On Halloween’s Dr. Loomis

A little damnation, a little redemption

FILM: Halloween, 1978
HOW TO WATCH: In a quiet suburban town, wearing your best terrycloth robe, while the kids are with the sitter. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

“They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to destroy him I must drag out my weary existence. I knelt on the grass and kissed the earth and with quivering lips exclaimed... ‘I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.’”  - Dr. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

At the close of 1978’s Halloween, Michael Myers’ psychiatrist Dr. Loomis shoots his patient six times at close range, looks out the window after him, and sees nothing but a Michael-shaped indent in the grass. Loomis later kneels beside that shape, the place where the body should be and isn’t, and it seems for a moment like he might lean down and kiss a flattened blade. 

Of all the unfortunate souls that populate the Halloween franchise, there is perhaps no sadder character than Sam Loomis. Michael is a boogeyman released upon suburban Haddonfield, and Dr. Loomis is all of the rationality and willpower humanity could muster to contain him, which is, of course, never enough. 

By Halloween IV, we find the long-suffering psychiatrist at his most haggard. It is 10 years after Michael Myers’ most recent killing spree. After setting both himself and Michael ablaze, he arrives in this film with fleshy burns rippling across the left side of his face and hand, his signature trench coat tattered and stained. He has a significant limp. His colleagues wish that he would retire or die. Time tracks on in Haddonfield, but Loomis remains plagued by the memory of Michael’s last escape, those 16 bodies still fresh in his mind. Exasperation is the Doctor’s primary character trait; obsession a close second. 

By contrast, ‘ol Mike reappears relatively unscathed. He is the same 6-foot-7 lurking presence in a blue jumpsuit and deformed William Shatner mask. He has no problem hurtling grown men through glass, lifting teenage heartthrobs off the ground by their necks, and ripping the limbs off of well-armed police officers. He has survived countless gun shots, falls from great heights, multiple stabbings, and the proverbial flames of hell. Over seven installments, Dr. Loomis shoulders the Sisyphean task of fighting unbeatable evil. A religious pilgrim spells out what Loomis by that point knows well: 

“You can’t kill damnation, mister. It don’t die like a man dies.” 

When Halloween first premiered in 1978 the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, its reputation and moral integrity sloshed. A generation of young people had stood up to a militaristic government and asked for some semblance of mercy — it had occurred to them, sometime between the advent  of TV news and the World Wide Web, that walking softly might be more important than carrying that big stick. 

A crew of 20- and 30-somethings — namely 30-year-old director and co-writer John Carpenter — made Halloween with $320,000 and a lot of creative energy. Their antagonist is, understandably,  the product of intense repression, an emotionless, nearly catatonic child raised in captivity, most comfortable in a mask or lurking behind a hedge. He is free love’s antithesis — restrained apathy. In the documentary A Cut Above the Rest, Carpenter said that he envisioned a killer who was “human, yes, but almost like a force… that can’t be denied.” 

Naturally, his adversary had to be someone equal and opposite — a little too human. Someone foolishly brave or single-minded or outcast enough to keep beating his head against that impenetrable wall. Dr. Loomis is all of those things, an apt representation of the resilience of the imperfect human spirit when up against… the resilience of the imperfect human spirit. He is, importantly, battling what is most familiar to him, and reminds us over and over again that Michael was his patient for 15 years. Loomis was part of the system that kept the child locked up, denying him human compassion and forfeiting belief in his ability to rejoin society. He is not without some culpability when it comes to damnation. 

In an essay on Halloween, J.P. Tellotte writes that human responsibility may be part of the point:

“Carpenter emphasizes the common human responsibility for and involvement in those grisly aspects of life from which we usually like to think ourselves safely removed. Perhaps he hopes to demonstrate that, bearing our own burden of involvement in these actions, we are also the ones best placed to call a halt to the proceedings, provided, of course, that we choose to accept this very human responsibility.”

More than 40 years and a full 12 Halloween films later, we have popped out on the other side of the Information Age armed with a new clarity of vision, a kind of bitter reward reaped by that sweet, groovy dissent. We have begun unmasking the villains and horror of our country’s past, attempting, and sometimes failing, to Whac-a-Mole new injustices as they crop up, digging beneath the surface and discovering systemic rot. The distinctly American ability to remain oblivious is a thing of the past. We now know that we are up against numerous evils. We know that environmental destruction is not only imminent, but that it is already occurring. We know that massive corporations are daily taking advantage of an underpaid, overexerted workforce. We know that the systems we live in are failing; that some promise previous generations believed was made in their favor is being broken over and over and over again. And, in light of the last two years, those of us still laboring under any impressions have realized that we are also not safe from the plague. Should we forget to be vigilant , a touch notification will alert us that some fresh hell is afoot, some old evil reanimated. 

We can now look any evil thing in the eye and recognize, beneath its pale, distorted mask, something shockingly and uncomfortably human.

There are many points in the Halloween franchise where Loomis or Laurie Strode have to re-convince the people of Haddonfield that they are in danger. Like Loomis, many of us feel exasperated by the optimism of others. Such optimism relies on the logic of the old systems; a belief that everything is going to be OK. With so much knowledge readily available, optimism has melded with denial. To not know what’s going on is to be as obtuse as the neighbor in Haddonfield who plods onto his lawn in a bathrobe after another of Michael’s attacks, and asks “is this some kind of Halloween prank?” 

We know that the evil thing is among us — indeed, it is because of us — but it’s not specifically me or you, right? Another kind of denial crops up. Recycling and avoiding single-use plastics are all suggested as nice ways to help the planet, but, someone will inevitably point out, they mean nothing without a similar commitment from the massive corporations doing the most environmental damage. Protesting and voting are crucial, but, another person will counter, are not enough on their own to combat the for-profit carceral system or the now-embedded systems of policing, housing policy, political redlining and education inequity that have branched out to form a web of all-encompassing, inextinguishable terror. 

Our problem is not with vision, it is with responsibility. We know more than we might have ever wanted to know. We are facing something shapeless and all-containing, something masked and yet standing right there in the open, something raised in our own backyard. We are asking: What next?

By the franchise’s fifth and sixth installments, Dr. Loomis is driven to a form of madness. He has no patience for the nonbelievers, he yells at children, he marches onward toward an obvious fate. 

Michael tosses the old man through a door and he survives only to suffer a stroke. The Doctor should die in this film. He doesn’t. Over time, Loomis, in his relentlessness and physical invincibility, bears more and more resemblance to the evil he intends to defeat. He is driven to great, almost inhuman lengths by his obsession. 

Loomis: “In many ways he was the ideal patient, he didn’t talk, he didn’t cry, he didn’t even move. The staff was unprepared. They didn’t know what he was.”

Police officer: “Did you know?”

Loomis: “Yes. I knew.”

For new generations of Halloween fans, there is familiarity in the Doctor’s arc. He is as hopeless as we feel, as determined as we know we should be. He carries the dual burden of responsibility and knowledge, and the shame that comes from knowing he is complicit. We may understand the desire to go limp in the face of terror. We may understand that Loomis is doomed: If you wrestle the beast all your life, the beast will inevitably destroy you. We may understand that this is no reason to back down.

CREDITS:

Thanks to Nicholas Gambini for editing and feedback, Brian Eggert of Deep Focus Review for offering insight, and Donald Pleasance for taking a chance on a film beneath his paygrade. RIP.