Halloween: Opening Analysis

          In the opening scene of John Carpenter’s Halloween, we are immediately thrown into the first person point of view of an unknown character. The choice to open with a first person point of view shot without establishing a character evokes a feeling of uneasiness and anxiety. Point of view shots are meant to put us into the mind of a specific character so we can literally see the scene through their perspective, but when we have no familiarity with the character, we are unsure as to what we ought to be feeling and thinking like.This allows our minds to wander, perhaps to a dark, dark place.

          The character is outside a commonplace suburban home, which they then wander around the side to look into the living room window to reveal a teenage couple kissing each other on the couch. The first person point of view makes it feel as if we are spying on the couple, which causes the audience to feel uneasy.
           We then see the couple rush up the stairs, presumably to have sex. The home, the first floor now empty, is entered by the character through the kitchen. A high pitched synth lead kicks in as we see the character brandish a large kitchen knife. We then see the boyfriend come downstairs and leave the house after saying goodbye. This leads into a low angle point of view shot of the character ascending a staircase. The low angle coupled with the ascension of the stairs evokes a feeling of power, almost as if this figure has the high ground. Literally.
          After the character reaches the top of the stairs, the character adorns a clown mask, which reduces the frame to two eyeholes. This obscured perspective not only serves the purpose of making the audience uncomfortably claustrophobic, but lets us know that whoever this character is, their view of life isn’t right. It’s skewed. They aren’t seeing the whole picture.
        We see him cross down a hallway into a bedroom, which houses a teenage girl in nothing but her underwear, looking at herself in a mirror. The girl exclaims “Michael!,’ before the character stabs her to death with the kitchen knife. The character, now established as Michael, clearly had a relationship with these people. That didn’t stop him from killing them in cold blood.
          We then see Michael, still from the point of view of his clown mask, run down the stairs and out of the house and into the driveway. Concurrently, a car pulls up. A man and a woman in formal attire exit the vehicle and approach the character. At this point we see that the two other characters are much taller than Michael is.
          The man presses Michael and proceeds to remove the mask from his face. The scene then cuts for the first time to a mid shot of a child in a clown costume, no more than eight years old, covered in blood. The couple, presumably his parents, stare at him in horror as the camera pans out into a master shot that includes the house, the neighborhood, and the driveway. He has just murdered his sister.

This scene is powerful because it utilizes an experimental version of the first person point of view shot to establish Michael Myers' sociopathic world view, and contrasts it with the common life of American suburbia.