The Return of Michael Myers the Trickster in ‘Halloween: Resurrection’
One of the best things about Halloween: Resurrection, without a doubt, is its return to the style of the original in a few surprising ways. After the rough send off of Laurie Strode, the film centers on a completely new cast of characters. It is still set in Haddonfield, the plot still revolves around the Myers house, but the college kids that make up the core group of characters have no familial or personal ties to the Myers family or any other character in the evolving Halloween legacy. In many ways, at its best at least, Resurrection feels like a lost adaptation of one of the 1990s young adult novels.
The other way in which this film echoes the original is in its depiction of Michael himself. Admittedly, he has a much higher body count, a worse mask, and loses a martial arts fight to Busta Rhymes, so it is not a one-to-one correlation. I’m speaking specifically to the way Michael was characterized as a trickster in that original movie, as an anarchistic spirit of Halloween, and that is absolutely something that this movie embodies, especially as the first sequel where Michael is freed from the shackles of pursuing his own kin.
The depiction of Michael in Resurrection has always been my favorite thing about it. Sometimes, Michael is wrongly characterized as having a child’s intelligence, even though there has never been anything to support that. But this Michael is smart, this Michael is cunning, this returns to the shape as a truly unknowable thing that is operating on some kind of otherworldly intelligence, who can think himself out of and into any situation, and always seems to do it with a sense of sadistic glee. It’s as if he’s telling himself a joke only he can hear. Basically, while the white mask is as stoic as ever, the Michael Myers of Halloween: Resurrecton feels like he is smirking throughout every single scene.
This is evidenced right from the opening, when it is revealed how he survived his supposed decapitation at the end of Halloween H20. It turns out that after Laurie stabbed him and left him for dead, Michael switched places with a paramedic and crushed his larynx so he couldn’t speak, and that is the person Laurie wound up decapitating. This idea was conceived during the production of H20. Jamie Lee Curtis signed off on it, because it meant Laurie could still believe that she had finally killed Michael and be allowed that moment of catharsis as the credits rolled.
I think the fact that they knew this twist when they were still making H20 completely informed and perhaps even defined the depiction of Michael in the next movie. It feels natural. If Michael outsmarted Laurie at Hillcrest, thought his way out of the situation and simply disappeared into the night, that provides a totally different energy as the next film begins, and offers different expectations of Michael. That is at least one expectation to which Resurrection lives up.
Michael’s next, even more devastating move comes when he makes a reference to the move he pulled on the paramedic. When Laurie finally has him on the ropes, hanging him upside down and preparing to deliver the killing blow, Michael starts trying to pull off his mask, just as the paramedic had done. That causes Laurie to hesitate for a moment and, naturally, that one moment is all Michael needs to regain the upper hand. He’s crafty, but he’s also screwing with her.
The institution where Laurie is being kept also houses a patient named Harold who is notorious for escaping his room and who also has an obsession with serial killers. He often recounts their full names, birthdays, and their infamous crimes, which Michael must have overheard on his way into the facility. In one of the craftiest moves of Michael’s career, he frames Harold for Laurie’s murder, literally handing him the knife while an excited Harold proclaims Michael Myers’ triumphant return. If it weren’t for the lackluster sendoff to Jamie Lee Curtis (at least, so we all assumed at the time) this opening would serve as an incredible hype train for the film to follow.
Michael’s trickery takes a bit of a backseat after the opening sequence, but never totally disappears. Upon returning home to find an entire television production has moved in, he uses that to his advantage, playing with the real-time display of the kills, putting on a show and presenting a house of horrors just as he did for Laurie on that first night in 1978. That pairs perfectly with the way the film plays with questions of what is actually real and what was simply planted by the production.
There’s a scene with a mass body pit that takes things to an extreme until the characters quickly learn that all of the body parts are fake, and then that gives way only minutes later to the discovery of Michael’s actual lair, underneath the house. It’s bold of a film to show us where Michael eats and sleeps, but given that the question of what pushed him to murder thankfully goes unanswered, I’ll let them get away with answering the question of where he lays his head.
When Michael kills Jen, shortly after his encounter with Freddie playing the role of “Michael Myers,” he seems to savor the event for the cameras, knowing they are recording it and knowing that after busting Freddie and believing none of what they had seen was real, they will simply watch her die while thinking it’s another scripted moment for the Internet audience. This one isn’t as overtly intentional as Michael’s framing of Harold, but it still works within that vein, and is a moment that seems to showcase that Michael at the very least gets the gist of the situation and is playing with it to his benefit.
In general, the version of the shape presented in Halloween: Resurrection is truly Michael Myers the Asshole. The malicious trickster spirit of the original is back, coupled with a smirking sense of glee and a delight in twisting the knife, and then twisting several more. He is simply a little shit. And while I cannot say Resurrection is my favorite of the series by any margin, that characterization of Michael is something that I will simply always be drawn to.
