Jamie Lloyd and Experiencing Death Through a Child’s Eyes in ‘Halloween 4’
Children have always been at the center of Halloween. The very first scene of that first movie, we watched through the eyes of six-year-old Michael Myers as he stabbed his sister to death. Not long after that opening sequence, we were introduced to young Tommy Doyle, and then later to Lindsey Wallace, both kids babysat by Laurie and Annie that Halloween night. It’s hard to have a movie about a killer stalking babysitters without first having kids around for them to babysit.
In Halloween II, children were peripheral. Tommy and Lindsey don’t appear again after they run screaming from the Doyle house, alerting Loomis to the presence of Michael Myers and thus likely saving Laurie’s life. But a kid still provides one of the sequel’s darkest moments. While the town is gripped in the developing news frenzy that Michael has returned home, there is a boy at the hospital with a disgusting, bleeding mouth because he bit into an apple that had a razor in it — an incident that is horrific and entirely unrelated to Michael Myers. The entire plot of Halloween III hinged on the mass murder of children and the protagonist of that film was an absent father.
But no entry in the saga had truly had a child protagonist until Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Jamie Lloyd brings us right back to the experience of that opening scene of the original film, although it is less obvious at the beginning than it is at the end. It becomes clearer and clearer as the movie goes on. Through her eyes, we are once again witnessing death through the eyes of a child, and that is true from the first moment she is on screen. At eight years old, Jamie has been dealing with death long before the audience is introduced to her. It has been eleven months since the car accident that killed her mother, just shy of a full year, and Jamie is still grieving. How could she not be? Her entire life has been uprooted.
She welcomes this new family, though. She wants a mother and a father, she wants Rachel to be her big sister. But everywhere she turns, there are reminders of what she has lost. This comes in its most literal form from the bullies at school. They dangle bandages in front of her face and taunt her with phrases like “Jamie’s mommy’s a mummy!” The things they say to her are unbelievably cruel and it would absolutely be within reason for a kid to completely break down and sob over that.
Even as an adult, I think I would be stunned into silence. Instead, Jamie runs away and gets herself out of that situation. Running to a nearby tree outside, she allows herself a few tears, then calms herself down without any adult to help her, telling herself, “You’re okay,” and wiping her tears away as Rachel pulls up, so that her foster sister doesn’t have to see them. Like many kids in the foster system, Jamie has been forced to become self-reliant at a very early age.
Having lost her parents so young, Jamie’s relationship with death is not what a typical child’s would be, at least not at her age. Some of the other children tormenting her likely don’t even grasp the weight of what they’re saying. It’s easy to pick out the only girl in class not wearing a costume and single her out to make fun of, but it’s much more extreme to laugh at the simple fact that her mother is dead, unless that is such a distant concept that you really don’t even know what you’re saying because you’re likely years away from facing anything like the reality that Jamie has to live with every day.
There is another character that defines how Jamie views death in the film, though, and that is Michael Myers himself. It’s evident from the very beginning that Jamie has not grown up sheltered around the topic of her uncle. She knows exactly who he is, and she knows exactly what he has done. Even though she has never met him, Michael is a boogeyman haunting the nightmares of his young niece, simply because of the stories she’s been told. Presumably, she heard these stories from her mother, perhaps as a kind of warning against the evils she was unprepared for when she first encountered The Shape. But Jamie hears it from everyone else as well, especially the kids who torment her at school. The specter of Michael Myers looms large over Haddonfield, even ten years later.
Even though Rachel steps easily into the protector role, a position she treats more and more like a badge of honor as the film goes on, Jamie is often looking out for herself. It’s most evident in that scene when she calms herself down after being bullied, wiping away her tears so that Rachel won’t see them and insisting nothing’s wrong when Rachel at the very least sees that she is upset. Even after Jamie is left in Rachel’s care for the evening, Rachel loses track of her as Jamie gets separated from the rest of the group.
Like her mother, Jamie has a sense of unease about her when wandering the streets alone at night, and not just for obvious reasons. She knows she’s being watched, she even warns whoever is out there that she has a big dog — an obvious bluff, whoever it is can clearly see that she doesn’t. It’s still a remarkable thing for a child her age to say. But it comes from the fact that Jamie does not get to have that childhood sense that life is everlasting and that danger only exists in the movies. She knows exactly what can happen to a girl wandering alone in the dark, and she knows it not only because of the harsh reality of her parents death, but also because of her uncle.
Jamie doesn’t know everything, though, as she picks out a clown costume for Halloween without knowing the larger connection. Rachel, who no doubt has grown up with the stories of Michael Myers, does not pick up on it either. That says a lot about the way Haddonfield’s ghost story has changed in the intervening decade. Before Michael returned home in 1978, the only local ghost story was his murder of his sister when he was six-years-old, while wearing a very similar clown costume. That one murder pales in comparison to what he did after he broke out.
In 1988, Judith might as well be forgotten, as is Michael’s original costume. The blank face, the dark coveralls, that is what people recognize. Still, there must be some recognition, however dim, because the moment Jamie holds the costume up in front of her to get a look at it, she sees herself as Michael Myers, as he looked as a boy the night he murdered his sister.
This is a small connection at first, and Jamie is horrified by it. That’s also the genius of it. Even though she’s wearing a similar costume to the clown costume Michael originally wore, even though she momentarily saw herself as him, the viewer doesn’t read too much into it because Jamie is so sweet and innocent. She’s not a normal girl, but she is trying to be one. She is trying to recover and find a family. She wants to feel safe and she wants to feel okay. While Jamie may be intimately familiar with death, while she understands the reality of it better than most children, she doesn’t want to think about it. She holds it at a distance.
Even after putting the costume on, she is happy and smiling, truly getting to be a kid for pretty much the first time in the movie. True to the way kids are in real life, the moment Jamie has an impressive costume, the kids who tormented her invite her to go trick-or-treating with them. Jamie doesn’t get to enjoy the thrills of being a kid on Halloween night for long, however, before the police arrive and the threat of Michael Myers goes from a thing regularly occurring in her nightmares, to a tangible and inescapable fact.
From that point on, as Michael besieges Sheriff Meeker’s house in order to get his hands on this little girl, Jamie gets closer and closer to death as the bodies begin to pile up around her. She might have lost her parents, she might be haunted both by their memory and by the stories of her killer uncle, but she had never seen anyone die and had never physically laid eyes on her uncle until this night. When Michael is shot at the end, Jamie gets as close to death as ever. She walks right up to it. She kneels beside Michael’s body and touches his hand, only for him to rise a moment later, curling his hand around his knife, ready to kill again.
Finally, at the end, death takes its toll on Jamie Lloyd and consumes her entirely. The clown costume she picked becomes less of an homage, and more of an explicit cycle of horror ready to begin anew. The costume is no longer just a reference to the original movie in the final scene of Halloween 4. Now, the camera POV shifts to an all-too-familiar first-person perspective. We watch through the eyes of Jamie’s mask as she stabs her foster mother. This is history repeating itself. Then she stands frozen at the top of the stairs, holding a bloody pair of scissors. Death has consumed her and here, at the end of the film, she has become her uncle. With Michael presumed dead, Jamie has taken his place. With each passing scene, no matter how much she has tried to escape its clutches, by the end her nightmare has come to pass, and the boogeyman has gotten his hands on her. Jamie has, at the horrifying end of Halloween 4, grown so close to death, that she has become it herself.
