Reading Halloween (1978) Through the Lens of Labor

[osteophage]

Halloween (1978) is, if nothing else, a movie about labor. This is something I think has at times been missing from horror genre analysis and commentary, as well as subsequent genre send-ups like Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011), which lean on “you can never have sex” while leaving out the salience of what those early slasher victims were supposed to be doing instead. Michael Myer’s primary victims were not just teenage girls, but specifically, teenage girls tasked with jobs—and not just any jobs, but jobs that had become a flashpoint of societal anxieties.

I am of course not the first person to point this out. The connection has been explored, for instance, by Murray Leeder and Miriam Forman-Brunell in their books on Halloween and babysitting, respectively. What I'm looking to do with this post is pull out this particular thread and give it the limelight, presented as a counterpoint to a more simplistic focus on abstracted sex.

When read through the lens of childcare as labor, Halloween presents a cautionary tale about workers who slack off on the job. Neglectful babysitters in this movie live up to the stereotype of irresponsible teenage girls who spend more time chatting on the phone and fooling around with boys than minding the children. By focusing on personal gratification and letting their guard down, they allow the telephone to become a vector of distraction, and they fail to identify a lurking threat that eventually spells their doom. The threat they face, crucially, stems from outside of the employer family, thereby deflecting attention away from the hazards of predatory employer-fathers. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. 

 

The Anti-Sex Reading of Slasher Horror

Like I’ve discussed before in Reflections on Jason Voorhees, Virginity in Horror, and the Specter of the Anti-Sex Killer, some of the popular commentary on slasher horror has amounted to “sex equals death.” Killers are imagined as avatars of punitive anti-sexuality, and the sorting algorithm of who lives and who dies is supposed to leave a virgin as the last girl standing.

The spirit of the idea is best condensed in the “rules” scene from Scream (1996), in which Randy interrupts a group viewing of Halloween (1978) to declare the rules for surviving a horror movie. Rule number one: “You can never have sex.” This segment at least seems tongue-in-cheek, delivered in a comedic way by a comedic character, so the movie itself is not necessarily taking the idea seriously, but there are certainly other people who have.

Elsewhere a similar notion crops up all over the place. It gets evoked in Cabin in the Woods (2011), for instance, where the people orchestrating a ritual sacrifice emphasize that the teens have to “transgress” (e.g. by having sex) in order to trigger their lethal punishment. Interviewers have even directly broached the idea to Halloween’s director, John Carpenter, such as in the “Trick and Treat” interview in Film Comment (1980):

The one negative appraisal I heard of Halloween criticized it for making a parallel between sexual activity and horror. Most of the women in the film are killed directly after having had some sexual experience. It was criticized on that level as being very moralistic.

Moralistic, yes, but in order to put that moralizing in context, we need to talk about babysitters.

 

A Cultural History of Babysitters

In Babysitter: An American History, Miriam Forman-Brunell provides an extensive look at how babysitters have been subject to all the same points of contention you’d expect from any employer-employee relationship. Sitters have wanted better wages and better hours, not to mention better working conditions, whereas parents have regarded sitters as overly entitled and demanding. The particulars of their complaints took many forms, and for our purposes here, the two that are the most salient are the tensions around sexuality and the telephone. With that said, those tensions are best understood in their broader context as part of a tug-of-war for control between the worker and the boss.

Across the decades, sitters and parents have resented each other through a lens of irresponsibility and taking advantage. Urban legends sprang up of babysitters who neglected the children to do illicit drugs, and many parents complained of sitters who ran up the telephone bill, ate all the food in the house, and trashed the place without cleaning up. Meanwhile, sitters complained of parents who stuck them with ill-behaved children, expected them to do extra housework, neglected to pay up on time, and lied about when they’d be back, extending the sitter’s hours without any notice.

Amid all this, babysitters were simultaneously being eroticized in movies, magazines, paperbacks, and pornography as objects of forbidden sexual desire—a media history running alongside their real-life experiences of sexual harassment. Forman-Brunell’s book presents example after example of how the babysitter has been portrayed in fiction as a seductive temptress with an appetite for older men. Very convenient for those older men, as you might imagine. In what accounts we have from the perspective of real babysitters themselves, the sexual attention of their employers has been unwanted and uncomfortable at best.

