This article originally appeared in The Terror Teletype, FANGORIA's weekly email newsletter.
John Carpenter was being straight with us from the jump: the masked killer in 1978’s Halloween is billed as The Shape. As the sequels unspooled (and after Carpenter and Debra Hill left the franchise in other hands), The Shape was dropped as a credit in favor of the more human and baggage-laden “Michael Myers.” That name is both symptom and avatar of the diminishing returns brought on by sequels, each one piling on more backstory and explanation, turning the quintessentially unknowable evil of the original into something familiar. (Halloween H20 gets even cozier, simply billing the killer as “Michael.”) Michael Myers is a person, he’s Laurie Strode’s secret brother, he’s the pawn of a pagan cult. Michael Myers is a character they’ve been exploring and explaining in sequels and reboots for decades. But there’s a reason why in the original Halloween (and, to be fair, in the 2018 “requel”), he’s just The Shape, and there’s a reason why The Shape is so much scarier than Michael Myers.
Clear your mind of familial revelations and cult subplots and travel back to those streets of Haddonfield (by way of Pasadena), circa 1978. With full respect to the chilling goings-on of Carpenter’s third act, it’s those early, daylit scenes that linger uneasily in the memory. Kids walking to and from school. Laundry hanging on the line to dry. A quiet street observed outside a classroom window. Each one a picturesque snapshot of placid suburbia, but with something just a little… off added to the frame: a silent, lone figure in a mask. Now, it is Halloween, so it’s not that odd in context, but in 1978 we’ve never seen this particular mask, and as it creeps into Carpenter’s idyllic tableau, it mars the landscape in a way that’s as matter-of-fact as it is terrifying.
The mask is described in the script as blank, and technically it is nondescript, though – as evidenced by countless sequels unable to duplicate it – hyper-specific in its own way. A way that could not have been planned, but was rather the result of a cheap rubber mask being coated with a spray paint that was chemically incompatible with latex, never fully curing. Pulled on and off Nick Castle’s head over a 28-day shoot, the white rubbed off here and there as filming progressed, and the result is a face that never looks quite the same each time it’s glimpsed in the film. Moreover, as it’s worn by a handful of different (and different-sized) performers in various shots, the mask’s very geography remains fluid and uncanny. You can't put your finger on it, but you know it's bad news.
This, friends, is The Shape, and it is coming for you. And the scariest part is you don't know that. You might be walking directly toward it on the sidewalk, or casually yelling at it as it drives down your street. You might mouth off to it as it stands at the foot of your bed. It's on your street, in your house, in the backseat of your car – and your first impulse is to shrug it off. Even though they literally saw The Shape coming, its victims on that 1978 night never quite got their heads around it.
This is the true existential terror of The Shape. Sure, The Shape is a void that can and does represent all the fears and anxieties of post-Manson America, of the 1970s suburbs where folks realized they were no longer safe in their homes. But the actual horror explored in Halloween – the horror of The Shape – is not about specifics, but about nothing less than the vague, unfathomable enormity of non-existence.
Michael Myers? Michael Myers is a boy who killed his sister one night 15 years ago. He has a face, and a birthday, and his own flashback sequence edited into the TV version of the sequel. And The Shape is not simply a criminally insane fella who became your local Boogeyman. Plenty of slashers were just that, but in Halloween, The Shape is that first time you caught a blurry glimpse of oblivion, the dawning awareness of your own inevitable end, peering out from some corner of your life. (It’s no accident that The Shape is a terrifying revelation to the youngsters in the film, while the one old guy who’s gazed a little too long into that particular abyss comes across as a little unhinged.) The Shape is a gas leak that kills the family of five down the street as they sleep. The Shape is the heavy quiet in the room where doctors tell you there’s nothing they can do about the stage 4 cancer taking away your partner a pound at a time. The Shape is the brutal, banal knowledge that the clock is ticking on your time on earth, and that the end is moving steadily and relentlessly in your direction.
Michael Myers has nothing on The Shape.
