Michael Myers is one of the only slasher villains who struck gold in the first movie, where our entire memory of the character and the traits we associate with him were born out of that first movie. Even when the sequels grew sillier, got convoluted and filled in a backstory, we all collectively agreed that Michael Myers is simply a faceless killer who aimlessly wanders around a suburban town and kills, not because he has any particular motivation, but because that is just who he is. With Jason Voorhees, our memory of the character comes from the later Friday the 13th sequels, starting with part four. With Freddy, our memory of him starts with three. But with Michael, they struck gold the first time out of the gate, and every successive appearance failed to live up to our expectations of what Michael Myers should be, which has forced a collective audience to overthink and intellectualize why he worked in the original, while in the others Michael just didn’t feel the same.
This intellectualization of Michael Myers in Carpenter’s Halloween has been used to help explain what makes him scary, this idea that he is simply the embodiment of evil. There is no backstory given, and Dr. Loomis is used as a tool to mythologize the evil of this central antagonist who kills because that’s who he is. And of course, the way we’ve intellectualized the character has been used to discredit the sequels, when it was revealed that Michael is Laurie’s sister and he returns to Haddonfield so he can finish the job. The audience scapegoated Michael’s backstory as the reason for the edge being taken off of the character. Those sequels aren’t scary because they’ve reduced Michael’s essence down to something that feels a little more tangible, and less unexplainable. In reality however, the sequels aren’t as scary because they weren’t directed by a master craftsman like John Carpenter. Michael isn’t as scary because the more we see of him, the more familiar he becomes.
In the first Halloween, Michael Myers feels like a ghost, and Carpenter uses him as this evil spirit haunting this suburban town. His lack of a backstory isn’t what makes him scary. What makes him scary is seeing him appear from the shadows, as if materializing out of thin air, as Laurie stands in a doorway thinking she’s escaped. What makes him scary is seeing the way he haunts a kitchen, before striking the victim. What makes Michael Myers scary is the simplicity in Carpenter’s vision. Carpenter’s movie is a minimalist masterpiece that takes a simple premise and builds a terrifying story of survival on top of it. Michael Myers doesn’t have a backstory because if we gave him one, the pacing would be thrown off and we would need to sit in exposition which would deflate the film of its tension. The focus needs to be on setting up the characters so we care about them enough for when they start being picked off, Carpenter can wring tension and sadness out of their deaths.
Rob Zombie’s movies, on the other hand, are not minimalist or simple. In fact, they barely feel like slashers at all. They feel haunted, dripping with despair and choked with tragedy, about the architecture of violence and the echoes of trauma that is left in the wake of death. Carpenter’s movie begins with Michael as a child killing his sister, while we watch the murder through his eyes, and then jumps to 15 years later, where Michael breaks out of a mental institution and goes on his killing spree. Zombie’s first movie dedicates the first half of its runtime to Michael’s childhood, beginning with the day that would lead to him killing his sister, followed by his time in the institution and his periodic visits with Dr. Loomis and his mother. Even though this section of the movie doesn’t completely work, primarily because it feels like Zombie is trolling us in certain scenes, especially with the first music cue of the iconic score along with the origin of his mask, but the final scene of this portion of the film, before the 15 year time jump, creates the atmospheric tragedy that will haunt the back half of the film perfectly. It is a simple moment, where a mother gives up and takes her own life, because she has lost everything and doesn’t feel like she is worth the heart beating in her chest. Michael’s mother sits on a couch, watching old home videos of a Michael who knew how to smile and laugh and be happy, and as the camera sits on the TV projecting Michaels jovial face, we hear a gunshot sound, and a baby cries off screen. The baby will become Laurie Strode.
