The Tragedy of Loomis the Prophet in John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’
He warned everyone. He told them for years what was going to happen. Nobody listened. When it finally started, he knew exactly what was kind of horror was about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting town of Haddonfield and tried his best to stop it knowing he was already too late. And he was. Dr. Sam Loomis did everything in his power to try to warn the local authorities about the danger lurking in their town, he did everything he could to stop Michael Myers. He knew it would not be enough and it wasn’t. When Loomis says that he warned the staff at Smith’s Grove about Michael and the threat he represented, it is easy to believe, because talking to people about this looming evil is all he does throughout the film. By the time we are introduced to Loomis, we are meeting a man past the end of his rope. He has been at this for years with no result and finally, it has happened.
Loomis’ iconic monologue reveals a great deal about his character. In this scene, returning to Michael’s childhood home, the scene of the original crime, he talks about meeting a boy with a “blank, pale, emotionless face” who was “purely and simply evil.” But there’s something else interesting in this monologue that paints a portrait of his character, of a vulnerability and even a professionalism that is long gone by the time we meet him. Loomis remarks that he spent seven years trying to reach Michael as his therapist before truly understanding the depths of what the boy actually was. That, to me, is so important. He tried to reach the kid, he tried for years, he tried to treat him as a patient, himself as the boy’s doctor. Eventually, he realized that what he was dealing with was not only beyond a seemingly catatonic state, it wasn’t psychology at all.
To understand Loomis and his frustrations, you really have to understand exactly what he was asking people to believe. A boy who killed his sister and then did nothing but sit and stare at a wall is actually more than human, is evil incarnate, a thing beyond understanding, an explicitly supernatural presence. Of course people didn’t believe him. It’s a wonder he was even able to keep his job. It would make him a very problematic doctor and many have said that he is.
People still bafflingly suggest that Michael is only evil because all Loomis ever talks about is how evil he is, and that’s a terrible standpoint for the boy’s doctor to take. That not only ignores all of the years he didn’t do that, but more than anything, ignores that Loomis is not simply saying Michael Myers is a dangerous patient, he is literally saying that he is a force of genuine inhuman evil, and the entire end of the movie hinges on the fact that he is right.
He knows he’s right. But at the same time, he cannot expect anyone to believe him, because it’s like asking people to believe in vampires or werewolves. They’re simply never going to do it until it’s too late, and sometimes not even then. That’s the tragedy of Loomis. Halloween is a realistic story with Michael Myers, The Shape, as its one supernatural element and that itself only becomes explicit toward the end. Realistically, no one is going to enact policy based on Loomis’ ramblings that the boogeyman is in their midst, especially without evidence. By the time we meet him in this story, he’s not really Michael’s doctor and hasn’t been for years. He’s his warden, to some degree even his caretaker, keeping an eye on the boy because only the two of them know what Michael actually is.
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the King and Queen of Troy, her brother having been a hero in the Trojan War. She caught the eye of the god Apollo, who sought to win her love by giving her the gift of sight, allowing her to see the future, and she foresees the fall of Troy. When she rejected Apollo’s advances, given that the god could not revoke a divine gift, he paired it with a curse: no one would ever believe her prophecies. In some versions of the story, she at first accepts Apollo’s hand, but goes back on her word. In later versions, her prophecies are brought on by snakes whispering in her ear as she sleeps.
However the prophecy came to her, Cassandra’s vision comes to pass and her gift is a curse. Before it happened, Cassandra saw that the arrival of Helen would spark the destruction of Troy. She warned that if Paris went to Sparta, returned with Helen and made her his wife, Troy would be doomed. Despite her warnings, Paris did go to Sparta and he did return with Helen as his wife. The people rejoiced. Cassandra, angry and distraught, resorted to violence, tearing Helen’s har and taking her golden veil. In Virgil’s epic poem The Aenid, Cassandra even warned people about the Trojan Horse, another thing that would obviously come to pass. Both things are hard to believe. How can one woman bring about the end of an entire civilization? Why would a gift of a giant horse, of all things, contain bloodthirsty soldiers? Cassandra is cursed in the classical sense. Nobody believes her, and she is forced to do nothing but watch helplessly as everything she has feared and warned comes to pass.
Stories are cyclical. We are always writing about the same things, the same human experiences. Fears and hopes change with each age, on the surface, but the basics of love, power, anxiety, and terror are by and large the same as they ever were. As many new and unique stories are being told all of the time, the echoes of the past are always felt. With that in mind, Loomis is Cassandra. He sees the end of Haddonfield, he sees a quaint small town about to be butchered, its reputation changed forever. Immediately, he goes to the people in authority. For Helen, it was Paris, for Loomis it is Sheriff Brackett. As with Helen, Brackett doesn’t believe a word of what Loomis is saying. Here it is even more frustrating because Loomis comes to him with at least some tangible proof. Michael Myers did escape from the sanitarium, that is an absolute fact. Of course he would be headed back to his home town.
For the second half of the film, Loomis and Brackett are a team. Or at least they could be, if Brackett would listen. Loomis spends all of their time together trying to make Brackett understand, to at least hear him. He gives Brackett the “blackest eyes, the devil’s eyes” speech and still it does nothing. Unlike Cassandra, Loomis doesn’t have specifics to his foresight, so he doesn’t know exactly where Michael will be and wrongly assumes he will be destined to return home, so he plants himself there while Michael seeks new victims throughout the neighborhood. When they split up, Loomis tasks Brackett with patrolling the streets, driving up and down the neighborhood in hopes of catching a glimpse of The Shape. That also means that when Loomis finally confronts Michael, he doesn’t even have Brackett with him, to finally prove that he’s right after trying to get through to the sheriff throughout the whole movie. Brackett never comes face-to-face with Michael even once.
While certainly more extreme, Loomis’ confrontation with Michael at the end of the film is similar to Cassandra’s assault on Helen. She tried talking to authority, she tried going through the proper channels, just as Loomis had done for years. Loomis attempting to kill Michael is an absolute last resort, even if he has no sympathy for his “patient.” He wanted the staff to listen to him, they didn’t. He wanted the police to listen to him, they didn’t. It was the same for Cassandra.
When all of those avenues fail, the only thing left is confrontation. In Loomis’ case, it’s a little more extreme than hair pulling. He shoots Michael six times and watches him fall backward off of the second story balcony of the Doyle house. He looks down at the lawn to see that Michael’s body has disappeared. He has managed to save Laurie Strode, so there is a sense of victory in that. But Michael is still out there, and so the town is no safer from Michael at the end than it would have been if Loomis had never shown up at all.
Even when the proper channels fail, even when they fail to convince authority, both Cassandra and Loomis resort to physical confrontation and even then, it does nothing. Troy still falls, just as Cassandra foresaw. Loomis shoots Michael six times, but he does not stop him. There is nothing he can do to stop what he knows is coming, not even when he abandons all reason to face his monster one-on-one. His willingness to try, despite that, especially throughout the franchise, is admirable. But it is also futile. Just like Cassandra before him, there is nothing Loomis can do but watch it happen. In that respect, he is a truly tragic figure in the classical tradition.
