The Night(s) He Came Home
The complicated history of Michael Myers
Warning: there will be spoilers for every Halloween movie featuring Michael Myers throughout this piece.
Michael Myers. The Shape. The Boogeyman. He’s the star of the Halloween film franchise and the unofficial mascot for the holiday. He’s the original masked slasher, and he has inspired numerous copycats and imitators for decades. He is also paradoxically the simplest and most complicated horror villain to grace cinema screens.
I know what you’re thinking, “How could a silent guy in a mask who goes around killing babysitters be complicated?” Well he certainly didn’t start off that way. The original Halloween is a master class in simplicity. A six-year-old child named Michael Myers stabs his sister to death on Halloween night for no apparent reason. He spends the next fifteen years in a mental hospital until escaping the night before Halloween to return to his hometown, don a mask, and silently stalk and kill babysitters on Halloween night with no apparent motive other than the one provided by his psychiatrist: he’s just pure evil. By having the villain be an entirely silent killer with a blank white mask to hide any emotion, John Carpenter and Debra Hill created a monster that audiences could project their own fears onto like a canvass. Combine that with the fact that this monster comes to you to violate the safety of your own home, and you have yourself the perfect Boogeyman. Michael also continually survives wounds that would kill most men which gives him just a tinge of supernatural invulnerability. How can you possibly stay safe from an unkillable serial killer with no discernible motive who invades the homes of people at random?
That sense of mystery took a bit of a hit in the sequel three years later. In Halloween II, it is revealed that Michael Myers is fixated on Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) because she is his secret younger sister, and anyone else who he kills is just unlucky enough to be around her or in his path. Suddenly it isn’t a situation where Michael Myers could sneak into your home at any moment. You’ll be fine as long as you stay away from the Myers family. Michael also becomes a little less human in the sequel. There’s a moment in Halloween II where Michael walks through a glass door as it shatters around him instead of just opening it. It makes him feel more like a robot than a lunatic in a mask. Despite these changes, he still wears the original mask (a painted over William Shatner mask) and sticks to silently stalking his unsuspecting victims.
After taking a short vacation from the series in the third film, Michael Myers returns in the appropriately titled Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers a decade after the original film debuted. In this installment, we learn that Laurie Strode has died offscreen in a car accident (not the best way to write the greatest scream queen out of the movie). Before that, she managed to have a daughter named Jamie Lloyd who has been adopted by an unsuspecting family. Despite being shot in both eyes and set ablaze at the end of Halloween II, Michael Myers somehow survived and has been in a coma ever since. But wouldn’t you know it, he manages to regain consciousness and escape just in time for Halloween. This Michael Myers is significantly bigger and stronger than previous iterations (he even has shoulder pads on under his coveralls), and the mask from the previous two films has been replaced by a much cheaper (and sillier) one. He is consumed with the desire to hunt down and murder his niece because Michael apparently is now driven by the hatred of any blood relatives. He is ultimately defeated by a an angry mob that sprays him with bullets before falling down a mineshaft where he totally died and surely won’t come back despite not seeing a body. The film ends with his niece seemingly becoming his heir to the serial killer business. This is in no way followed up on in the subsequent films.
Despite the addition of a familial motive added in the previous two outings, Michael Myers was still a pretty simple and scary slasher. That was about to take a drastic turn in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Released a year after the previous entry, Halloween 5 makes some drastic changes to the Michael Myers legacy. He now shares a psychic link with his niece who can see when he is about to kill. He’s also now wearing a totally different mask than the previous film with no explanation whatsoever as to why. The psychic link angle is pretty rough, but it’s not as baffling as the second addition to the Myers lore. Myers is ultimately arrested and put in jail at the end of the film only for a man dressed all in black with a matching runic tattoo to show up and break him out. If this sounds rushed and confusing, that’s because the filmmakers added this subplot in the middle of filming at the urging of the producers without an idea in mind as to what it all meant. The idea was just to create a hook for a sequel that subsequent filmmakers could use as they pleased. So now Michael Myers has gone from a silent serial killer who stalks and kills at random to a lunatic hellbent on killing his relatives possibly with a connection to something supernatural or occult. Don’t worry. It’s about to get worse.
It would be six years before the next installment in the Halloween film franchise (due mostly to the poor box office showing of the previous film with only $11.6M). Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers fully embraced the direction established at the end of the previous film. In this entry, we learn that the mysterious man in black is the leader of a Druidic cult that keeps its power through the Curse of Thorn. It works by the cult leader placing the curse on a child that forces him to kill his entire family as a blood sacrifice to fuel the cult’s power. The curse also makes the child able to withstand injuries that would kill a normal person. Once the entire bloodline has been killed off, the cult places the curse onto the next unsuspecting child and the cycle continues. Michael Myers is a victim of this cult, and the man in black is actually one of the psychiatrists at the mental ward he had been kept as a child. Also, Michael apparently impregnated his niece at some point between the previous movie and this one. Gross. Needless to say, the simplicity of the original Halloween had mutated into a convoluted mess by this point. Both fans and critics were beginning to skewer and abandon the franchise. The solution to this problem? Reboot time!
