Donnie Darko Is a Halloween Movie

On October 2, I turned on Donnie Darko for the first time in quite a while, and I had one of those moments where you suddenly notice something about a movie you have watched before but somehow never really considered. I realized ironically the day I watched the movie was actually she same day the movie begins.. October 2, 1988, with a culmination on October 31..

Obviously, Donnie Darko is a lot of things. It’s science fiction. It’s psychological. It’s a mystery. It’s a time-travel movie, depending on how you interpret it. It’s a movie about alternate realities, fate, death, adolescence, mental illness, God, free will and probably another dozen things people have been arguing about since the movie came out in 2001.

But it’s also very explicitly an October movie. So for that reason, Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie..

The story begins in early October 1988. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. That countdown takes us through October and directly toward Halloween. And when everything finally comes together, it happens on Halloween night.

There’s a Halloween party and there are people walking around in costumes. There are dark streets and autumn leaves. All that visual… And, of course, there is Frank.

Frank is a giant rabbit, which admittedly should make him sound more like something that belongs at Easter. except nobody has ever looked at Frank and thought that guy should be delivering Cadbury eggs.

He’s basically the anti-Easter Bunny.

But when you really consider the time frame of the movie, Frank makes even more sense as a Halloween figure. He’s a man in a grotesque rabbit costume who appears out of the darkness and tells Donnie that the world is going to end. He’s frightening, mysterious and somehow exists in this strange place between the living and the dead.

There’s an old idea associated with Halloween that this is the time of year when the veil becomes thin when the boundary between our world and whatever might exist beyond it isn’t quite as solid as it normally is.

Well, the veil is definitely thin in Donnie Darko. Except Richard Kelly takes that old supernatural idea and essentially gives it a science-fiction vocabulary. Instead of simply having ghosts crossing from the world of the dead into the world of the living, Donnie Darko gives us the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe. Reality itself has fractured and two things that aren’t supposed to exist together suddenly do. Time becomes unstable while the living and the dead don’t necessarily stay in their proper places..

Donnie Darko also feels like fall.

You can sense it in the bones and roots of the film with fallen leaves and gray skies. The suburban streets and school hallways add to that mix. There is a melancholy running underneath everything that feels like that particular stretch of autumn when summer is definitely gone but winter hasn’t arrived yet.

Even the school scenes feel like October.

And that brings me to something else often almost forgotten about this movie: just how beautifully made its opening sequences are.

In the original theatrical version, Donnie wakes up inexplicably on a mountain and eventually rides his bicycle home while “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen plays.. Donnie wakes up somewhere he shouldn’t be, looks around, smiles, gets on his bicycle and rides home. We don’t know what’s happening yet, but already it feels like we’re somewhere between a dream and reality.

“Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears begins playing. The camera moves through the school, and within the length of essentially one song, Donnie Darko introduces us to an entire little universe of people. The continuous school sequence really does use “Head Over Heels” as we move among Donnie’s classmates, teachers and the different social groups inhabiting the school.

Within just two minutes, we don’t need long introductions to learn who our lead characters are.. this musical moment brings us a visual version of their collective stories without any dialogue to interrupt it..

There are movies that spend twenty minutes introducing their characters. Donnie Darko somehow introduces an entire world in the length of a Tears for Fears song.

The movie basically tells us: Just watch these people. You’ll understand.

“Head Over Heels” isn’t a Halloween song and it isn’t even really an autumn song. Yet somehow, when we hear it in Donnie Darko, it feels like October and the song kind of stayed a honorary tune of this time of year since being in the movie..

Halloween is about masks, and almost everyone in Donnie Darko is wearing one even before anybody puts on a costume.

Jim Cunningham presents himself as a wholesome motivational speaker preaching about fear and love while hiding something horrific. Kitty Farmer presents her worldview with absolute moral certainty. The school itself appears orderly while underneath that order are frightened, confused, angry, lonely kids trying to understand themselves and each other. Donnie’s neighborhood looks like an ordinary, comfortable American suburb while the universe itself is quietly coming apart.

Then Halloween arrives and everybody finally puts on actual masks.

A part of the reason we don’t normally put Donnie Darko alongside Halloween movies is because we’ve spent the last 25 years trying to figure out what the hell Donnie Darko actually means.

People have debated Frank… debated whether Donnie understands what’s happening to him. and everything else including Frank.. The Director’s Cut even brought The Philosophy of Time Travel material more directly into the movie, explaining concepts such as the Tangent Universe, the Artifact, the Living Receiver and the Manipulated Dead, although Kelly himself described those pages as something to be interpreted rather than simply treated as unquestionable canon.

We’ve spent so much time trying to solve this movie that we’ve overlooked something sitting right there on the calendar.

It’s October.

It’s Halloween, and a Halloween movie doesn’t necessarily need Michael Myers, witches, or trick-or-treaters ..

Donnie Darko understands that peculiar feeling that there might be certain nights when ordinary reality isn’t quite as solid as we think it is when the veil gets thin.

Or, in this case, when the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe collide.

SO THAT’S THE ARGUMENT.. underneath all of it is an October story and really a melancholy autumn story about masks, death, fate, strange things appearing in the darkness and a world in which the boundary between realities has suddenly become dangerously thin.

Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie.

And maybe Frank isn’t the Easter Bunny after all. Maybe he’s been a Halloween rabbit the entire time.