Hard to believe it has been 42 years since Michael Myers first escaped from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and terrorized Haddonfield, leaving 4 dead bodies and a tormented Laurie Strode in his wake. The body count has increased significantly since then as have the interpretations of his demonic character, but what made the original movie so frightening was the simplicity of John Carpenter's tale. This was a kid who could have grown up in any white community anywhere in America, yet for some strange reason took a butcher knife in his hands and stabbed his sister nine times, the official count. Dr. Loomis chalked it up to "the devil's eyes."
John Carpenter says he deeply regretted making a sibling connection between Michael and Laurie, largely because he couldn't think of what else to do when NBC pushed him to add 12 minutes to make up for the censored cuts for television purposes. There was quite a bit of nudity in the original. All subsequent movies picked up on this leitmotif. Rob Zombie's 2007 reboot explores this relationship in great depth, but not with very satisfying results. Carpenter thought Zombie went way too far. However, the creator of Michael no longer had any control over the franchise. He had given that up after three installments.
Unfortunately, Michael and Laurie have become inextricably linked, with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role multiple times, but seemingly never quite satisfied. She reappeared in the 20th anniversary of the movie in 1998, as an older Laurie having faked her death to throw Michael off her scent only for her monster brother to track her down in California. Then she pitched up in the 40th anniversary edition as a mother ravaged by these multiple experiences trying to reconnect with her daughter, whom she lost to the state because of her drinking problems. The relationship has become so muddy that we forget that in the original movie Michael was simply a stalker, who appeared to be recreating that horrible night in 1963 when he killed his older sister because she wouldn't take him trick-or-treating, choosing to have sex with her boyfriend instead.
One can talk about all the layers of sexual repression here, but Michael was too young to have any real sexual feelings toward his older sister, Judith. He was 6 years old at the time. He spent the next 15 years in a sanitarium, apparently mute according to Dr. Loomis, so it is doubtful Michael discovered anything more about the opposite sex during that time, much less learned to drive. Yet, he chose a knife to kill the teenage girls, generally viewed as a phallic symbol in horror movies. The way he stalked poor Annie before finally killing her also implied he had some kind of sexual attraction toward her, but in the end we see that he was simply offering her as a substitute to his dead sister. Lynda and her boyfriend just happened to interrupt Michael's gruesome reverie and so he killed them and stuffed them into the closet, as they had no value to him. The same for Laurie, but someone always survives these gruesome evenings, usually the most innocent one, and so she managed to ward off the "boogeyman," even if Michael lived to see another movie.
If he had been primarily interested in Laurie, he would have gone after her from the start, not wasted his time with her girlfriends. She was just as alone as Annie, babysitting Tommy Doyle on the other side of the street. The only reason Michael initially followed her is because he saw her come by his dilapidated house, dropping off some papers that her father, a real estate agent, had asked her to do. She met up with her girlfriends, Annie and Lynda, noting this weird guy stalking her. Annie shouted at him as he drove by. He stopped momentarily, giving the teenage girls a momentary fright, then moved on.
What made the original movie work, despite its many plot holes, was that Carpenter presented a bare-bones horror movie. You could read into it what you wanted. The most glaring plot hole was why Michael didn't take Annie back to his house to make his ritualistic offering to his dead sister. Zombie picked up on this in his reboot, centering the action at Michael's house. In his subsequent film, he even conjured the dead Judith back up, as well as a boyhood image of himself, which it seems is what Carpenter was implying with this scene. Was it guilt that drove Michael, leading him to try to restore the boyhood image of his family?
Dr. Loomis offered very cryptic explanations for Michael's behavior, implying he may be the devil's seed, a reference to The Omen perhaps, but Carpenter was content to make this a small town nightmare In Carpenter's 1981 follow-up, more demonic elements emerged, after all this is Halloween, but he appeared content to let such references lurk in the background of this sleepy Midwest town, not turn Haddonfield into a hell hole as Rob Zombie did in his movies, conjuring up all sorts of evil spirits.
There have been eleven installments in the franchise to date, with two more scheduled in the near future. Not bad for a movie that only cost $350,000 to make back in 1978 and grossed over $50 million at the box office. Try as they might, all these sequels and reboots haven't built on the character, but rather turned him into a perennial Halloweeen favorite. Shock gave way to schlock, largely the case with all the slasher films the movie has inspired over the past four decades.
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