motives are also personal. By imbuing these monsters with even the slightest personality, the filmmakers (perhaps unintentionally) suggest that they could be thwarted through psychological manipulation or misdirection. In FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2, the heroine lures Jason into a trap by posing as his dead mother. Someone driven by emotion can have those emotions used against them. Specific intent also creates a buffer for the audience: though the killer may be inescapable to the protagonists, the viewer isn’t the intended victim, and so remains a degree removed from the threat.
This even extends to THE TERMINATOR, otherwise a textbook example of the unstoppable menace. Though its villain is a slow-moving murder-bot that’s not fussed by being dragged fifty yards beneath an eighteen-wheeler, it has clear purpose. As the proxy of Skynet, the evil A.I. of the future that seeks to protect itself from human threat, the T-800 deliberately carries out its master’s orders. As we see in later installments, the T-800 is equally proficient at protecting as it is terminating. Though the T-800 itself has no skin in the game (often literally), it’s only ever an empty vessel, a slave to its programming, and programming conveys intent.
By contrast, an antagonist stripped of motive and deliberate intent remains a blank. Killing seemingly at random, it exhibits no predictable behavior that might let the protagonists avoid it. In RINGU (later adapted in the U.S. as THE RING), the VHS-formatted specter, Sadako, initially seems to have intent. Like most ghosts, she seeks revenge for a past wrong. In her case, she was murdered and thrown down a well, her ghost transferred to a videocassette which, passed from viewer to viewer, propagates her curse. The heroine locates Sadako’s remains and ensures a proper burial — the tried-and-true method for sending ghosts to the sweet hereafter. In a shocking twist, however, the curse remains. Despite being laid to rest, Sadako’s vengeance continues unabated. With ghost story convention upended, the heroine has no choice but to play Sadako’s game, saving herself and her son by passing along the curse. In the end, Sadako was only ever driven by innate malice.
IT FOLLOWS is one of the best recent examples of this type of antagonist. Seemingly driven by no more than viral imperative, a formless monster, visible only to its current target, seeks to murder the last person to have had sex with someone infected with its curse. The only way to thwart the curse is to pass it along like a supernatural STD to the next hapless victim. The enemy shuffles along, in no rush whatsoever. It never sleeps, relentlessly pursuing its target. Its victims can never rest, constantly looking over their shoulders for a menace that can take any form it chooses. Paranoia, exhaustion, dread and despair are weapons from which there is no escape. Of his film, writer/director David Robert Mitchell explains that he never intended to provide an explanation or point of origin for the curse, because doing so robs it of the inexorable terror of the unknown. “If you were in a nightmare,” he says, “there would be no logical step to be able to explain it. It just is.”
And so we look to Michael Myers on that fateful Halloween night in 1978. Though subsequent installments tried to build a mythology by revealing Laurie to be Michael’s sister, the original HALLOWEEN presents a monster as blank and unknowable as the pallid face he wears. It’s notable that while the movie credits the actors who played the unmasked “Michael age 6” and “Michael age 23”, the masked Michael – the real Michael – is credited as “The Shape”. No identity, no personality, no purpose beyond indiscriminate murder. An unstoppable killing machine, a terror of the highest order.