I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face,
and the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes.
﻿Hi, I’m Moose,
and I’ve always been intrigued by what makes movie slashers tick.
We all know that Jason is out for revenge on the camp counselors who let him drown,
and chopped his mother’s head off with a machete.
Freddy is feasting on fear to keep his legend alive,
and Chucky just wants a new body that doesn’t need batteries.
But when it comes to Michael Myers,
the O.G. slasher icon has always been an international man of mystery.
Today, we’ll attempt to answer the question that has plagued horror fans,
Haddonfield residents,
and creepy psychologists since 1978:
Why Does Michael Myers Kill?
John Carpenter’s game-changing first film gives basically zero explanation for the Shape’s rampage,
but after the night HE came home,
subsequent sequels would try to pin a motive on the mindless mass murderer,
and the best they could do was
The Curse of Thorn
After Michael’s death in the first sequel,
‘Halloween 3’ took the series in a drastic new direction.
Instead of focusing on a single serial killer,
the producers envisioned ‘Halloween’ as an anthology series featuring unrelated stories centering around everyone’s favorite night of the year.
Why, Cochrane? Why?
Do I need a reason?
The Celtic festival called Samhain first appeared on screen as a mysterious message from Michael in ‘Halloween 2,’
but ‘Season of the Witch’ played on the holiday’s ancient origins as the backdrop for a story about mystical masks, human sacrifice,
and the power of Stonehenge.
Stonehenge! Where a man is a man, and the children dance to the pipes of Pan!
‘Halloween 3’ wasn’t what what the audience was looking for,
but when Michael Myers returned in the next film,
his inevitable origin was inspired by the same pagan ritual.
‘Halloweens’ 4, 5, and 6 form a loose trilogy,
where Michael is on the hunt for his cousin Jamie,
with some help from a mysterious Man in Black helping him from the shadows.
That would be Doctor Terence Wynn,
the administrator of Smith’s Grove Sanitarium,
who’s been orchestrating Michael’s killing spree since the very beginning,
enlisting an evil babysitter to fill his head with cultist thoughts,
and orchestrating his escape in the beginning of ‘Halloween 1,’
which finally answers the age-old question of “how can Michael Myers drive a car?”
For God's sake, he can't even drive a car!
He was doing very well last night! Maybe someone around here gave him lessons!
In Part 6, we learn that Wynn is the leader of the Cult of Thorn,
and that Michael’s strength, invulnerability, and madness comes from an ancient curse.
Legend has it that, in olden times, the stars would select one child in a village,
and mark them with Thorn.
They were granted supernatural powers,
and compelled to sacrifice their family Halloween night,
to stave off disasters and ensure the next year’s harvest.
Now depending on which version of ‘Halloween 6’ you’re watching,
the cult is either trying to pass on the curse to another innocent host,
Michael. Your final sacrifice.
or studying Michael’s DNA to create a race of evil genetically engineered supermen.
I thought Michael was a monster. But you-- Oh!
Either way, it’s all just kind of a mess.
I appreciate trying to tie Michael more closely to the titular holiday,
but making him the centerpiece of a cult conspiracy kinda takes away from the terror of his random rampage.
The Thorn trilogy would be retconned out of existence by ‘Halloween: H20,’
which made use of a much more simple motive introduced in the second film:
the Meyers
Family Ties
John Carpenter refused to direct ‘Halloween II,’
saying “I already made that film once, and really didn’t want to do it again.”
But he still wrote the script with his partner Debra Hill,
and introduced a twist that would have major ramifications on Halloween lore for decades to come.
Taking place the same night as the first film,
Michael Myers pursues Laurie Strode to the hospital where she’s taken to recuperate.
Meanwhile, Loomis is doing some sleuthing and discovers that Laurie is actually Michael’s biological sister,
who was adopted and shrouded in secrecy for her safety.
This is a pretty big retcon,
but it actually fits with the first movie pretty well.
After all, Michael’s first victim was his sister Judith,
so it makes a twisted kind of sense that he’s got some deep-seated issues with his sisters,
but Laurie’s connection to Michael was nowhere to be found in the original,
at least, not in the theatrical version.
