Histories of Horror: Michael Myers

This essay exploring the historical and folkloric background and cultural DNA behind Michael Myers and Halloween is an exclusive revival of my “Histories of Horror” column that I wrote for the website for Council of Zoom. Halloween seems as good a day as any to bring something back from the dead…

To trace the origins and inspirations of Halloween, we really need to trace the origins of the holiday itself, as well as the boogeyman, a word which has hung around for generations to describe all manner of evil tricksters. Even though John Carpenter’s film has its own inspirations, the cultural consciousness of both of these things are relevant, I think, to laying the groundwork for what became Halloween. It’s easier said than done to trace the origins of a holiday that has been celebrated for thousands of years, even predating Christianity. Those Celtic origins are central to the Halloween franchise as a whole, not just the original film. In its earliest form, what we now know as Halloween was known as Samhain, the Celtic observance of the end of summer, mixed to some degree with the festival of the dead, Parentalia. Those two things formed the basis of our customs and iconography, and were later stolen by early Christians, who gave their ever-so-slightly remixed version of the holiday the name “All Hallow’s Evening,” which over time resulted in the contraction, “Halloween.”

Over the past few thousand years, give or take, much has obviously changed. But the basis of most of our most prominent customs have basically been there from the beginning. Pumpkins eventually took the place of turnips, but those early turnips were still carved into Jack O’Lanterns and placed outside of a family’s dwelling. Wearing masks to disguise one’s self as they walk about their village, another key component of Halloween that was also part of those earliest celebrations.

Other than the holiday itself, these things don’t appear to factor all that much into the original film. Many people have pointed out that despite the title, the holiday is really a backdrop in Carpenter’s Halloween, and doesn’t have much bearing on the story other than that. I’m not sure that I personally agree with that. It’s true, those Celtic traditions become a much more textual and obvious part of the Halloween series as it goes along, and are also central to the original movie’s novelization, but the spirit of the holiday itself is essential to Halloween. Michael Myers might appear as nothing more than a one-note slasher, carving up one victim and moving onto the next without uttering so much as a word, but he is very much a trickster in the classic Halloween tradition, at least in the original film.

Michael embraces the holiday on every conceivable level, but he celebrates it in his own, unique, very twisted way. When we are introduced to him as a six-year-old boy in the opening scene, he is just returning home from trick-or-treating. He saves the ultimate trick for his sister, Judith, slaughtering her in her bedroom while still dressed in his clown costume, almost separating himself from the act. It is a trick for Judith but a treat for Michael and this perverse celebration of the holiday defines the character through the rest of the film.

In the holiday’s earliest incarnation, people believed that the days surrounding this celebration were also the days when the barrier between the land of the living and the land of the dead was thinnest, so they initially took to wearing masks to disguise themselves as ghosts or demons in order to trick any entities that might come through that barrier into thinking they were one of their own. In Halloween, Michael essentially does the opposite. Thousands of years later, the holiday had become so commercialized by that point that everyone wore a mask and roamed the street.

Here, a devil could essentially disguise themselves as a man disguising themselves as a devil, and roam the streets completely unnoticed. Michael’s blank mask is a perfect disguise, because he is wearing it on the one day that absolutely no one will notice him as being anything at all out of the ordinary. He even wears an additional disguise later on in the film, dressing himself in a sheet to prank Lynda into thinking he is her boyfriend Bob, for no reason other than his own amusement. In fact, Michael sets up scares, gags, and pranks that serve no purpose other than his own enjoyment frequently over the course of the original film.

Haunted attractions were a creation of the twentieth century and something that only continued to build and build in popularity by the 1970s, when Halloween was released. There’s a certain charm to a walk-through attraction designed to do nothing but frighten its attendees, and it’s something people immediately latched onto. The first known attraction of this type opened in 1915, and was called the Orton and Spooner Ghost House. These attractions are now more commonly known as haunts. They are integral to the film, because as much as Michael’s trickster spirit pulls from the origins of the holiday, a modern haunt is technically what he is building throughout the movie. It doesn’t become clear until much later on, of course. As much as we have Dr. Loomis to deliver monologues about the nature of evil, Michael remains a mystery.