The sexualization of babysitters also coincided with a widespread parental anxiety about irresponsible, inattentive sitters. In general, the themes of urban legends about bad babysitters relate to broader themes of distraction: sitters who neglect the baby or child by watching TV, doing drugs, or doing basically anything other than minding house. In that light, sex is just another form of distraction that fits into this narrative of slacking on the job.

Likewise, sitters and parents were often at odds over the use of the telephone. Many sitters were not thrilled about spending boring and stressful hours working after school without the company of their friends, and so the telephone offered a way to socialize at an otherwise isolated workplace. To many parents, however, the telephone was a line of emergency communication that should not be used unless strictly necessary, and teenage “gab fests” were widely frowned upon.

It’s little wonder, then, how the ominous telephone call became such a staple of urban legends like the babysitter and the man upstairs. Different people tell different versions, but they usually involve a babysitter who receives an ominous phonecall—a phonecall that turns out to be coming from inside the house. By that point a criminal has already broken in on the babysitter’s watch and is taunting her for her inattention. In some versions, the caller tells her to “check on the children,” but she writes him off as just a nuisance not worth heeding, until she finds out that the children are already dead. There is no mistaking the moral here: babysitters, stay on your guard.

Incidentally, Forman-Brunell’s book also talks about the babysitters of Halloween (1978), but if you ask me, her analysis is slightly off the mark. Taking the typical approach, she writes that Laurie was “spared (rewarded, really) because she was ‘pure at heart,’” in contrast to her sexually active peers. Picking out the contrast in sexual activity in this way is relevant but imprecise. Rather than some more abstract moralizing, what the film is doing here is pitting sex (and phones) at odds with responsible childcare, which is to say, at odds with dutiful labor.

 

The Bad Babysitters of Halloween (1978)

Annie, Lynda, and Judith serve as the embodiment of parental fears about the bad babysitter, an irresponsible teenage girl who neglects her ward to chat up her friends on the telephone and fool around with boys. Lynda and Judith are supposed to be watching their own brothers, whereas Annie is babysitting for another family, but all three live up to the stereotype. All three ditch their responsibilities and fail to keep their wits about them, and so all three of them are killed.

When Judith Myers is introduced in the opening scene, her very first line establishes that she’s already lost track of the child entrusted to her care. In response to a young man (ostensibly her boyfriend) asking “We are alone, aren’t we?” Judith replies “Michael’s around someplace.” The two of them decide to head upstairs. The next we see of them, the young man is coming down the stairs in the course of putting his shirt back on, and Judith is shown half-naked, wearing only a pair of panties. She is immediately murdered by a masked assailant with a knife.

The same fatal flaw of irresponsibility extends to Annie and Lynda, two babysitters portrayed in the stage of the story that takes place fifteen years later. Like with Judith, their first priority is personal gratification. Both are more focused on planning rendezvous with teens their own age than thinking up childcare activities, and of course they make frequent calls to each other on the phone.

This exchange early on is representative of Annie’s characterization:

Annie: He can’t come over tonight...

Laurie: I thought you were babysitting [Lindsay] tonight.

Lynda: The only reason she babysits is to have a place to—

The remark gets cut off, but it’s easy to fill in the blank. While babysitting Lindsay that night, Annie chats extensively on the phone and fails to notice a masked killer staring at her through the window, revealing her inattentiveness as a babysitter. Later that night Annie actually ditches her job by getting Laurie to babysit Lindsay in her stead, freeing her up to meet up with Paul. Once she gets into the car to go see him, she gets murdered.

Likewise, Lynda’s irresponsibility leads to a similar fate. She gets out of looking after her little brother and brings Bob over to the Wallace house, where Annie was supposed to be babysitting. There the two make out and go to bed together in somebody else’s bed. Her irresponsibility and inattention to her surroundings is dramatized by the fact that during the makeout scene, she fails to notice that a masked killer is already in the house, standing there watching her, directly within line of sight—if only she would think to look.

 

The Killer as External Threat to the Family

As the counterpart to teenage irresponsibility, Michael Myers embodies the fear of an outside attack on the household—not just an embodiment of evil, but a direct consequence to babysitters letting their guard down. He is the “find out,” if you will, to their “fuck around.” In light of that, it’s worth pointing out that the threat he poses is completely external to the employer-employee relationship between babysitter and parent. He’s an escapee from the psych ward, dressed like a blue-collar worker, characterized as nothing but pure “evil,” in a way that means there is nothing to be examined in the way of motive. By centering this kind of villain, the story is able to lean into parental fears about sitters’ inattention and its consequences, while sidelining employer-parents themselves.  

Parents, historically, have been the most recurring threat to babysitters in their capacity to exploit and prey on them, and yet with Michael on set, the threat of the predatory employer-parent gets completely displaced. In fact, employer-parents hardly appear in the movie at all. There’s only a brief, distant glimpse of anonymous parents leaving the house after their babysitter arrives. Other than that, we see a couple of men identified as the babysitters’ own fathers, like the sheriff, but they don’t employ any babysitters themselves. At no point do we get a sustained close-up interaction between a babysitter and an employer-parent who has tasked them with childcare.

Instead, the source of threat in the film stems from a more nebulous sense of irrational evil, presented in the wrappings of mental illness and blue-collar labor. The iconic blue jumpsuit isn’t a true reflection of Michael’s socioeconomic class, of course—he stole it from another victim—but it remains the fact that the villain of this movie looks like a manual laborer, and this signifier of blue-collar attire has remained an iconic part of his aesthetic ever since. Prior to the jumpsuit, he wears a pale hospital gown as a patient at a psychiatric ward, invoking the narrative of “crazy” people as physically violent and dangerous. Both of these signifiers—that of mental illness and of working-class manual labor—serve to position Michael Myers as outside the conventions of respectable middle-class suburbia, even though we know from the opening scenes that he comes from the suburbs himself.

Underneath the superficial layer of these two costumes, the only explanation we’re provided for Michael’s violence is that he is simply rotten in some disconnected and nigh-spiritual sense. Again and again Dr. Loomis monologues about how inherently “evil” Michael is, how he has “the devil’s eyes,” how irrevocably bad he is down to his core, to the point that Dr. Loomis calls him an “it” and thinks of him as not really a man. If Michael is “evil,” then he is not evil in a way that wants anything. There is no motive, no interiority, nothing to make the mistake of empathizing with, and no risk of anyone ever resembling him. This type of motive-less, cartoonish villainy is not much use for any insight into human nature, but it is plenty of use to a carceral logic—a logic that says some people are so inherently defective as to deserve to be locked up for life.

Across the story, this masked embodiment of evil is used to highlight the problem that Lynda and Annie are unconcerned with monitoring their surroundings for danger. When Annie talks on the phone with Paul, she doesn’t notice Michael standing in the doorway, watching her. When Lynda and Bob kiss each other on the couch, they somehow don’t notice that Michael is also there in the house, watching them. When Annie brings Lindsay over to the Doyle house where Laurie is babysitting Tommy, Annie doesn’t notice that Michael is watching her then either.

The exception to this lack of awareness, of course, is Laurie, who is portrayed as more cautious and alert compared to her peers. She is the one who looks out the window at school and notices Michael watching her. She is the one who looks out her bedroom window and sees him outside. She is the one who sees him on the sidewalk and remarks about him to Annie. At Laurie’s urging, Annie goes over to confront him, but by the time she goes to look, he’s already gone. The contrast between what Laurie sees and the others don’t serves to characterize Laurie as alert to the possibility of danger in a way that her more distractable peers are not.

 

Not “Sex Equals Death,” but Phone Equals Sex/Death

For all that it’s easy to be distracted by the themes of sex-as-distraction, Halloween is almost equally hung up on the issue of the telephone. Phones figure as a means of teenage socializing, teasing each other about boys, making plans to hook up with boys, and then, ultimately, as a lethal weapon. Given the pervasive suspicion in popular culture that teenage girls make too much use of the phone, particularly for employer-parents worried about the babysitter using their phone, it’s easy to read some of that resentment into how the phone becomes weaponized by the killer as an instrument of death.