The slasher genre is built on the immediacy of violence, and on the ways that characters instinctually react to what’s happening around them. But what happens when that violence fades, and you’re left with the scars of your experience? The most haunting scene in Zombie’s first Halloween is Michael’s mothers death, which happens off screen, the echo of a gunshot ringing in our ears. A death that is a response to Michael’s violence. Violence like the kind that exists in a slasher is immediate, but that violence leaves behind an echo. Michael’s mother’s death is a response to the echo. The most haunting scene in Zombie’s Halloween II is a death that happens off screen. All we see is the aftermath. A bathroom soaked in the blood of a victim barely breathing, gutting the audience when Laurie finds the body, and later when the father of the victim responds to his daughter’s death. The violence itself is tragic, but the way characters respond to the violence and are forced to live with this experience is what haunts us once the credits roll.
After the set-up of Zombie’s first Halloween, where he sets up Michael Myers as he slowly loses his humanity while setting up a Dr. Loomis, played deliciously by Malcolm McDowell, as an opportunistic psychiatrist selling a book based on his experience with Michael, we get to the part of the movie that acts as the “remake” portion of the picture. Whereas Carpenter’s movie gets straight to the point, Zombie saves the point for the final 45 minutes. But when we finally get to the remake part of the movie — even though certain shots are recreated from the original and certain death scenes mirror the original — Zombie makes small updates and changes that end up feeling a little more revelatory once both movies are brought into focus. For instance, Zombie simply does not care about the general rules that come with a slasher movie. He’s not subverting the rules, because in order to subvert something you need to at the very least acknowledge its existence. To Zombie, the rules don’t exist. Scout Taylor-Compton’s Laurie can acknowledge sex and sexuality without spelling her doom. Annie, while left in a pool of her own blood, can still survive the night because she was found by the police in time, negating Laurie’s status as the Final Girl. Michael’s rampage extends past just the teenage girls, to Laurie’s parents, with a Dee Wallace death scene that is equal parts horrific and equal parts fan service.
Michael Myers has also been updated, even beyond being given an origin. This is where the intellectualizing of Michael Myers feels like it began. The common critique being that Zombie doesn’t understand what makes Michael Myers scary, and trying to add depth to a faceless killer makes him less scary. This particular critique has never made sense to me, partly because what Zombie does with Michael is scarier than anything Carpenter concocted. As incredible and masterfully directed as Carpenter’s movie is, it is about the immediacy in the act of killing and the instinctual survival response. I don’t feel haunted by Carpenter’s vision once the screen goes black. Certain shots linger in my brain and the visualization of Michael Myers and the kills themselves are incredibly well executed, but the despair attached to Michael Myers in Zombie’s two movies doesn’t exist with Carpenter. Sheriff Brackett finding Annie’s body in Halloween II is forever etched into my brain, and the deep, guttural sadness that exists within the tragedy of a father mourning his daughter haunts my memory of that scene. Zombie playing home videos of Annie after her death to remind us of her innocence and the life she could have lived before it was taken away ripped my heart out, and it will continue to rip my heart out whenever that scene resurfaces in my mind. It isn’t the same kind of scary that Carpenter’s version of Michael elicits, but to dismiss this version of Michael because he has a backstory feels incredibly short-sighted.
Carpenter’s Halloween ends with Laurie and Loomis looking outside of the bedroom window that they just pushed Michael out of, and he is gone. Disappeared into the night. It is ambiguous and mysterious, because to Carpenter, Michael Myers is the embodiment of evil. You can’t kill him by shooting him, and you can’t kill him by shoving him out the window. He is the spectre that will haunt Haddonfield forever. In Zombie’s Halloween, the first movie ends with Michael charging at Laurie and tackling her as they ball fall out of the second story window and crash to the ground. Then, as she sits on top of him, she grabs a gun, points it at his head, and pulls the trigger. The image we’re left with is her bloodied face, screaming into the night at the top of her lungs.
