“A Namelessness Wheeling in the Night”

In Cormac McCarthy’s fictional world, there are many characters that can only be described as evil. Moreover, the origin of the evil that runs through most of McCarthy’s fiction is complex and problematic to determine. In her 1985 New York Times review of Blood Meridian, Caryn James is persuasive in her description of McCarthy’s oeuvre when she writes that he “has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality.” Whether it is the gang in Outer Dark, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, or Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, characters are created that symbolize undying and incomprehensible evil. The fact that they appear in human form makes them that much more terrifying and mysterious. The existence of this incomprehensible evil is one of the many reasons why McCarthy’s fiction continues to frighten, thrill, and fascinate us. In order to probe this notion further, this essay compares Judge Holden in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and the character Michael Myers/ The Shape in John Carpenter’s horror classic Halloween (1978). ¹ To some it might seem ludicrous to treat a low budget horror film in the same context as a literary masterpiece. Even if the original premise of Halloween was to make a “killer-stalking-babysitters” horror film, the craft of director John Carpenter in depicting evil embodied in Myers/The Shape creates an enigmatic piece of cinema that has endured for over thirty years, and that continues—just as Blood Meridian does—to shock and mystify its audience. In the context of McCarthy’s impulse toward horror, and especially in his depiction of the Judge, I believe the comparison is productive and posits yet another intertext for McCarthy’s work.