Kristen Lené Hole and Dijana Jelača, in their book Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction, reference Linda Williams in explaining that in narrative film there are “three body genres that seeks to provoke an excessive physical reaction in the viewer: melodrama (crying), horror (fear), and porn (arousal)” (Hole & Jelača 268). In an interesting choice, John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween combines two of those body genres in creating a horror movie that elicits both fear and arousal, primarily through the means of it’s female protagonists.
Discussion around the female characters in Halloween has been around for years, and it’s not an uncommon topic to discuss when speaking of horror in general. As Hole and Jelača discuss extensively, Halloween was one of the first horror movies to include the final girl trope, where there is a large distinction between females who are killed in a slasher horror film and the “final girl” who survives the attack (282-283). Within Halloween this distinction would be between Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her two murdered friends Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (P.J. Soles). Hole and Jelača discuss how the final girl “is always somewhat ‘boyish'” in comparison to the females who die, and that she is often “sexually less available” (283). It’s the second part of their argument that plays significance in Halloween as well as Williams’ body genres. Arousal and fear come together in Halloween, and it makes a large distinction in the girls who die as opposed to Laurie.
From the first scene of the movie, where a young Michael Myers (Tony Moran and Will Sandin) murders his sister, Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson), the audience is set up to expect the blending of horror and arousal.
Judith Myers is presented to us first as a sexual being and is shown half naked in a way to incite arousal in the viewers. Only once the arousal is introduced does Myers kill his mark. Even in the killing is sexualized. While being stabbed, Judith Myers is moaning and clutching at herself in a way that is more like porn that like someone being stabbed in real life. Ten minutes into the movie and the audience is set up to blend arousal (sexuality) and fear (murder) into one. The deaths that follow are in the same pattern.
The second death in the movie comes after Annie (Kyes) ditches her babysitting job to meet up with her boyfriend. Dressed in a large button down that creates the image of a girl wearing a man’s shirt after having sex, Myers attacks her from behind in the car. While being choked, Annie’s screams are less pornographic than that of Judith Myers’, but many of the faces she makes mirror ecstasy-like faces.
The third and fourth deaths, again, come after sex and the audience arousal has been in play. Lynda’s boyfriend is killed first, stuck through the chest while nearly fully dressed. Lynda, however, faces a different, more erotic, death.
As seen in the image, Lynda once again makes wide, mouth expressions like Annie and she’s also seen shirtless and nearly shirtless much like Judith Myers was.
In all three of the female deaths in the movie, the audience is exposed to arousal and then death. This puts stress on Hole and Jelača’s argument in separating the emotions of sorrow, fear, and arousal. While in examination and analysis it’s often natural to make distinctions between the films based on the emotions they’re supposed to engage, Carpenter makes a clear attempt in combining arousal and fear. By separating these emotions, it erases a deeper discussion on the emotions.
Both fear and arousal are seen as “base emotions” or as the more animalistic emotions that humans can feel. Fear works in combination with fight or flight instincts while arousal works with the desire for reproduction. When looking at the arousal factor, the movie characters could be broken down into two categories: those that feed into arousal and those that don’t. The characters that give into their own arousal and who feed the audience’s arousal (Judith, Annie, and Lynda) are paired with fear and flight. None of them actually fight back against Myers and are killed fairly easily. The character who don’t feed into arousal (Laurie and Myers) are the characters who fight, and who survive. It’s almost as though fear and arousal are at war and only one can survive. Either the character has control and power in arousal, and they lose to fear and die, or they have suppressed arousal and then have the capacity to fight fear and survive.
By separating these emotions in Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction, Hole and Jelača reduce the potential for conversation between these emotions. While Halloween doesn’t feed into the audience’s sorrow, Carpenter does work with both arousal and fear which shows that these base emotions have conversations with each other and it is detrimental to separate them and talk about them individually.
Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, performances by Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes, and P.J. Soles, 1978.
Hole, Kristin Lené, and Jelača, Dijana. “Narrative Film: Gender and Genre.” Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction. Routledge, 2019.
Images. “Halloween (1978)” Movie Screencaps. https://movie-screencaps.com/halloween-1978/
Gender & Sexuality in Film 
Ally,
I found your overall argument for how Halloween incites fear and arousal within the audience members both compelling and interesting. I really appreciated you adding in images so that I could easily recall what scene you’re talking about. On my initial watch of Halloween I thought the moaning while Judith Myers was being killed to be a little over the top, especially because she was already naked. It just felt extremely sexualized for no apparent reason. But with the connections you’ve made about how this was intended for the audiences, it makes me feel almost disturbed, realizing I was witnessing this blur between arousal and fear and not being able to differentiate. I also never realized, until you pointed it out, how most of the female characters were strangled, which seems to be the more sexualized way to kill someone according to Michael, because it automatically makes the victims wide-mouthed, looking as though they are moaning. Your point about how these two emotions are at war and only one can survive is a perfect way of summarizing it up.
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