For a century, America has rebuilt itself around the needs of prowling, violent shapes. Our environments grow vast and empty to accommodate them, our social lives are atomized by them, our hearts are hardened to the more than 30,000 people a year that they kill. 

Cars are scary! Yet they are also cinematically compelling. Just as Truffaut opined that “every film about war ends up being pro-war” because combat will always appear so dynamic on screen, it is very difficult to make an anti-car film. Horror master John Carpenter made one of the best.

But it’s not his 1983 killer car flick Christine, which lingers fetishistically on the titular Plymouth’s gleaming curves and turns her into a charismatic antihero. His movie about the horrors of car dependency isn’t ‘about’ cars at all. It’s Halloween.

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Critical reads on Halloween (1978) don’t mention cars much. Michael’s driving habit is sometimes remarked upon as an absurd curiosity – the film itself waves away the implausibility of a man who has been in a mental institution since age six being able to drive with Dr. Loomis’ quip that “perhaps someone around here gave him lessons” – but let’s consider it not as a plot necessity, not as an accident of the setting, but as an important part of the text. What does Halloween have to say about cars?

First, the basics: Halloween is most commonly interpreted as the prototypical slasher morality tale in which youths are punished for their libertinism, though Carpenter himself has pushed back on such takes. It is also often credited with being the first film to inject horror into suburbia, as opposed to the tony urban milieux of your Rosemary’s Babys or Exorcists and the exurban isolation of Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. For the first time, this reading holds, average Americans in post-War housing tracts could thrill at grisly deaths that might have happened in their own suburban backyards.

Every mention of the suburbs, though, is also an implicit mention of cars, which are as integral to suburbia as blood is to tissue. The suburban environment of endless rows of detached homes with spacious lawns, impassably distant from commerce or leisure or anything that’s not another house just like yours, could not exist without the automobile’s ability to collapse distance and time. The wide lanes and tree-lined verges that characterize Haddonfield (actually shot in Pasadena, CA, on the outskirts of America’s most car-centric metro area) constitute a built environment designed primarily for the convenience of these miraculous machines. In other words, while critical reflections on suburbia consider it mainly as a place where people live, we must also always consider it as a place where cars live. Even when they’re not on screen, Halloween is a horror movie playing on the car’s turf.

They’re on screen an awful lot, though. The first action we see Michael Myers take as an adult is stealing Loomis’ government-issued station wagon. He then drives it 150 miles back to Haddonfield, stopping halfway there to slaughter a tow truck driver and steal his clothes – for the rest of the film, and indeed the franchise, he is always clad in the uniform of an auto mechanic. When he makes it home, he spends the remainder of the first act slowly cruising the streets, the car’s headlights as impassive as the eyes of the mask he eventually steals. 

Meanwhile, teen protagonists Laurie Strode and Annie Brackett share a joint and listen to Blue Oyster Cult while driving downtown. Annie later attempts to use the same car to go pick up her boyfriend while she’s supposed to be babysitting. The other member of the friend group, Lynda, arrives on the scene pounding beers with her boyfriend in his van. If Halloween is a morality tale where teens are punished for their hedonistic embrace of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, well, all of their transgressions are directly enabled by their access to the automobile. As in real life, cars are totems of freedom and independence for the suburban teen. 

But when Michael enters the equation they also represent the threat of traumatic, random death. As soon as Annie hops in her car, Michael rises from the back seat to strangle and stab her. Unlike some other, more explicitly puritanical slasher villains, he doesn’t seem to really care that Annie is off to go have premarital sex – he just cares that when she gets in the car she’s now in a place where he can easily kill her. As the statistics tell us, every time any teen gets in a car, they are in the place where they are most likely to die.

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The first car we see in the movie is the one driven by Michael’s parents, returning from a night out at a Halloween gathering. They had the freedom to leave suburbia. He did not. And he went insane.

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A ‘stroad’, in the coinage of urban planner Charles Marohn, is a paved place for driving cars that tries and fails to be both a street (an urban form where life happens at a human scale) and a road (a thoroughfare to convey cars from one place to another). You can easily picture a stroad – it is probably your default vision of an American built environment. One turns up in Haddonfield as the site of the burgled hardware store. 

On a typical stroad the road feature of a grassy median is replaced with a ‘suicide lane’ to facilitate left turns into the various strip malls and chain restaurants that surround it. Meanwhile the street feature of sidewalks is included out of legal obligation but clings forlorn and crumbling to the side of the stroad, bereft of pedestrians. And no wonder- to navigate a stroad without a car is to be profoundly vulnerable, your body exposed to noxious fumes and punishing noise and the constant threat of swift-moving metal fatally penetrating your flesh.

Laurie Strode was reportedly named after John Carpenter’s first girlfriend, and anyway the term ‘stroad’ was not invented until 2011, so there is certainly no intentional connection between the homophones. Besides, they’re spelled differently – “strode” is the past tense of “stride”, to walk. Laurie is a pedestrian. She spends the whole movie walking (and eventually running), doing her best to navigate the suburbs on foot. Their inhuman scale is never more apparent than when she escapes into the night after first encountering Michael. She runs to the neighbor’s house to beg for help, but the only response is the porch lights blinking off. The neighborhood is not built to interface with bare, car-less humans. Then she must scramble across the wide, wide street while Michael slowly stalks her. She seems tiny and incongruous stumbling over the vast asphalt. He looks right at home.

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In the script and credits of Halloween, the adult version of Michael Myers is called “The Shape”. He is portrayed by Nick Castle, and when Castle asked Carpenter to describe his motivation in a scene, Carpenter’s response was along the lines of “Don’t act. Your motivation is to move from this mark to that mark”. The Shape, then, is envisioned and portrayed as a purely mechanical being, an engine that produces only locomotion and murder.

