“He kills. He creeps. He goes home.” Lonnie says in Halloween Kills while tracking a map of Haddonfield littered with Michael’s victims. It’s almost as if he’s seen all the other movies in the Halloween franchise.
Michael, indeed, always seems to go home. Have we ever really asked why? Like so many other things in the franchise, they’ve hinted but never told. Keeping Myers a mystery. The way it should be. That doesn’t stop us from pontificating.
In that spirit, while reading through Tim Waggoner’s recently released Halloween Kills novelization something caught my attention.
When describing the flashback scene in the start of the film in which young Hawkins is about to be in pursuit of Michael Myers for the first time, the writer fills in some empty spaces for his readers (all of which had to be approved by Producers).
He mentions that Hawkins had no idea what happened to young Michael’s parents after the events of that fateful night when he stabbed his sister. One day they were “simply gone, their house empty.” The gossip around town included the idea they packed up and went somewhere else to have another child and start a new family. That the memories of that house and town were understandably just too painful.
This has me thinking…is part of Michael’s rage the fact that he’s just trying to find his Mom and Dad?
All we know is this. Michael is a kid. He sees a guy go upstairs and have the fastest sex ever with his sister. He puts on a clown mask. He kills her. His parents show up and we never see them again. Presumably, neither does he. Loomis has in a sense become the closest thing he has to a parent. When he escapes Smith’s Grove he goes home. He kills a dog. Mom and Dad aren’t there. Laurie shows up. She’s literally his only clue at this point. A young girl (who in the other timeline is his sister but not in our current timeline) shows up at his door. Does she know where his mom and dad are? Better follow her and ask. Maybe murder all her friends and design an elaborate set piece of their dead bodies for her to walk through first. Really break the ice.
It’s here where my theory runs out of steam a little but not completely. He definitely wants to get her all alone, right? He kills all her friends and never really goes for the “kill shot” with Laurie. Think about it. He has a clear shot at her at the top of the staircase. She’s got her back to him and is wide open for the attack and he inexplicably cuts….the side of her arm? Maybe he really was just looking for his Mom and Dad. Maybe he thought she was the only one who knew where they were. Maybe it’s why she’s the only babysitter who survived that night.
Fast forward to 2018’s Halloween. Michael breaks out. He starts to kill. House to house like a murderer on a rampage. Or a lost child trying to find his way home who also happens to be a murderer on a rampage? Later that night as Michael is walking aimlessly in the night he’s hit by an SUV and his doctor gets all freaky with his mask and throws him in the back of a cop car, drives him into the middle of the woods… and away from his destination. That’s why he gets his face stomped like a watermelon. As Lonnie says, Michael was just trying to get home.
When Michael finally arrives home in Kills, his whole house has been redecorated and there are two dudes living in it. Little John and Big John. He murders them, of course. Mom and Dad aren’t home but we never really get a chance to see what he planned to do next because Lonnie, Allyson and Cameron show up.
After the massacre in the street Karen makes her way back to the house thinking Michael is dead. Allyson says to her the same thing her Mother had told her about her Father, Ray dying. “He’ll always be with us. Even if he’s not here” (That may not be exactly right, I’m paraphrasing). Which is a confusing line at the moment. Is she talking about her Dad still or is she referencing the damage Michael has inflicted on her family?
Either way, the line moves Karen to look up at the window and think of young Michael Myers staring out of the window. Could she have realized when Allyson referenced losing her Father exactly what this article is hinting at? That Michael just wants his Mom and Dad?
Karen then goes upstairs, fucks around and finds out. Michael murders her psycho style then does what, exactly? Stares out the window. Like a kid. Waiting for his parents to come home.
I realize there is a fat chance in hell this turns out to be David Gordon Green’s arc for Michael. It’s just interesting to think about. All this talk of “None of us are innocent” and seemingly derivative storylines like the mental patient who is forced to his death by the mob. Jamie Lee Curtis saying the next movie is going to make people angry? It leaves the door open that David Gordon Green and his writing team are considering making Myers an almost sympathetic serial killer in Halloween Ends. Well, not so much that Michael is sympathetic because he’s a murder machine from hell. Rather that the town is just as much to blame for many of these deaths as he is because they put themselves in harms way by projecting their own personal agenda’s onto his blank white face. He doesn’t give a damn about all the scary Haddonfield residents screaming “Evil dies tonight!” He’s just looking for his Mom and Dad.
Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. What do you think?
Michael Myers (aka The Shape) in Halloween Kills, directed by David Gordon Green.