I was reminded of the horror paperbacks that lined the shelves of my mother’s bookcase. I inspected every film in the store before finally settling on Halloween, charmed by the haunting simplicity of the cover image of a vicious jack-o’-lantern seemingly gripping the exaggeratedly angled blade of a knife, the fire inside the pumpkin visible only through the carved-out holes of its eyes. I remember wandering the aisles alone while my father waited in the car, nursing one of the beers that he brought with him for even the shortest of drives. I was maybe ten years old when my father took me to the video store during one of the weekends when I was staying with him at the old house where we had all lived before the divorce, and we came home with a VHS copy of Halloween.

The opening of Halloween is a coming-out story. The imperative in this scene isn’t immediately to disarm the costumed Michael Myers of a murder weapon - rather, it’s to reveal him, to show his face. But rather than relieve his son of the bloodied knife, Michael’s father first removes the mask. Outside the house, he encounters his parents emerging from the family car, and his father calls out to him by name as he approaches the street. After donning a clownish mask that had been discarded on the floor by the departed lover, Michael hacks his screaming sister to shreds before enacting his own post-climax exit down the staircase and out the front door. This evil finds its mode of expression in the shiny blade of a kitchen knife, the first iteration of what will become his weapon of choice. The revelation of heterosexual desire seems to have triggered the onset of a latent evil inside Michael’s young body. He notices that the bed behind her is unmade, the sheets ruffled, evidence of an exchange that Michael doesn’t yet understand but for which he intuitively believes she must be punished. As his sister’s lover bounds down the stairs and out the door, casually pulling on a striped T-shirt over a perfectly toned chest and torso, Michael seemingly takes the young man’s place, retracing his steps up the stairs and into the bedroom where his sister sits topless at a vanity table. What follows is a dreamlike first-person sequence that ends with the viewer looking through the eyeholes of a mask. He has just witnessed his sister’s seduction of a beautiful young man while spying on them through a window on Halloween night. John Carpenter’s Halloween opens with the post-coital murder of a half-naked adolescent girl at the hands of her younger brother, Michael Myers. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

Michael myers face reveal