“To Live Through That Night Again:” The Haunting of Haddonfield in ‘Halloween 4’
Halloween III had not been successful in theaters, to the point that instead of marking a new direction for the franchise as had been the plan, it nearly killed it instead. Through no fault of its own, too, because it’s extremely good. Audiences had simply not taken to the new direction, probably because there had already been two films following the same story before that. It was clear that viewers wanted the Halloween they knew. They wanted to music, the mask, the town, the atmosphere and more than anything they wanted Michael Myers. While that decision probably became obvious about as soon as the third movie opened, it took six years for it to actually take shape — so to speak. Part of this had to do with the changing hands in regards to the rights to the franchise. After Halloween III, Universal was no longer involved with the series, so the rights to a potential Halloween 4 briefly went to Cannon Films. There are still rumors that in that extremely small window where Michael Myers and Leatherface were within the same company, there were discussions about a potential crossover between the two, which would have beaten Freddy vs. Jason to the punch by well over a decade.
While Cannon still had the rights to Halloween, returning producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill decided that they would not return to write the script as they had for the first sequel. Instead, they commissioned Dennis Etchison, who had written the novelizations for Halloween II and Halloween III under the pseudonym Jack Martin. Together with Carpenter, Etchsion hashed out the overall story and concept, then went off to write the first, unused script for the movie. In this draft, Haddonfield had canceled all celebrations of Halloween considering what had happened in the past, in attempt to move on and forget all about Michael Myers. The larger ideas centered on the idea that if you repress evil, all you really do is bring it back stronger than ever. It’s that repression that leads to Michael’s return as an actual ghost, given that everyone involved with Halloween II had been pretty certain he was dead.
That of course didn’t get made and when it was decided not to move forward with that script, Carpenter and Hill finally washed their hands of the series. The one remaining person from the original Halloween was Moustapha Akkad, who would from this point on truly become the series’ biggest champion. Moving forward with nothing but a rejected script, Akkad only knew one thing going into Halloween 4 and that was that Michael Myers had to come back.
With that in mind, the Return of Michael Myers subtitle is almost ridiculously fitting. Much like Jason Lives before it, it announced right in the title that the filmmakers had recognized and were willing to right perceived mistakes, restoring the franchise to glory, as well as to its overall status quo.
Even though Etchison’s script went unused, there are nonetheless some notable similarities — however unintentional they may be — to the movie that actually wound up getting made. Unlike Etchison’s version, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is not, in essence, a ghost story. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t ultimately feel like one. While it might not be a physical or literal ghost story, Halloween 4 is still very much about a haunting in the way Michael Myers has, for the past ten years, haunted the entire town.
This makes sense, as right from the opening moments, the sequel is designed to make us feel the location more than ever before. Haddonfield is much more of a character here than it had been in the first or second movies. The opening montage not only depicts the season better than maybe any other moment in the franchise, but also sets a mood and tone that hangs over the rest of the film. While people are still having fun, getting ready for Halloween, going trick-or-treating and genuinely engaging in all aspects of the routine, there’s a cloud that hangs over all of it, partially due to the fact that we as the audience know that the thing responsible for creating this sense of dread in the first place is of course going to return. Even among the generally, blissfully unaware young cast who were all children when it happened, this ominous memory still exists. When Brady asks who Michael Myers is, all Rachel has to say is “ten years ago” for it to click. And that’s really fascinating to think about, that the people growing up in Haddonfield at this point remember what Michael did rather than who he was.
In the first movie, Michael was already something of a ghost story. That was very much baked into the concept. As Carpenter pointed out, every town has that one haunted house. The Myers house is something that everyone in Haddonfield knows about. Everybody remembers it, everyone remembers what happened. Even if it was one horrific act fifteen years ago, it’s the kind of thing people talk about forever. Kids tell each other rumors about it, even Laurie and her friends know about it, the grave keeper is quick to reminisce about the story while also attempting to tell one of his own. That’s what it feels like he’s doing with Loomis, telling tales of local history just like swapping ghost stories. After Michael came home the first time, things only got so much worse. In Halloween 4 the ghost story is no longer about a girl being killed in her bedroom by her little brother, but an entire town that suffered an unspeakable mass murder over the course of a single evening.
The way the town has been haunted by Michael Myers is represented in the film in an almost split way. First, you have Sheriff Ben Meeker, who points out to Loomis that cops are the first ones to remember what went down and remember this man in particular. Meeker wants to do anything and everything he can to avoid “a repeat of ten years ago,” because having to endure that is certainly the town’s biggest fear. Whereas the police tried to keep things quiet the first time and failed spectacularly, Meeker wants to set up an immediate response, to get people off the streets and safe in their houses until morning. Unfortunately, it’s a response that Michael has prepared for, as one of the first things he does as he returns to town is to wipe out the entire police force.
