Boogie Man Season

October is upon us. And so is Michael Myers. The silent, hulking, masked slayer of the Halloween franchise returns to a cineplex near you to claim his latest batch of nubile victims. Like its dark protagonist, the Halloween series cannot seem to die.

The new movie is called Halloween Kills. It picks up where the 2018 reboot, simply titled Halloween (the third movie in the franchise to use this singular name), leaves off. Without giving anything away to anyone even remotely familiar with the slasher genre, the Boogie Man only seems to die at the end of the last movie. Like Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist who hunts Myers through many of these films, once explained, we are not dealing with a human “man.”

The new movie is the 12th in the franchise. Not that it matters. Like Myers’s body count, it’s a number meaningful only to the fanatical few who are actually keeping track. It is also a number that will, inexorably, climb.

The history of the Halloween franchise

As part of my research on the cultural history of the American asylum, I have tracked this cinematic psychopath through all of his films. I do this because Myers is an escapee of a “failed” mental hospital, Smith’s Grove Sanitarium.

The original Halloween, shot in 30 days on a shoestring budget of $300,000, went on to slay the box office to the tune of $70 million. Audiences couldn’t get enough. So we got Halloween 2 through 12. This parade of celluloid gore has given filmmakers many opportunities to connect Myers to a “broken” mental hospital system, milking it for horror.

The director of the original Halloween, John Carpenter, claimed he based Myers on a mental patient he met while visiting an institution as a college student. “The kid I saw the day I went,” he recalled, “had the Devil’s eyes, and he stared at me with a look of evil, and it terrified me.” Carpenter would “utilize the experience” in his creation. Though he didn’t direct any of the sequels, Carpenter’s vision of an evil mental patient busting out of a failed institution has remained.

In Halloween II, we learn that while in the asylum, Myers was “the ideal patient” because he “didn’t talk… didn’t cry. Didn’t even move.” This notion of the “ideal” mental patient being comatose speaks to deep scorn for hospital therapeutics—ineffectual psychiatrists are happiest when they need only babysit “vegetables.” So thoroughly is Myers killed in this movie (he’s incinerated) that in the next film, he’s not even around. But part 3 didn’t do well. Thus we got Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.

Halloween 4 begins 10 years after number 2, with Myers back in a mental institution, having apparently survived the conflagration. This hospital is fortified and secure. Explains one guard, “This is where society dumps its worst nightmares.” Their mistake is to transfer Myers back to Smith’s Grove. He escapes en route, ushering in another round of carnage.

In Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, we find the protagonist of the previous film, Jamie, in the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic, mute and institutionalized from the trauma of the last movie.

In Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, the filmmakers go beyond psychiatry and into the occult to explain Myers. He is apparently part of a long druidic line of killers who sacrifice their next of kin on Halloween night to spare the “lives of the entire tribe.” Chasing Myers is a demonic cult that wants to birth a new era of darkness and thus wants Myers to die. The cult leader, appropriately, is the superintendent of Smiths Grove Sanitarium. It ends with Myers’s “death,” though we know that won’t stick. It never does.

In Halloween: Resurrection, the eighth movie in the franchise, an adult Laurie Strode (the Final Girl of films one and two, played by Jamie Lee Curtis) lives in the Grace Anderson Sanitarium. When Myers breaks in to kill her, she turns the tables and traps him, but he kills her before she can finish him off. Curtis exits with the line, “I’ll see you in hell.” In fact, she’ll see him in movie number 11.

In Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), the first series reboot, we see Myers escape an abusive prison-like mental hospital where the orderlies supervise rapes of helpless patients. He’s dispatched at the end. In the 2018 reboot, Myers is again back in Smith’s Grove, the premise being that films 2-10 did not happen. He escapes during a transfer and is again “killed” by Lori Strode.

Psychopathy Essential Reads

Is the Psychopathy Checklist Unsuitable for Court?

How a Psychopath Succeeds by Deceiving and Dividing

The new movie, Halloween Kills, opens on October 15th. Presuming this one continues where the last one left off, Michael is out of the institution and already cruising around the neighborhood. We can hope the filmmakers will leave out the asylum this time.