He’s The Shape when he wears the mask. But he’s also The Shape before he gets the mask, when he wears the station wagon.

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The lead-crime hypothesis is a provocative concept in the social sciences that points out that, in the US at least, the sudden spike in violent crime in the late 1960s and early ’70s followed by the rapid decrease in the ’90s can be mapped on a one-generation time lag to how much leaded gasoline children were exposed to. A bunch of the kids huffing tetraethyllead exhaust from the gigantic cars of the ’40s and ’50s, the story goes, grew up into sociopathic murderers due to the effects of low-level lead poisoning. When leaded gasoline got phased out in the ’70s children’s brains stopped being poisoned as much, so when they hit their prime crime-doing years in the ’90s they did fewer crimes. Correlation is not causation and statistical analysis has shown that the hypothesis is far from being able to explain the entire contour of the crime spike. But it’s still a potential factor, and a frightening one – our machines modifying our own biology to increase our propensity for pure evil is something straight out of horror fiction.

Michael Myers was born in 1957, part of the same lead-addled generation that drove that ’70s crime spike. Between 1963 when he murdered his sister and 1978 when he returned to kill again, the US homicide rate doubled as people about his age ran rampant. When he first committed murder at age six, he was just getting an early start.

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If you want to get silly with this metaphor, the very silly sequels of the recent David Gordon Green-directed Halloween sequel trilogy provide plenty of fuel. The opening of Halloween Kills (2021) sees Michael trapped in a burning basement, apparently defeated – until a giant fire truck arrives and the firemen bust him out to start killing again. In real life, firefighters often lobby for urban planning that features wider, more dangerous stroads by raising concerns that their huge fire engines won’t be able to fit down narrower, more human-scale lanes. Advocates of safe walkable urbanism are left, like Laurie and her family, screaming futilely at them to stop.

Kills also bolsters a psychoanalytic read of Michael that centers on the isolation of his suburban upbringing leading to the impulse to murder. He is shown to operate on a fixed pattern: he stabs, he stares out the window, he steps out onto the lawn. His world is so circumscribed that it has been reduced to these three actions. There is nothing to do in the suburbs sans car, so in defiance of this bounded life he becomes an entity that emulates the only things cars can produce: movement, stillness, and death.

The divisive conclusion of the whole saga, Halloween Ends (2022), practically makes the subtextual Michael-is-cars thread we’re pulling here into text. Borrowing its broad plot outline from Christine, it depicts hapless auto mechanic Corey Cunningham adopting a derelict, sewer-dwelling Michael as a mentor who can teach Corey how to murder (with his car, naturally) the townsfolk who torment him. When Laurie finally manages to kill Michael for good at the end of the film, the whole town watches as his lifeless body is obliterated in an industrial car crusher.

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So the death that stalks the suburbs is the death that comes from cars. But what does all this have to do with Halloween, the holiday? Perhaps the great outlier in the franchise, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) can help shed some light on the subject. This film, existing out of continuity with all the others, reminds us of the pagan origins of Halloween: it has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a time when the veil between our world and the Otherworld drew thin, and costumed folk could mingle with the spirits known as aos sí. 

Trick-or-treating evolved from the tradition of handing out sweets to any aos sí (or person dressed like one) who came to your door in exchange for good fortune in the coming winter. The villain of Halloween III, a neo-pagan android-and-mask magnate named Cochran, believes that candy is not enough. He says that the ancients engaged in child sacrifice to propitiate the spirits, and he wants to do it again, in a big way, using masks booby-trapped with occult microchips carved from the rocks of Stonehenge.

He needn’t have gone to all the trouble; modern Halloween traditions have already done the job for him. Most days of the year, we do live with two separate worlds laid on top of each other but never touching – the world of humans, and the Otherworld of cars, those inhuman entities beyond our ken. On Halloween the invisible wall between worlds vanishes, and kids and cars mingle just like the Celts and the aos sí, and across the country the sacrifice is made. The risk of death from vehicle collision is ten times higher than average for young children on October 31st.

Per the same analysis, each year’s Halloween festivities result in four pedestrian/motor vehicle deaths in America that otherwise would not have occurred – exactly the body count in the film’s 1978. If Michael is identified with cars, there can be no better night for him to slake his bloodlust than Halloween.

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To be clear, this is all death-of-the-author intellectual exercise stuff. John Carpenter almost certainly did not consciously set out to make Michael a metaphor for cars, and if you asked him about it he’d probably give a curt dismissal and return to playing Horizon Forbidden West. But the cultural forces he tapped into in 1978 are so deeply intertwined with American car dependency that it can’t help but bleed through on screen, intentional or not, from beginning to end.

The beginning of the film, of course, is a celebrated minutes-long POV shot, starting with a long view of the Myers’ family home before Michael moves inside to murder his sister. The hand-held camera work in this opening sequence presents an interesting contrast to the very end of the film, which is a series of static shots of empty sets and locations. In this sequence the camera holds perfectly steady, as if mounted on a wheelbase, and invites us to consider how the Shape suffuses the built environment of Haddonfield. Each space is presented as pure geometry, empty of human forms, while Michael’s heavy breathing swells in the background. The shots start inside the suburban houses, then move outside, showing us their indifferent façades, until we end with a head-on view of the Myers house that almost matches the first frame of the first shot.

In the first frame, the camera is Michael. In the last frame, the camera is the Shape. Its position, at beginning and end, is the same: it is looking at suburbia from the middle of the street.