While Zombie’s Halloween remake felt like a compromised movie because he had to squeeze the original movie into the bones of what he wanted to explore, his Halloween sequel is all his, and it is one of the most haunted, depressing, tragic horror pictures of the past 20 years. Scout Taylor-Compton gives a heartbreaking performance as she navigates the trauma of the first movie while seemingly fraying at the seams and on the verge of self-destructing. Living with Annie and Sheriff Bracket now because her parents were killed in the last movie, she is taking pills to ease the pain and drowning her trauma in alcohol, while her relationship with Annie is imploding. Danielle Harris as Annie is just as heartbreaking, as she deals with her own trauma by internalizing it and putting on a strong face. What’s fascinating is that Annie and Laurie essentially trade sides. Annie takes on the role that a traditional final girl might have in one of these movies, as she mostly stays at home and doesn’t partake in any activities that a slasher villain could deem as “sinful” while Laurie takes on the role of someone who is supposed to be one of the first people killed. She drinks, pops pills, goes to parties, gets wasted, you get the idea. And yet, these roles ultimately don’t matter. Both women are doomed for death. Michael will rip Annie away from Laurie, before taking Laurie with him to hell.
Zombie makes the daring choice to allow Laurie the space to be “unlikable,” which is not a luxury afforded to most actors or actresses who lead these big productions for major studios. We get to see her melt down. When she blows up at Annie, who is just trying to help her friend, it feels unbearable because we understand the context of the relationship that these two once had. Again, Zombie is more interested in the way trauma and violence lingers and infects a human being more than he is in simply committing these acts of violence and moving on. Sometimes, that kind of trauma, when you survived a killer’s grasp after he murdered your friend and your parents, does not come in an easy to consume package. The biggest problem with the 2018 Halloween movie is that they attempted to make Laurie’s trauma palatable by turning her into Sarah Connor. They took familiar tropes and repurposed them to fit the most iconic final girl, and in doing so, made Laurie’s pain feel like a plot device. They made Laurie’s survival feel ordinary.
In contrast, Zombie makes Laurie’s survival feel like hell. She is haunted by Michael Myers, and instead of fueling that rage into a purposeful mission, she shrinks into herself. Surviving Michael Myers isn’t some tool that she can wield. Surviving him breaks her.
One of the first scenes in the movie is a 20 minute hospital sequence, as Michael stalks Laurie as she hobbles around a hospital, and just as she’s about to die, she wakes up screaming. The dreaming we just watched took place right after Halloween night when Michael attacked. It is now two years later, and she is still being haunted by him. This dream sequence does two things. It acts as an homage to the original Halloween II, but it also puts us into Laurie’s head, where she can’t escape that night. So she drinks, and pops painkillers, and does whatever she can to escape the pain, the tragedy being that she can’t.
What separates Zombie from his horror contemporaries is his ability to allow his characters the space to fill the screen with their humanity, existing within conversations while the horror washes away. We are simply watching people exist on screen, sharing the same space and existing within the same rhythms of a moment. The horror is on the periphery, because allowing for the humanity to seep through the foundations of the picture will amplify the horror later on when this humanity is broken. Michael Myers doesn’t show back up in Haddonfield until the back-half of this movie, and while he’s out in the world roaming about, we get scenes of Laurie having breakdowns in therapy, where she admits that she can’t look at Annie without being reminded of that night. We get moments where Sheriff Brackett gets to act as a father to both Annie and Laurie as he deals with his own pain from that night. We get scenes of Laurie and her new friends, with Laurie trying to move on from that night. And we get scenes of Annie and Laurie having conversations that turn into arguments, both of them dealing with their own scars. The last conversation that Annie has with Laurie turns into a shouting match, and they never get to reconcile their feelings before Annie is ripped away from Laurie, adding a sense of regret to the interminable sadness of the moment.
Halloween II is also weirdly surreal, with Michael’s mother returning with a white horse in visions that only he sees, and him and Laurie form a psychic connection, which was borrowed from the later Halloween sequels, but at its core, it is a movie about being consumed by grief and trauma. And sometimes, these cinematic buzzwords can’t be overcome. Sometimes, grief and sorrow and trauma can feel suffocating until your lungs give out and you give into the peace that comes with no longer having to carry this burden any further.
Not being able to overcome her circumstances doesn’t make Laurie weak. It makes her human.
