Halloween (film)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • How did Michael find out where Laurie lived? When Laurie's mom killed herself, the sheriff erased Laurie from the record and dropped her off at a hospital in the next town, AND Michael has been secluded from the world for the last 17 years! Moreover, how did Michael even know what Laurie looked like? It's been 17 friggin' years!
    • Probably the same reason on why he seems to have immortality...a complete and utter mystery. (This is ignoring the 6th film, of course.)
    • If you don't ignore the sixth film, however, then there's your answer: the Cult of Thorn would have seen to it that he knew. They informed him where she was and probably showed him a picture so that he could get the job done. Just like they'd the ones who secretly taught him to drive and orchestrated the asylum break-out. Remember that they had a man on the inside. And he could have obtained files on Michael's family himself easily for ostensible job-related research reasons.
      • If you DO ignore the sixth film, however, in the director's cut version of the first movie, Michael doesn't immediately go after Laurie. He returns to his old home, where Lauire is dropping off a key on behalf of a realtor parents. Michael sees her, and then spends the rest of the day stalking her and her friends. This is revisited in The Remake.
  • Do you think there's a limit to Michael's high resistance to pain? Could there be some things he simply cannot survive?
    • Sure, but no one will ever be able to reliably bring them to bear, or make it stick if they do. I'm willing to bet he can survive losing a limb or three, and even getting riddled with bullets (he has got to have a hyper clot factor in his blood and self pinching arteries), total immolation would do it (but merely frying all his skin would probably do nothing) and destroying at least two thirds of his brain may kill him. Everything else he'll just shrug off.
    • The Cult of Thorn supposedly protected him with their spells when they abducted him as a baby, but what we can see shows that he isn't invulnerable, only endowed with a fantastic healing factor like Wolverine's. Probably you'd have to go at him faster and harder than his healing goes, and keep at it until his body is destroyed.
  • Why didn't they follow up the ending of Halloween 4?
  • Here's one: In the first Halloween how did Michael Myers, a man confined in an asylum since childhood learn how to drive a car?
    • If you count Curse, one of them cult members could have taught him, for whatever reason. The novelization of the original mentions he just watched Loomis and other people charged with transporting him do it from the back of the vehicle, and when the time finally came, he winged it.
    • Even if you ignore the later films, the strangeness of this is brought up in dialogue... Loomis scratches his own head over it. "Maybe someone around here's been giving him lessons!"
  • Or this one: When he fell from the window near the end, shot, eye poked, and stabbed, how did he get his injuries taken care of? It wasn't as if he could just go to the hospital.
    • But he did, in the very next movie! Anyway, I'm going with a (possibly supernatural) Healing Factor, since even in the original, Michael seemed inhuman (for evidence of that assumption not related to shrugging off normally lethal injuries, there's lifting Bob up with one hand with no visible effort whatsoever, plus getting Judith's stolen tombstone into an upstairs bedroom by himself).
  • Why so much hate for the Rob Zombie movies? Especially 2?? I can understand the complaints about it being Bloodier and Gorier, but deep down, Zombie really was trying to make the characters complex human beings.
    • While the frequent "pounding the blade into people" got old in quickly in Halloween 2, I'd have to say that overall the Zombie films were so different than the original films that they could actually be considered different films. They certainly have more story structure than the original ones did.
    • The original Michael Myers was terrifying because there was no reason for his behavior: he was a child from a normal family who murdered his sister on Halloween. Rob Zombie's Michael, on the other hand, came from an absolute shithole of a family: stripper mom, drunk dad, etc. It would have been more strange if Michael hadn't gone crazy and became a serial killer. Plus, nothing Rob Zombie added really made the characters more complex, only more cliche.
    • Your mom's drunk boyfriend can't make you have psychopathic delusions and hallucinations. Also, Rob Zombie said he wasn't a maniac because he came from a bad family--he was a maniac because he's just a fucking maniac. Which may be worse depending on your point of view, since if it's true, the relentless vulgarity from the family is shown to be just one of Zombie's random indulgences with no bearing on anything. In any case, the characters aren't limited to just Michael. The Bracketts are arguably more complex than they ever were in Carpenter's films.
    • Laurie is so immensely unlikeable in the new films. Plus, besides simply being Bloodier and Gorier (and maybe even because of it, as if that alone makes a film "scary"), he eliminated any real tension or scares - the unfortunate trend in horror these days.