After things had gone fully off the rails by the end of what had become known as the “Thorn Trilogy” by fans, the stewards of the Halloween franchise decided to take things back to basics. This was done by bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back to the franchise and pretending that the last three films never happened. This new film created a new timeline that diverged following Halloween II. Instead of Laurie Strode dying offscreen and having a daughter, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later established that she faked her death following Halloween II and moved to California with her son. There she became a teacher at a private school and created a new life for herself. Unfortunately for her, Michael Myers decided to wait exactly twenty years to re-emerge and track down his estranged sister. This version of Michael is more in line with how he was portrayed in Halloween II. He’s slimmer in build and more human than supernatural. The film also suffers from a case of near terminal Scream poisoning (i.e. it has a too-cool-for-school veneer and a cringe inducing ‘90s soundtrack). For all its flaws, it does succeed in getting rid of the unnecessarily complicated cult and psychic link subplots from the previous two films.
All of the goodwill from Halloween H20 was quickly wasted four years later with Halloween: Resurrection. It opens with Michael Myers killing Laurie Strode and then picking off dumb twenty somethings on a reality television show before fighting Busta Rhymes. The less said about it the better. It was a critical and commercial failure that killed the franchise. All of the mystique surrounding Michael Myers was officially gone. Another branching timeline wouldn’t be enough this time. Now there would be a full blown remake.
With the franchise dead and buried following Halloween: Resurrection, Rob Zombie was brought in to do a complete remake and reboot. Zombie took a completely different approach to the character. Instead of leaning into the mystery and mystique of Michael Myers, Rob Zombie decided to explore his childhood in great detail. Zombie crafted a story that painted Myers as a sympathetic character who was in an abusive and dysfunctional family environment as a child. This is what pushed him into the life of a serial killer. This version of Michael Myers the is sympathetic, completely human (nothing supernatural), and almost impossibly large (played by the 6’9” 295 lbs Tyler Mane). While I appreciate the movie for what it is, it has always felt to me like Rob Zombie wanted to make a Jason Vorhees movie and just projected that onto Michael Myers. Humanizing the Shape just strips him of what makes him scary.
Rob Zombie’s second Halloween film really goes off the rails. Michael Myers has his face at least partially exposed throughout the film, and he is plagued by visions of his dead mother. Virtually nothing about this version of Michael Myers resembles the original iteration. This version is just a tragic mentally ill man with an obsession with his equally tragic mentally ill sister. It’s hardly a realistic or tasteful portrayal of mental illness, and none of it feels like a Halloween movie. Both fans and critics seemed to agree as it was widely panned and underperformed at the box office. Once again the Halloween franchise appeared dead, and this time it seemed like it might stay that way.
Nine years after Rob Zombie’s Halloween II seemingly killed off the franchise for good, Blumhouse put out a brand new Halloween film from David Gordon Green and Danny McBride. This time the filmmakers decided to go back to basics and make their film a direct sequel to the original Halloween from 1978. This latest divergent timeline does away with the sibling connection between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and returns the Shape to being an enigmatic serial killer with no discernible motive. It also brings back the (aged) mask from the original film. It succeeds in making Michael Myers scary again by returning him to his roots and simplifying him once more. It also was a critical and financial success to a level not reached since the original in 1978 (it finished with a massive box office haul of $255.6M). On a personal note, it is my favorite entry in the franchise since the original.
Halloween Kills is a direct sequel to Halloween (2018), and it further drives the point home that Michael Myers is a killer whose motive no one understands. While Laurie is convinced that she is the Shape’s target, the movie makes it clear that he has no interest in her or her family beyond wanting to murder anyone in his general vicinity. While the previous film in the series definitely portrays Myers as just a man, Halloween Kills more fully embraces the idea that he is something more than just a man. He bounces back from what should be mortal wounds much the same way as he does at the end of the original Halloween. There is a third and final film planned for release in 2022 to wrap up the arc in this current timeline called Halloween Ends.
For those keeping track at home, we now have the original timeline of 1978-1981-1988-1989-1995, a rebooted divergent timeline of 1978-1981-1998-2002, a remake timeline of 2007-2009, and now a third divergent timeline of 1978-2018-2021-2022. X-Men continuity is less complicated than Michael Myers continuity at this point, and I didn’t even include Halloween III: Season of the Witch that doesn’t feature Michael Myers at all (and yet is referenced in each of the last two Halloween movies). It seems almost impossible that a movie about a guy in a mask who kills babysitters and cost $300,000 to make could have spawned a franchise so convoluted. I’ll be interested to see what comes next, but the only certainty is that Michael Myers isn’t going away anytime soon.
Fantastic write up, Josh. It can get a little hard to get a comprehensive look at this franchise with all its different timelines, reboots, spin-offs and remakes.
2018 is my favorite after the original too. Such a shame after all was said and done that Halloween Ends would end up on the lower point of the Michael Myers spectrum instead of another high.
Still, there's plenty of fun to be had with this franchise, even the sillier ones (not Resurrection though).