Kids These Days Think Michael Myers Is Lame
Does the original Halloween hold up after The Shape became Michael Myers?
John Carpenter’s Halloween is the slasher movie’s slasher movie. It introduced the most famous tropes, the most iconic villain, the most iconic final girl, and spawned a franchise that might better be called an empire. Michael Myers and Laurie Strode are household names, as much as any characters can be. But characters of that level of popularity generate some problems. How do you start at the beginning with a franchise like that? How do you watch the first Halloween with the knowledge that Michael Myers has stopped being the boogeyman he began his career as? Will The Shape still be scary when you know what it is? The short answer is, as it always is in these posts, yes. He’s still scary, and you can still start from the beginning.
I watched Halloween for the first time on my living room couch, as I do most movies. I’d bought it for ten dollars at Barnes & Noble, while I was there getting a present for my English teacher’s new baby. I’d read an article about it before watching it, so I knew everything that was coming. I knew where the jumpscares were, and which ones were real and which were cat scares. I knew that Michael Myers gets away. I knew Michael Myers to be a popular character, almost cartoonish in his depictions outside of movies. I knew what to expect of this movie.
And somehow, it still floored me.
Halloween’s opening scene is one of the most famous in horror. The perspective of the killer, seeing through the eyeholes of a mask, the reveal of this little six-year-old boy as the murderer is famously shocking. Now, while I was not shocked by the reveal, the scene was still chilling. My film studies class has talked about the rule where the first ten minutes of a movie are meant to give the viewer a sense of what the rest of the movie will be like, and Halloween is a perfect example of that rule. It establishes the types of murders that will follow, and the evil behind them. It also establishes that the killer kills from behind a mask, and with a butcher knife, the two things Michael Myers is most recognized for.
Halloween was the first slasher to take the ‘have sex and die’ rule to the extreme it came to have a reputation for. The first of Laurie’s friends to die, Annie, hasn’t even had sex before she’s killed. Her only crime is planning to. Judith Myers is murdered immediately after having sex, as are Linda and Bob. Laurie, like most final girls, survives by following the rules. She has done nothing wrong, so she can’t be punished by the narrative. But, in a way, her fate is much worse. She has to live with the boogeyman now. She’s doomed to a life of constantly looking over her shoulder, knowing that the thing that wants her dead can’t die. Michael Myers is eternal and always will be.
Halloween is often criticized for Laurie Strode’s character. A stereotypical final girl, she is not interested in boys, or sex, and does honest work taking care of kids on Halloween night. She is also, in true final girl fashion, a very masculinized figure. Halloween has been widely regarded as a movie that claims that some types of girls are better than others, that maybe those other girls deserved to die. I watched Halloween with this in mind, and found that those complaints didn’t quite hold up. While yes, the suggestion made by slashers that the final girls are somehow better than all the others and deserved to live longer is problematic, what people tend to forget is that their villains are meant to be pure evil. Michael Myers kills those kids because of their interest in sex, yes, but he also kills them because he’s evil. No reasonable person would believe that teens deserve to be murdered just for having sex. The whole point is that he is, as Dr. Loomis says, Michael is “pure evil”. Is the message still that teens shouldn’t have sex? Yes, that is what comes across. But the thought that Annie, Lynda, and Bob just had it coming is not entertained. Michael Myers is evil, and those kids did not need to die. And yet, he is the one who is remembered in their place.
This takes us to my main problem with slasher franchises - they become about the slasher and not his victims. The Halloween franchise is about Michael Myers, not Laurie Strode. The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is about Freddy, not Nancy Thompson. Sally Hardesty doesn’t show up in any meaningful way after the events of the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The only character of a franchise I can think of that comes close to being both the victim and the face is Andy Barclay of Child’s Play, but Chucky wins out in the end. I think that Halloween is the best - or worst, depending - example of this. Michael Myers is remembered instead of the kids - mostly girls - that he killed. This phenomenon infuriates me, partly because it feels very much like the way murders are treated in real life. Ted Bundy is remembered as a charming man, the most famous serial killer out there, while his victims are just remembered as dumb girls for believing his act. This allows more murders to happen, which leads to more killers to put in the news, which leads to more murders, and so on. These men almost don’t seem scary anymore. They’re commonplace, just another guy who snapped and shot a bunch of people. The same thing happened with Halloween. The franchise has become so much about Michael Myers that he’s almost stopped feeling evil. He’s a human now, not The Shape, and he’s the face of the franchise. You know his butcher knife, and you know his mask. You almost don’t want him back in jail because then you wouldn’t have the movies anymore.
Fear is important, which makes horror movies important. In many ways, fear keeps us safe. Which is why it’s so important to look back on classic horror movies and reflect on them in a modern context, as I do. It is also why I was so worried that Halloween wouldn’t hold up. What’s the point of movies like that if they don’t make us scared anymore?
Even with his modern status as more of an icon than a villain, the original Michael Myers is scary as hell, especially the vanishing acts that he pulls throughout the movie. Even though I knew that he wasn’t behind that bush anymore, I was still tensing like he was going to jump out and stab Laurie the moment she passed it. I had seen the bit of him standing by the clotheslines in her yard, but it was still chilling to see in the full context of the scene. Although I knew of Michael Myers’s character as a man, he still had a sense of inhumanity about him in Halloween that can’t be taken away, even with the knowledge of his later career. Watching him get shot and stabbed several times, only to come right back up again gave this sense of helplessness to the story that was just incredible. You know that he’s not dead after being stabbed with the knitting needle, you even know he’s not dead after being stabbed with a clothes hanger, but the realization that he’s still not dead after being shot out of a window is draining. You feel Laurie’s terror, her knowledge that this thing will never stop chasing her, and you almost feel like it might be in your own front yard.
The end of Halloween gives a sense of endless night. This Halloween night won’t ever end, because The Shape is still out there, staying just out of sight, waiting for his next victim. He’s following people just like he has for the whole movie, never there when they take a second look. He’s walking Laurie’s life right alongside her, just out of sight, and the police are in the wrong part of town. And the worst of it is, you know that even if the police were in the right place, nothing they could do would work.