Then, conversely, you have Earl and his drunken lynch mob, who have the exact opposite response as the police. Their connection feels much more personal, driven by a need for revenge on behalf of the entire town. It’s even pointed out that Earl lost his son in Michael Myers’ initial attack. While it’s never made clearly exactly who that is, it’s been long-speculated to be Bob, from the original film. Unlike the police, Earl and his gang have absolutely no plans, no strategies. They just arm up and get plastered, load into their trucks and search the town with drunken eyes for anything that might look like Michael Myers. Unsurprisingly, it gets a random townsperson killed. But this huge lack of oversight and accountability only goes to show just how quick the town, as a whole, is to react to try and avoid what is already an unavoidable outcome of another terrible Michael Myers attack.
Just as Haddonfield has been haunted by what Michael did in 1978, each major character is haunted as well. This starts naturally with Loomis, who treated Michael like a specter before the first film even began. Loomis has certainly been haunted by Michael the longest, but now it truly defines him to the point that his previous encounter with the shape left him covered in physical scars. Loomis has spent the past decade watching over Michael, but given that his patient has been in a coma since the events of Halloween II, Loomis has been met with more ridicule than ever. By the time we meet up with him in this film, Loomis is much older, his previous encounter with Michael has taken a huge physical toll on him, and whatever was left of his reputation is gone. He’s seen as a sad and delusional old man. And if that matters to him, he doesn’t show it, because everything he said the first time was proven right. There’s an unwavering selflessness to Loomis throughout Halloween 4.
When Loomis goes to Hoffman after Michael’s escape, one of the first things he tells him is, “I don’t want anyone to have to live through that night again.” Nothing speaks to how haunted he is by what happened better than that. It’s also the line that completely defines Loomis’s arc throughout the movie. In Halloween, Loomis had spent years trying to keep Michael locked up because he knew exactly what he was capable of and no one believed it. He knew exactly what was going to happen and despite that, he was absolutely powerless to stop it. In Halloween 4, it’s worse, because it all happened. Everything Loomis warned everyone about came true. There’s a precedence now. He has been forced to live through it once and will do anything to stop it from happening again and once again, he can’t. The thing that makes Loomis so fascinating in this film, though, is that he’s at least somewhat aware of that. He’s determined, but it’s a determination that’s almost married to a knowledge that he will probably fail. As he says later on in the movie, when asked if he actually knows what to do to defeat Michael, “maybe nobody knows how to stop him.”
It’s best represented in the scene where Loomis first encounters Michael at the gas station. In the original, Loomis wanted to do whatever it took to stop the shape by any means necessary. That’s still a factor here, but in this scene we also see him attempt to bargain with Michael for the first time ever. He lays his life on the line, presents himself as a sacrifice, saying, “If you want another victim, take me. But leave those people in peace.” It’s a hero making moment, a pure act of selflessness, and it also entirely stems from the fact that he knows exactly what is about to happen and he cannot bear to watch it happen again.
For barely starting out in her life, our young new protagonist Jamie is also very haunted in her own right, but not so much by Michael Myers. There’s an element of that, to be sure. It’s clear that news got out of Laurie’s relationship to Michael after the events of Halloween II, so with Jamie being Laurie’s daughter, everyone in town knows that Michael is her uncle. Kids taunt her with it, she has nightmares about Michael right from the opening moments of the movie. But if there’s one thing she is truly haunted by, it’s the memory of her mother. Jamie listens to stories of her mom from Rachel, she keeps her mother’s picture on hand to comfort her when she’s scared. She’s at a difficult point, especially as a young kid, of being taken in by a new family while her mom’s death is still fresh, as Rachel even states that it’s been less than a year. And there’s no doubt a fear of stepping comfortably into this new family while holding onto the memory of her mother. With that in mind, albeit in a very dark way, it only makes sense that after touching hands with Michael at the end — a way of coming to terms with her biological family in its own right — it’s Jamie’s foster mother that she winds up stabbing. At least in the context of the individual film, without taking its immediate sequel into account, it’s almost like a reclaiming of her own family, on one hand refusing to allow her mother to be replaced, while also obviously giving into the murderous urges that had defined her uncle, and finally claiming her tragic, terrible family legacy.
Halloween 4 sidesteps the need to wrap things up with a concrete conclusion that had been clearly displayed at the end of Halloween II. Instead, it brings us back to the end of Halloween (although it’s obviously a direct reference to that movie’s opening scene) by presenting an ending where there can be no clean victory, perhaps even no victory at all. Whereas we initially had Michael falling off the balcony and disappearing into the night, not defeated but simply gone, we know have Michael apparently dead but with his evil passed on or rekindled in his niece, with the cycle apparently beginning anew. Either way, the legend lives on and the evil continues. Haddonfield still has a reason to be haunted, and the story appears to shift once again, as if being passed on to someone else to continue telling on yet another cold Halloween night. Given the hold it has on the town, it’s a perfect ending. Even if Michael Myers is dead — and we obviously know he is not — it doesn’t matter. The ghost story remains and the town is still haunted, no matter what form the story takes from there.
