Little Boxes, Big Knives: Halloween Is a Horror Film for Urbanists
“Once a street is well equipped to handle strangers, once it has both a good, effective demarcation between private and public spaces and has a basic supply of activity and eyes, the more strangers the merrier.”
-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Halloween is suburban horror, fully realized, in the same way Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the perfect vegetarian film. To many Americans, the suburbs are an idyll which represents peace and security away from the chaos of the city. By the end of John Carpenter’s breakout film, however, the detached houses and hedge rows of Haddonfield begin to feel less like castles and more like mausoleums.
Consider the moment when Laurie runs to the house next door. The residents hear her screaming, peer out, and ignore her. Notice that she doesn’t run to the next house and try again, either. She knows it’s a lost cause. Suburbia is a system that doesn’t care about anyone else’s distress. Suburbs are the architecture of isolation, alienation, and detachment masked as comfort, idyll, and privacy. Strangers don’t belong; they must be dangerous. But it’s not just a matter of violent crime, which isn’t a purely suburban problem, but a more quiet social violence. As our understanding of its consequences grows, the malicious selfishness of suburban life becomes more apparent.
We build entire neighborhoods that demand cars for every adult in the household and then wonder how climate change got so bad. We spend absurd amounts of water, fuel, pesticide and fertilizer maintaining the lawn, the biggest irrigated crop in the nation, a non-native, unproductive, inedible, space-wasting parasite of a plant, because it looks nice, and because it keeps our neighbor further away from us. How much power could be saved on heating and cooling if several blocks’ worth of suburban residents moved out of their gigantic homes and into a single high rise apartment building, and what would their carbon emissions be like if every household could trade the two-plus cars each that they need to even get out of their neighborhood (as they must for groceries, eating out, recreation–anything that requires more than rows and rows of identical houses and yards) for a set of transit passes–and how many of their lives would be saved by keeping them away from cars, which are more effective at killing Americans than Michael Myers and nearly as effective as guns? How much danger are we putting each other in when we live to be (just barely) apart from others instead of in a community? How much connection do we lose out on when we have to call our neighbor across the street because the kids we babysit are each watching The Thing in their own living room on their own TV? How much more obvious can it get that detached housing breeds detachment?
Halloween is a terrifying, imaginative, and evocative illustration of the perils of suburban living, imitated, but never replicated. Halloween feels timeless because it recognizes that insidious forces are no longer confined to mad scientists’ labs, haunted houses, or gothic castles. Instead, they hide in the bushes that keep our homes apart. The normalization of the American suburb is an inadvertent social and environmental evil which may kill us all, not one by one, but generation by generation. Like Michael Myers, no matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to kill the suburbs first. Of course, I’m not saying John Carpenter set out to make a deliberate piece of anti-suburb propaganda…
But can you imagine Michael Myers in downtown Brooklyn?