During production of ‘Halloween II,’
the producers actually shot some extra scenes for the TV version of the first movie, that took place during the prequel,
Including one where we see that Michael scratched the word ‘Sister’ into his cell at Smith’s grove.
Pretty sneaky, sis.
Michael’s family fixation continued after Laurie’s offscreen death,
as he developed a psychic bond with his cousin Jamie, who he targeted and eventually impregnated.
Incestuous fatherhood is a pretty good way to kill Michael’s mystique,
so ‘H:20’ ignored movies 4 through 6,
but they retained Laurie’s role as Michael’s baby sister.
My brother killed my sister. When she was seventeen.
Well, that's sucky. How'd he do that?
With a really big, sharp, kitchen knife.
‘Halloween’ 2018 is the first to remove that retcon,
and return the series to Carpenter and Hill’s original vision,
but before we get there,
we should at least touch on the Rob Zombie reboot,
which showed us all the dirty details of Michael’s
Troubled Youth
Originally, Michael Myers was a perfectly well-behaved little boy,
until one night he murdered his sister out of the blue and spent his adolescent years in a sanitarium.
But according to Zombie’s ‘Halloween,’
Michael began exhibiting the telltale behaviors of a sociopath at an extremely early age.
Mainly, killing a bunch of cute little innocent animals.
We also learn that the Boogeyman was shaped by trauma and abuse at the hands of his scumbag stepfather,
and Judith, who spends most of her screentime berating her little bro.
So when he finally snaps on Halloween,
it’s not a random occurrence,
but a deeply disturbed kid lashing out at bullies.
The only people Michael has any sort of bond with are his mother and his baby sister Boo,
who would later grow up to be Laurie Strode,
and instead of trying to kill her,
he just wants to be friends.
It’s a clear, but fairly pedestrian motivation for Michael Myers,
and I was never really a fan.
It removes the horrific randomness of his first kill,
and paints the slasher as sympathetic, sweet,
and other qualities you don’t typically associate with the embodiment of evil.
I don’t mind peeking into Michael’s psyche,
but fleshing him out too much kills some of the fear.
That’s why I’m glad the new movie is cutting the extraneous noise,
and returning to Michael’s original motive,
the scariest one of all:
Michael Myers kills for
No Reason
The script for ‘Halloween’ only refers to Michael as the Shape,
and doesn’t offer any insight into Michael’s upbringing,
his insanity,
or his motives.
That’s because they didn’t exist.
As originally envisioned, Michael Myers killed because he was pure, unstoppable evil.
Evil! EEEVILLL!
He’s a supernatural force of nature,
Unkillable and unknowable.
Carpenter and Hill didn’t have a deep backstory they were dying to tell,
they didn’t have an epic nine-part saga in mind,
they just wanted to scare the crap out of you
Michael isn’t an abused child, a brainwashed assassin, or a fratricidal maniac,
he’s the boogeyman,
and asking why kills is like asking a tornado or a tidal wave why they do what they do.
Was it the boogeyman?
As a matter of fact, it was.
There’s no reasoning, no logic,
just death, destruction,
and a search for answers that don’t exist.
Hey Lonnie, get your butt away from there!
Locking Michael to an ironclad motivation limits the stories you can tell with him,
you’re always going to have to pull out a new distant relative,
or keep piling on the cult stuff until we’re barely in a slasher movie anymore.
But if there’s nothing behind the wheel but evil,
you can drop the Shape in any plot you like,
whether it’s butchering babysitters,
or chopping up a bunch of jerks who turned your childhood home into a reality show.
Let the danger-tainment begin!
It might be a cop out to say that ‘Michael kills because he’s evil,’
but considering the alternatives,
that stark simplicity is what makes him so effective.
Would Jaws be more frightening if we found out he had a personal grudge against the Brodys?
Did learning that Jason’s spirit could possess anyone who ate his heart make him any scarier?
Or were they at their best, and more terrifying,
when all that came to mind when we saw these monsters was “run?”
When it comes to horror,
the less we know, the better,
and when it comes to Michael Myers,
well, it turns out Doctor Loomis had him pretty much figured out 40 years ago.
I spent eight years trying to reach him, then another seven trying to keep him locked up,
because I realized that was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil.