2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 111,978
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This is a good piece on the original "Halloween" movie, and left wingers should read it....they might learn something...not likely, but there is always hope...
Why The Original 'Halloween' Movie's Horror Is Ageless
None of this is explicitly spelled out in the film, but the implications are all there, particularly in Loomisās dialogue. The Shape represents evil itself, or at the least the potential for evil that lurks in every community. This brings us to Haddonfield and its inhabitants. A large part of the power of āHalloweenā comes from how persuasively ordinary the setting and characters are.
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This is exactly where the horror lies; Laurieās a perfectly decent, ordinary teenager of the kind you could meet in any school in any town in America. And she ends up the target of an unthinkably evil force, and for no other reason than that she happened to cross his path.
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Laurieās understandable response is to try desperately to ignore it, to tell herself that sheās imagining things or overreacting. Haddonfield is a peaceful, friendly little town, and Laurie is a nice, normal kid. These sorts of things donāt happen to people like her.
But of course, that is precisely to whom they do happen. And therein lies the horror. We want very much to think that we live in a safe, nice, civilized world, where we can safely go about our lives and where āthat sort of thingā will never happen to us. But however safe and nice and civilized the world around us is, it retains the potential for evil, and hence for āthat sort of thing.ā
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Yet, like Dr. Loomisās colleagues and the people of Haddonfield, we still donāt quite understand what we are dealing with. We futilely grasp at sensible solutions: We need more mental health research, we need more and better gun control laws, we need a more rational foreign policy so as not to provoke terrorism, we need economic reform so that people wonāt be driven to crime, we need to teach men not to rape, and on and on.
Whether any of these things are actually needed is not the point. The point is that we are deluding ourselves. Nothing we do here on Earth will eliminate evil from our midst. Evil is not a matter of a lack of education or economic desperation or bad laws or cultural norms or mental health. Evil, like love, is a choice; the choice to put the self first.
Why The Original 'Halloween' Movie's Horror Is Ageless
None of this is explicitly spelled out in the film, but the implications are all there, particularly in Loomisās dialogue. The Shape represents evil itself, or at the least the potential for evil that lurks in every community. This brings us to Haddonfield and its inhabitants. A large part of the power of āHalloweenā comes from how persuasively ordinary the setting and characters are.
--------------------
This is exactly where the horror lies; Laurieās a perfectly decent, ordinary teenager of the kind you could meet in any school in any town in America. And she ends up the target of an unthinkably evil force, and for no other reason than that she happened to cross his path.
------
Laurieās understandable response is to try desperately to ignore it, to tell herself that sheās imagining things or overreacting. Haddonfield is a peaceful, friendly little town, and Laurie is a nice, normal kid. These sorts of things donāt happen to people like her.
But of course, that is precisely to whom they do happen. And therein lies the horror. We want very much to think that we live in a safe, nice, civilized world, where we can safely go about our lives and where āthat sort of thingā will never happen to us. But however safe and nice and civilized the world around us is, it retains the potential for evil, and hence for āthat sort of thing.ā
---------------------
Yet, like Dr. Loomisās colleagues and the people of Haddonfield, we still donāt quite understand what we are dealing with. We futilely grasp at sensible solutions: We need more mental health research, we need more and better gun control laws, we need a more rational foreign policy so as not to provoke terrorism, we need economic reform so that people wonāt be driven to crime, we need to teach men not to rape, and on and on.
Whether any of these things are actually needed is not the point. The point is that we are deluding ourselves. Nothing we do here on Earth will eliminate evil from our midst. Evil is not a matter of a lack of education or economic desperation or bad laws or cultural norms or mental health. Evil, like love, is a choice; the choice to put the self first.