We don’t know why he’s doing what he’s doing or even what he’s doing for most of the film. Why did he steal his sister’s headstone when he first returned home? Why carry Annie’s body back into the house after killing her in the garage? By the end of the film, we have our answer and it is delightfully ghoulish. He has, this whole time, been setting up his own twisted version of a walk-through haunted house, just for Laurie to experience. The gags are universal. Lynda and Bob’s bodies pop out of closets and doorways like any plastic skeleton or rubber spider at any Halloween haunt all across America. The only difference, of course, is that in Laurie’s case these are the actual, freshly dead bodies of her friends. Annie’s body stands out, looking in some respect just like the others, like Michael’s twisted attempt at a Halloween display, but there is also something ritualistic about the way her body is displayed alongside his sister’s tombstone. It is the perfect midpoint between the holiday’s modern flair for showmanship, and its origins in Celtic ceremony.

In this first film, and it is not something that carries through for the rest of the series, Michael Myers appears to be much more interested in scaring people than killing them. Killing them is simply the end to the gag, a means to an end and the punch line to a joke that only he could understand. For most of the film, he’s a voyeur. He is simply watching people. That’s really where the horror in Carpenter’s classic lies. There are plenty of movies about guys in masks with knives, but that film so perfectly captures the deeply uncomfortable feeling of being watched, or at least Carpenter knows how to get under the audience’s skin with the idea of being watched. The thought that you might not feel it is even scarier. The notion that somebody could be watching you from right outside your window and you do not even know he’s there. That is horror.

In John Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers is a showman. He does not just want to stalk people and he does not just want to kill people, he wants to show off, he wants to display his work like a cat proudly bringing home a dead bird. He wants to set up a haunt of his own, to have Laurie walk through a labyrinth of horrors, a parade of corpses that he has planned, and that he has put together just for her. It is sickly whimsical, in its own way, but also unsettlingly premeditated. Michael is a force of nature, he is absent of humanity, he is an almost Lovecraftian unknowable entity, and yet there is a great deal of personality that can be gleamed from his actions, at the same time. It only makes sense for him to rig something elaborate, too. After all, he was institutionalized for fifteen years, with nothing to think about except what he would do when he finally decided it was time to go home.

Yet the unique thing is the way Michael blurs the lines between real and unreal, at least in terms of the plot. The supernatural elements are peppered throughout, but the brilliance of the film is that nobody believes Dr. Loomis until it’s too late, not even the audience. Halloween is a movie that really doesn’t tell you that it’s supernatural until its final few moments, until after having been stabbed three times — once in the neck, once in the eye, once in the chest with his own knife — Michael is shot six times and falls off the balcony, only to disappear into the cold October night mere moments later. That’s when the viewer finally realizes that The Shape is, in fact, everything that Loomis said it was through the entire film.

As much as he is a local ghost story, though, it’s easy to understand why people don’t believe Loomis’s ramblings that Michael is, in fact, supernatural. Well, other than the fact that in realistic terms that would be considered completely insane, and that is absolutely how characters tend to view him in this movie and even in the sequels. But in terms of the larger plot, and just in terms of Haddonfield as a town, Michael Myers is simply a boy who stabbed his sister to death and was sent away. While the supernatural elements, the air of dread and mystery to Halloween are integral, there are elements of real-world horror that one has to take into account when thinking less about The Shape and more about Michael Audrey Myers, the little boy who made headlines for murdering his older sister.

This was very likely the element of Halloween that people could relate to most in 1978. At this point in time, true crime was growing in popularity and becoming more sensationalized. Violence was no longer buried by the news, it was being dragged into the light because it sold papers in ways that fluff pieces no longer did. Even the nuclear families of the 1950s had to read about the horrific discovery of Ed Gein’s farmhouse. Serial killers had not quite become an epidemic, but there were no shortage of them, either, and there seemed to be more than ever before.

People had to learn to live with the existence of active serial killers at any point across the country and, more than that, learn to live with their own fascination with them. At the dawn of this decade, people had seen unimaginably gruesome things just watching the news, watching the images coming out of Vietnam. Sometimes they were watching their own lovers or their own sons being carried out of the jungle in a barely recognizable mess. Sensationalizing it was simply a way of processing it and accepting it as a new American reality, that like looking at a car wreck, this fascination with violence and mortality had always been there and, once fed, was never going to go away.

