Halloween 2021: Should You Root for Slasher Villains?
Universal PicturesThe great film critic Roger Ebert said that “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy”. This statement applies to every cinematic output, including horror cinema. In a way, this oft-underappreciated genre most easily connects with audiences: fear and all its derivatives are deeply upsetting emotions, and films that see innocent people get bruised, mangled, chased, harassed, tortured, disturbed, and killed is an easy way to generate empathy since most viewers have lived at least through one of those events.
While horror usually has poor, upright, virginal, and compassionate characters as the ones that audiences root for, the slasher subgenre works very differently. While its origins are very broad, going back to the bloody theatrics of the Grand Guignol or Agatha Christie’s masterpiece mystery novel And Then There Were None, 1960 was the year that saw the birth of slashers in the more literal sense – serial killer stories involving sharped objects – courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s underrated Peeping Tom.
These two classics of cinema are more than worthy of being analysed and compared in depth, but what matters now is how they turn viewers into accomplices: Psycho’s Norman Bates is a sympathetic loner whose attempts at hiding Marion Crane’s body are the source of much tension, and Carl Boehm’s creepy Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom is the sole protagonist, whose voyeurism mirrors the audience’s own obsession with the macabre and peering into other people’s lives. While both characters are never portrayed as heroes, their final ends always feel a bitter taste in the mouth, lacking the satisfaction of standard murder mysteries. That is because, knowingly or not, viewers want to see them get away scot-free.
Psycho was such a success that copycats started to be produced worldwide. Italy saw its fair share of boundary-pushing chillers known as “giallos”, exploitation filmmakers like Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper made uncomfortably raw projects such as The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and holiday-themed horrors featuring masked or faceless killers like Black Christmas or Silent Night, Deadly Night were commercial successes. But there was one film in 1978 that would change the slasher genre forever: John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Borrowing elements from many of the aforementioned films – specifically Psycho and Black Christmas – Carpenter created the perfect template for slashers to come: a menacing killer that hides in the shadows, promiscuous teenagers slaughtered for their sexual activities, all inside a familiar setting that could be anyone’s home. Jamie Lee Curtis became the first iconic final girl, and her being the daughter of Janet Leigh can be seen as a symbolic passing of the torch.
However, the most famous and important element of Halloween was its villain, Michael Myers. Credited as The Shape in the end credits, he was the embodiment of pure evil – a scary and evil force, precisely, because of how inhuman and emotionless he is, never uttering a single word. He was a blank slate upon which every viewer could project what they feared the most, and Carpenter’s economical and ingenious filmmaking propelled what could have been a bland figure into one of the most instantly recognisable characters of cinema.
Halloween now has twelve entries in its series, and the original run of films ended up giving too many unbelievable reasons behind Michael’s violence that bordered on the ridiculous – the whole Cult of Thorn storyline is best left forgotten – though he did have plenty of idiotic characters that deserved what was coming their way. The film was remade in 2007 by Rob Zombie, one of the most unfairly maligned remakes of its time: while its second half, where it recreates Carpenter’s original, is rushed, changing Michael’s evil as the result of nurture, not nature, made him a purposefully more human presence. Zombie’s duology is mean, angry, and Michael becomes some sort of anti-hero as he also kills abusive prison guards and pervy men that, for all intents and purposes, deserve what was coming from them.
The evolution of the character of Michael Myers/The Shape, going from a disturbing killer to a borderline vigilante, shows how the slasher genre as a whole evolved over the years. Cinema is, after all, primarily a source of entertainment for audiences, and most of them want anything but to wallow in misery and total darkness. By having slasher villains kill criminals and all-around awful people, they deliver catharsis to frustrated spectators: the release given by gruesome kill is such a satisfying feeling that it is inevitable that the public will start to root for these villains, which consequently leads to dumbing down characters in order to make them more disposable.
The inevitable progression of a slasher franchise is to go from a Halloween-like scary first film to an increasingly more self-aware and ridiculous series of films. Think of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Chucky/Charles Lee Ray, and Leatherface: comparing the fourth entries in each franchise (Nightmare 4: The Dream Master, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Bride of Chucky, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) with their first entries is night and day! Whether it is for the better or worse is up to fans of each series, but one thing is undeniable: audiences kept flocking to the cinemas to see these bad guys brutally kill people, occasionally with hefty doses of humour to lower the stakes and tension. The breakout success of Wes Craven’s Scream especially helped in putting more emphasis on comedy and meta references than anything else.
Occasionally, there were slasher films that managed to subvert expectations or play with these tropes in interesting ways. 1983’s Sleepaway Camp stole wholesale the point-of-view shots and setting of Friday the 13th, but it improved upon it by having a surprising final twist that re-contextualises the entire film, and for having virtually every kill be for truly despicable teenagers. 1992’s Candyman saw Tony Todd become a new slasher icon, but the film itself tackles far greater social issues such as America’s racist history and gentrification, with strong gothic atmosphere that is closer to tragic retellings of Dracula than a simple slasher. Lastly, underseen found footage comedy Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon comments in a playful way on the allure of serial killer and slasher characters, as a documentary crew follows a wannabe slasher icon.
The question ultimately remains: should audiences root for slasher villains? The answer is yes. 2021 has seen the return of many quintessential horror characters, and these films are perfectly healthy ways to escape daily hardships and enjoy seeing teenagers make poor decisions that lead to their untimely demise at the hands of a masked killer. While it is commendable that films like The Rental or Wolf Creek try to make slashers scary again, it is clear that spectators have more fun seeing Michael Myers kick a car door to make a woman shoot herself in the head than have everyday people scream and cry in agony for ninety minutes. Movies are the empathy machine, and pain is far less palatable than plain entertainment.