An early scene during the daylight hours primes us for the connection between phones, sexuality, and danger. When Laurie looks out her bedroom window, she sees a masked man standing by the clothesline, lurking and returning her gaze. He hasn’t done anything overtly threatening just yet, but his demeanor is menacing enough to put Laurie on edge. Then the phone rings. Laurie answers it with an ordinary “Hello?” but hears only strange wet sounds coming from the other end. In a moment she will find out that these sounds were actually chewing sounds made by her friend Annie, but in the moment, Laurie mistook the noise for “an obscene phonecall” (i.e. vintage sexual harassment). This mistaken impression introduces a relationship between phones, sex, and danger that will be cemented later in the film with Lynda’s death.

Lynda’s death scene is truly horrifying in its dramatic irony. As before, Laurie receives a call from an unknown caller. As before, all she can hear on the other end of the line are some ambiguous noises. So she figures, as before, that one of her friends is just messing with her. What she doesn’t realize is that this time, she’s hearing her friend Lynda being strangled to death. Amplifying the irony, a frustrated Laurie even blurts out, “I’ll kill you if this is a joke.”

This death scene is what cinches the triad of phones, sex, and death. It’s not just that Lynda has sex before she dies, although that’s part of it. Shortly before the murder, when Lynda sees a figure in a sheet ghost costume, she mistakes the intruder for her sex partner Bob and tries to entice him back into bed with her, unsuspecting of the danger. When that doesn’t work, she reaches for the phone. It’s then that Michael sneaks up behind her and begins to choke her with the phone cord, rendering the phone itself into an instrument of death.

To me it is difficult to escape the impression of something sexually vindictive about this scene—not merely suggestive, not merely punitive, but both at once. True to parental fears of badly-behaved babysitters, Lynda has just had sex in someone else’s bed and placed a phonecall with someone else’s phone. When the phone itself becomes her undoing, her dying gasps are presented in combination with a view of her writhing naked body, bare breasts conspicuously in frame, as if in anticipation of gratifying a straight male viewer. After all, in that famous Scream segment, what initially kicks off Randy’s rant about “the rules” is another teenage boy declaring that he wants to see one of the characters’ breasts. For those to feature here, when Lynda is being strangled with a phone, invokes a sordid history of desire entangled with resentment.

 

Aftermath

In portraying the violent death of bad babysitters, Halloween (1978) dramatizes the societal anxieties about babysitters as overly entitled and irresponsible, slacking off on the job to the point of endangering the children (and themselves). Because some of this slacking has involved sex, some of the popular commentary on slasher horror has flattened the moral of the story to a simplistic “sex equals death,” while generally overlooking the factor of labor. Yet when read through the lens of labor and its attendant politics, Halloween entirely aligns itself with employer-parent anxieties about babysitters taking liberties in their homes, overusing the telephone, and worst of all, being inattentive about the possibility of danger. What’s more, that danger takes the form of an external threat that has nothing to do with parents themselves.

Patriarchal authority figures, meanwhile, are exempt from Halloween’s call for constant watchfulness and suspicion. At no point does any father-employer do anything untoward to any of the babysitters or the children; fathers are barely present in the film at all, except in the form of the sheriff, who aids Dr. Loomis in searching for Micheal. Michael’s sheer abstractness as a villain—being “purely and simply evil”—not only sidesteps any attention to motive, but provides a justification for suspicion to be directed outward at the faceless stranger, thereby deflecting suspicion away from the authority figure, the employer, and the father.

Perhaps the salience of these connections is less apparent to viewers in the present day because compared to perennial conflicts over sex, babysitting as a teenage career is been long past its heyday. It’s still practiced, of course, but in the U.S. it’s not as omnipresent as it once was, allowing for societal anxieties about babysitters to fade from popular consciousness. Everyday professional childcare has since become the domain of the daycare industry, which employs grown adults. Societal anxieties about childcare were updated accordingly, and we know how that turned out.