    • I was alright with the first one (I actually liked the re-tooling of Dr Loomis's motivation for stopping Michael), but I can see why most die-hard Halloween fans wouldn't like it. It throws the original's subtle horror in favor of full-on gorn (though I can't really be surprised, this being a Rob Zombie flick), and the first half hour was bogged down by a completely unnecessary and, honestly, badly done origin story. If Rob Zombie wanted to assure the audience that Michael was only crazy because he was simply born that way, then he failed miserably. I, however, utterly detested the sequel. Michael just became some murderous hobo with mommy issues, their decision to have Michael's mother appear to tell him to kill people was bizarre and served as a Nightmare Retardant to say the very, very least. And to top it all off, they completely derailed Dr. Loomis to being a money grubbing egomaniac who's riding on the corpses of the first film's victims to success.
    • My main issue with Zombie's remakes was how horribly unlikeable every single character was. Nobody felt like a real person - they were all just annoying redneck stereotypes or awful caricatures. The rapist orderlies, the necrophiliac ambulance driver, Michael's abusive stepdad, the stereotypical stripper mom, etc. Even the teens were unlikeable...Rob Zombie seems to have it in his head that female teens only talk about fucking, fucking and more fucking...oh, and apparently they can't speak a single sentence without swearing like sailors. (I miss the days when I didn't want to see every teen in a horror movie be killed.)
    • I always figured Zombie was trying to play on the coralation/causality assumption people make when they talk about child abuse and bad upbringings leading to Michael's kind of behavior. If there's no reason for Michael to go batshit, then it could happen regardless of whether his life was normal or horribly abusive. I figured Zombie was trying to subvert both the blaming it on the upbringing and the common subversion of that (giving the monster an ideal upbringing) at the same time. As for the unlikable characters, Zombie tends to write people as over the top parodies. You have to look at them from a black comedy slant.
  • In the original, why didn't Michael kill Laurie when she was a helpless baby. I'm sure he had some time to kill her. I mean, at least the remake explained that he just wanted to be with her.
    • Because Laurie isn't his sister in the original Halloween. If you want a longer answer that takes the sequels into account, though, killing a baby probably didn't provide the same thrill as murdering a nubile teenager.
    • I'd chalk it up to Michael's unpredictability. There was never any reason as to why he killed his sister Judith, and there was never really any reason as to why he didn't kill Laurie as a baby (ignoring the fact that Carpenter didn't intend Laurie to be Michael's sister in the original film). He just...decided to kill one sister that night, and not the other. It can't be explained. It's just pure evil at work.
    • Michael's behavior is often seemingly random. For instance, toward the beginning of Halloween 4, he probably could have killed Loomis at the garage, but let him live for whatever reason. In the sixth movie, he followed that mother and daughter into the bathroom, but just took their keys without killing them, even though there's no reason why he couldn't have.
  • Why did no paramedics not notice a man with burnt scarring and a wielding a kitchen knife after Michael had switched "bodies" in Halloween 8? It just boggles the mind.
    • Yeah, this bugged me to. The only explanation I have is that Michael may have healed enough to pass for normal over the last twenty or so years.
    • I always assumed it has something to do with the supernatural-esque aspects Michael seems to have. He walks straight past a bunch of paramedics holding a bloodied knife and (presumably) covered in burn scars...then just seems to just fade into the bushes. As if he was never there.
  • In Halloween: H20, Michael drove from Illinois to California. So he would have had to refill the car a few times on the way to California. Would he have taken off his mask and just refilled at a gas station like any regular person, or was he leaving a trail of bloodied gas attendant corpses behind him? If the latter is correct, then you'd think the police would have found the trail and followed it back to Haddonfield. Especially since they were already on the look-out for Michael after he killed the nurse in California.
  • How did Michael end up on the truck at the end of Halloween 4? When did he cling to it? We seen the truck pull up, load the girls onto it, and leave. If Michael clung onto the bottom, he would have had to come out of the school before the girls did, at which point the people pulling up probably should have been able to notice him.
    • Offscreen Teleportation. All slasher film villains have this power. It's how people like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers can suddenly appear in front of their intended victims despite said victims clearly being able to out-run them.
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