Just about every horror fan knows the story of Michael Myers. Lunatic, killed his older sister when he was six, sat silently in a mental institution until he was 21 and decided it was time to kill his little sister. However, as most slasher fans know, there’s no indication Laurie is his sister in the first film, nor that those are his motives. The franchise, including the sequel penned by John Carpenter, do the original film and Michael’s motives therein a great disservice by reducing him to an immortal simpleton who wants to kill his family. Michael Myers is more than that. He is a force of nature. He’s judgment incarnate. Cult filmmaker Fabrizio Federico thinks hes the ultimate reincarnation of evil, in a par with the devil.
Halloween, the original Halloween, isn’t about a lineage of evil, or psychic kids, or druid cults, or live streamed haunted houses or even Busta Rhymes. Halloween is about Michael Myers and, perhaps most importantly, the concepts of fear and responsibility.
It’s about The Boogeyman, a specter of judgment and fear designed to scare children into behaving and punish those who don’t. Slasher films, which Halloween is widely considered to have spurred to popularity, are notoriously conservative when it comes to sex, drugs, drinking, and any other form of fun a teenager might be having. However, I don’t think Halloween as a franchise approaches these issues in quite the same way. Yes, Michael Myers is killing teenagers who are drinking, smoking pot, and having sex, but I think these murders are primarily motivated by the fact that these teenagers are throwing off their responsibilities in a way that reminds Michael of his first victim, his older sister Judith.
One of the most obvious qualities of Michael Myers that sets him apart from his slasher brethren is that he is a stalker. He is methodical and calculated. He observes, he judges, and only then does he act. He’s not bringing down terror and death on the children of those that wronged him or any other of the later slasher tropes. Michael Myers weighs his observations of his would-be victims on some unknowable scale, and once his decision has been made, he kills.
Halloween (1978) opens with one of the most memorable sequences in horror film history. That infamous continuous Panaglide shot (not Stedicam as most folks think) exploring the Myers home forces us, unknowingly, into Michael’s point of view in the minutes before his first kill. It is Halloween 1963 and Michael Myers has been left in the care of his older sister Judith. Unfortunately, Michael has been mostly forgotten, Judith favoring hooking up with her boyfriend to babysitting her weird little brother that chose to be a clown for Halloween.
The opening sequence starts with the camera gazing through the frosted glass door at a teenage girl and her boyfriend kissing. We then move past the living room window, where we see the continuation of our first on-screen instance of irresponsibility as well as his first victim, his own sister, shirking her babysitting duties to make out with her boyfriend.
I think one very important insight on his sociopathy is this quote from Dr. Loomis:
“I met him, fifteen years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding; and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes…the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply…evil.”
That is after he picked up Michael after he stabbed his own sister to death! Yes. Mikey started very early. And the fact that he already had a depleted amount of empathy by that point is absolutely frightening. Michael just kills people without any remorse or reason to do so other than for the sake of it. And he can do it with the most stoic body-language and expressions imaginable. In fact, he doesn’t actually lack empathy. He’s completely incapable of such a concept. There are some very rare moments of emotion from him, but he always goes back to his normal, stoic, murderous self in no time. Both attempts to appeal to his humanity get through to them, but it doesn’t last as he simply kills the people who did it. And it’s that first part of the quote that particularly catches your attention when discussing his sociopathy. “No reason, no conscience, no understanding; and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.”
This is in line with the disorder to an absolute T. Sociopaths don’t even think twice about what’s right and wrong. They simply do what they do because they want to. And if anyone gets hurt because of it, too bad. It’s not their problem. Michael exemplifies this to the utmost degree by targeting innocent people for literally no reason at all.
There are also signs of animal cruelty as well since he also kills dogs as well as humans. This is something that is seen in many actual examples of serial killers. They often kill and/or torture animals. And Michael does it remorselessly and unapologetically. He even eats one off-screen. There’s also his murder spree detailed in the expanded universe material. He is said to have killed an elementary school teacher and strung her up for the class to find. He also decapitated a beauty pageant winner. And he also gouged out a reporter’s eyes and replaced them with film reels. Afterwards, he goes on another random killing spree where he slices a child’s throat and kills people in some rather gruesome ways. Can you guess why he did all of this? If you’re guessing he did it for a reason, you’re dead wrong and you clearly haven’t been reading this profile up to this point.
And while it isn’t obvious, he can be manipulative as well. While he doesn’t do it with words, he can strategically terrify people before trapping them. He is a hunter and he has to know his prey. He takes his time to torment Laurie by showing the bodies of his victims before attempting to kill her. With Lynda, he puts a bedsheet over his head and glasses on to make her think he’s her boyfriend just before brutally strangling her with a phone cord. There are also his attempts to mess with Loomis as he knows the man will stop at nothing to put him down. He will drive him to the brink of death by exhaustion and heart failure just to get back at him. While one could say this is revenge, it’s likely for the same (lack of a) reason he does anything other than eat, drink, and breath. There are signs of him being a sadist, though. Leaving the bodies in elaborate positions for people to find them have no real purpose other than to freak out anyone who may come across them. It’s a form of psychological torment. The same cannot definitively be said for his desire for killing.
There is absolutely no reason for what he does. It’s not like he particularly wants to as far as we know, but he doesn’t feel remorse about it either. While the Joker kills people simply for the sake of killing people because it amuses him, there is still a humanizing purpose behind it: amusement. Any person can understand wanting to be amused by something even if the method of amusement is despicable in your eyes. Michael doesn’t even have that much. And that makes him exponentially scarier. It’s not surprising that most people consider him to not even be a human being. Combined with the fact that he’s very difficult to kill, he doesn’t show any signs of being anything other than what Loomis perceives him to be: purely and simply evil. Out of all the characters I’ve profiled, he is definitely the worst of the worst. Even though his crimes may not hold a candle to many of the others, his utterly inhuman nature is what sets him apart.