Michael Myers does not bear too much in common with real-life serial killers at first glance. That’s part of the point of the film, after all. He isn’t a realistic criminal, he is an absence of humanity, a haunted house in a human body. But he is nonetheless seen as a well-known source of true crime and local history, Haddonfield’s one morbid claim to fame. There are, in fact, certain traits of serial killers that do line up with some of Michael’s traits as well. First and foremost, there is the fact that serial killers often start by killing a member of their own family. Usually, it is a parent, often their mother. For Michael, it is his older sister, which seems like a very different dynamic unless you remember just how young Michael was when he committed that initial crime. Judith was much older than Michael and, that night, was the one left in charge of his care.

Many serial killers have been driven to recreate their original crime. Sometimes that’s in the form of attempting to chase the thrill they got from it, sometimes they attempt to physically recreate specific details of it, both are about attempting to have that same experience for a second time. Ted Bundy had fixated on a young woman from his youth, a girl who had never seemed to care for him as much as he did her, and often fixated on victims who shared some of her physical traits, usually hair style and hair color. That is incredibly worth noting when thinking about Michael Myers, who simply saw Laurie Strode through the window of his house and immediately fixated on a slender girl with brown hair who vaguely resembles his sister Judith and is the same age that Judith was when he killed her. Michael takes this obsession with repeating his crime to the point of ritual. He steals a knife, the same weapon he used as a child. He wears a mask, just like he did on that first fateful night.

The most shocking element of Michael’s backstory, and a huge part of why he is still a local legend fifteen years later, is how young he was when he claimed his first victim. The idea of anyone killing their sister is mortifying, but what lures you in right from the opening scene of Halloween is that this murderer is a child. This is an angel-faced six-year-old boy. Even if he does have a completely vacant expression, and his eyes appear to be dark, empty pools. Killer children are a harsh reality, though, and always have been. Like all shocking acts of violence, they were gaining more publicity in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, a decade before the release of Halloween, a young girl named Mary Bell murdered a four-year-old child the day before her twelfth birthday and even left a note claiming responsibility for the crime. The last bit in particular feels reminiscent of Michael, who made no attempt to hide what he had done, but simply walked outside for his parents to find him with the knife in his hand.

The year after Halloween’s release, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer committed one of the most infamous mass killings by a minor in American history, carrying out a school shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary and offering no other motive than the words, “I don’t like Mondays.” As little motivation as Michael himself ever provided, and even more terrifying to think about.

But of course Michael Myers has the background and some of the characteristics of a realistic killer, but again as we prove by the end of the film, he isn’t one. A huge part of the appeal of his character is that there is something else to him, something unknowable, that he is a being of true, undefinable evil. Even when he’s spoken of by the locals, what he did is treated as much like a ghost story as a real local tragedy. He is not only Michael Myers, he is The Shape, after all. But there is another name. In fact, given that he is only referred to as The Shape in the script and that the full name “Michael Myers” is actually never uttered once in the movie, this other name is by far the one he’s called by most: the boogeyman.

What is the boogeyman, though? The word bogey derives itself from the Middle English bogge, which means “hobgoblin.” Many other cultures have had their own names that sound remarkably similar to what we hear as “boogeyman.” In Germany, it was butzemann. The Norse had busemann. In most cultures, the boogeyman is simply a general term for any kind of demon, a monster used by parents to frighten children into good behavior. The methods behind the boogeyman stories are the same as the urban legend of the twentieth century from which Halloween borrows heavily. As the film showcases, these stories are also reclaimed by children to scare one another.

There is no set description for the boogeyman. In most stories, it just is, it exists, it is evil, and that’s the end of it, which actually makes it a perfect descriptor for Michael Myers. It’s incredibly non-specific, so the blank slate of Michael’s mask is a perfect image to embody this monster. Francisco Goya’s 1797 artwork Que viene el Coco depicts the boogeyman slinking toward two children who are held close by their protective mother. That image is essential. Swap that mother with Laurie Strode and you essentially have Halloween. We don’t see anything of the boogeyman’s form in this artwork because he disguises himself under a white sheet. That is something that Michael obviously does as well. The title of that artwork even translates in English to “The Boogeyman is Coming,” a line directly stated in the film.

I don’t think it’s likely that Goya’s art served any direct inspiration for Halloween, but that’s what I’m getting at with all of this. This was all in the air, this was the cultural backdrop in which Carpenter’s film was made, and it’s essential to look at those origins, of the holiday and the boogeyman and the country’s relation to real-life violence at the time, to establish the cultural factors and the way they are reflected in the film itself.