What we're afraid of
There’s this scene in the newest “Halloween” movie from 2018 I can’t stop thinking about.
Here’s what you need to know about this scene. It contains just four people: a cop, a teenager, a doctor and a mass murderer named Michael.
The teenager is running through the streets alone the night of Halloween, and gets picked up by the cop and the doctor, who are patrolling the town to find Michael, who has escaped a psychiatric hospital (because of course he has).
The cop spots Michael near a high school football field, and rams the guy going about 50. Michael flies through the air and is motionless.
But the trick with this Michael character is that this dude doesn’t die. Why? We don’t really know. It’s why, after the 1978 hit “Halloween” they made like six sequels featuring the guy. The end of these movies always leaves you to believe that yes — this time — this guy is toast. No way he makes it back from this one.
But that mask Michael wears is so recognizable, and the premise of these movies are so copy-paste-print-money, that inevitably Michael rises and a new movie is born. Very spooky.
Anyway, Michael gets up after getting drilled by this car and ends putting this doctor — who, by the way, has been studying Michael for decades — flat on his back in the middle of the road. The pavement is wet, dead leaves line the streets, they’re in the woods, a fog hangs over the whole scene. The teenager, by the way, is watching all this from inside the cop car, not running away because as you’ll see with these movies logic doesn’t often follow in step with the plot.
So Michael is standing over this doctor — looming is a better word — just breathing. The doctor’s older, with a white mustache and frizzy Einstein hair. All the doctor has ever wanted to know is why Michael is the way he is. Why he killed his sister, why he kills at random. What’s the driving force of it?
So the doctor knows his goose is likely cooked, so he starts screaming at Michael.
“Say something!”
“Say anything!”
And Michael just breathes. And he says nothing at all. And then (spoiler alert) smashes the doctor’s face Drive-style with his boot.
I’m not a fan of horror movies for many reasons. The missing logic, yes, but signing up to be scared isn’t on the top of my list of vices. I’ve gone to exactly one Haunted House in my life, which wasn’t actually a Haunted House but a “Haunted” part of Worlds of Fun back in the 2000s. Smoke covered walkways and scary figures jumped out and yelled. It was horrible.
But a few years ago, I watched this first “Halloween” movie, the one from the late 1970s. And I was fascinated. And I wasn’t sure why.
So I watched the new one this year. And yet again, despite my hinderance to horror, was intrigued.
And I think I’ve pin-pointed that it comes down to that one scene, with the doctor and the boot.
Because I think what we as humans are most concerned about, what most worries us, is the unknown. I think so often we’re the ones on our backs on the pavement screaming, “say something, say anything!”
We want answers. We like answers. They ground us. And when they are not readily available, when they hide behind masks and say nothing at all, that is the most terrifying.
You see this is movie tropes often. You pick up the phone and only hear breathing. You hear a noise, but nothing is there.
It’s why the infamous Batman villain the Joker is so popular and why there have been so many iterations over the years. The appeal to the Joker is chaos, yes, and it’s the perfect juxtaposition to Batman, a man driven by stringent ideas and rules. It’s the perfect pairing.
But it’s the unknowableness of the Joker that keeps us caring about so many Jokers. What’s his backstory? No one really knows. In the most agreed-upon origin story, a comic called The Killing Joke, there’s messy and foggy reasons why the Joker becomes who he does. It is purposefully vague.
In “The Dark Knight,” the Joker gives three different stories why he got the scars he did. All probable. But which is true? We’re not told. It’s noted that his clothes are untraceable, his fingerprints untraceable. They can’t figure out his name. They don’t know who this guy actually is, or what he’s doing in Gotham City.
And that’s why we still see him everywhere on Halloween, or why The Dark Knight is on a perpetual re-run on TV. We’re fascinated with what we don’t know, and what we can’t know.
I think we’re living in a moment with so few answers. Why did this virus happen, why now, why does it impact who it does, why does the degrees of impact vary, why has so much piled into one year?
I don’t mean to purposefully scare you with real-life horrors on a weekend of made-up horrors. There’s something pretty remarkable about Halloween, dressing up and confronting fears.
But I’m stuck with that idea of looking up at what we don’t know and asking for an explanation, and how often we’ve been met with that this year.
And I wonder if part of the horror baked into that is that we might not hear an answer we want. Maybe it is the last answer we’d ever want to hear.
But I think even Michael removing his mask and telling us he’s a psychopath is better than laying on the ground wondering why.
Because it’s the searches for that answer, why, that keep us up at night.
Best Thing I Read This Week:
What to do about Ahav? By Hannah Dreier in the Washington Post
Podcast:
Hey, so I do a podcast with my friends called Click Bait that I’d love for you to subscribe to. Here’s a link. Check us out if you have a chance.