Narrative Theories on Halloween and The Crazies

Classical Hollywood Narratives –
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian structural linguist and he came up with the idea of the Classical Hollywood Narrative. This term, abbrieviated as ‘CHN’, is a way of describing the structure of a narrative in a film or story and this is conventional to a high number of films narrative structures. It works by two opposing forces being in balance or equilibrium, but then an event causes disruption of the balance which then triggers a chain of events and problems that needed to be sorted in order to create a new equilibrium again, which means a new balance to the world in which the narrative is set. The CHN is useful because from looking at just the stat of the film and how the narrative plays out you can predict or tell whether or not the film is going to follow the CHN and then you can guess whether the film will have a happy ending or not and if the main characters will survive. This allows film makers and media analysts to place the audience where they want them and to incorporate stereotypes and conventions that gratify the audience more easily. Halloween follows the CHN as they the evil towards the end of the film. However, there is no new equilibrium as his body was not found so a new balance couldn’t be restored. The Crazies doesn’t follow the CHN because the first scene in the film is of the town destroyed, meaning that the film starts off with a disequilibrium and is therefore unconventional and does not fit the category of the CHN.
Propp’s Characters in relation to Halloween and The Crazies –
 Vladimir Propp was a Russian critic who examined 100’s of folk tales to see if the character types shared structure. He narrowed it down to 8 character types which are:
The Villain
The Hero
The Donor
The Princess
Her Father
The Donor
The dispatcher
The false hero
Understanding character roles and applying them to narrative in films is key because it allows us to understand what roles the characters will fulfil and what conventions and stereotypes they must then conform to. This helps us to understand a bigger picture of the film itself. In Halloween, the villain applies to Mike Myers, The hero is Laurie and The helper is Myer’s Doctor. In the Crazies, the villain is the government, the hero is David, The princess is Judy, the false hero is the military and the donor is deputy russel.
Claude Levi-Strauss and binary opposition –
Claude Levi Strauss looked at narrative structure and how it has binary opposites. Binary opposites are sets of contrasting opposite values in a narrative that represent different things. For example, good and bad. Binary opposition is important and useful to analysing and understanding media texts because it allows to dig deeper and find the arrangement of themes and contrasting values that different types of characters try to represent, this allows us to see what different characters stand for and what the narrative gives an ideology of what they represent in the plot. In Halloween there
are many binary oppositions, these include: Good and Evil, Innocence and Adultery, Mortal and Immortal, Aware and Unaware and finally powerless and dominance.
Bordwell and Thompson – 
Bordwell and Thompson said ‘a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occurring in time and space’. This means that events happen within the time and space of the run time of the film but which do not occur on the screen that we see, but we know that they still occur in the film because of the cause effect relationship these then have and cause in the future. This is useful because with the right narrative and dialogue the audience can visualise entire sequences that are happening off screen but have not happened on the screen. This is a very useful movie making method that allows for extra narrative and story to be crammed into the film and have certain events happen in the frame that could not have happened without a particulare cause in a differnet time and space. This is useful for understanding media texts also because it allws us to understand a narrative in a more detailed manor and to analyse how the screenwriter have created the particular story for the film.
For example, 2 events in the crazies that caused another event to happen were when deputy russel sacrifices himself allowing Judy and David to get out of the town and continued the narrative trying to escape. Secondly, when Judy visited the nursery of her unborn child which then causes David to get his hand stabbed whilst trying to save her from the Crazies that were present.
There were also events in the film that we knew that happened but didn’t see. Examples of these would be when the plane crashed and contaminated the water flowing into the town, we know this had happened because there are shots of the plane in the lake. Secondly, when Judy gets her blood tested, it is not seen but we know it happened as she mentioned it in the dialogue.