Tag: john carpenter

Does Michael Myers Ever Die?

Halloween’s Michael Myers is infamous for returning over and over again on Halloween to slay his family and a variety of other victims in his path.  Sometimes, he sustains injuries that no human being could ever sustain at the end of one movie, only to reappear in another film a few years down the road.  So what is the deal? Is Michael Myers an immortal? Horror Enthusiast analyzes some of the most key points in revealed throughout the Halloween franchise which explain Michael’s never-ending killing cycle!

Can Michael Myers Live Forever?

Dr Loomis describes the first time he saw Michael Myers as essentially meeting the devil himself. He admits that he felt Michael was savable, however, after 8 years of trying to mentally repair Michael, he gave up and began trying to keep him locked up.  Loomis describes Michael Myers as pure evil.  Being made of ‘pure evil’ would most certainly explain Michael’s incredible survival skills. Here is a list of the ways he has ‘died’ throughout the Halloween films…

Michael Meyers Defeats Timeline

In Halloween (1978), Michael gets a full revolver of bullets in the chest and falls from a second story window.

In Halloween II (1981), Michael gets shot 8 times, including once in each eyeball, and then blown to smithereens via oxygen and ether tanks in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) features a practical firing squad as Michael receives a barrage of bullets, from both rifles and shotguns, and falls into a mine shaft.  Law enforcement toss some dynamite into the shaft along with him in an attempt to finish him.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) presents Michael’s elaborate survival of the previous film’s ‘dynamite ending’ (pun intended), and showcases Michael’s building strength strength.

In Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Michael is injected with a solution that is revealed to be a tranquilizer and then beat with a pipe.  He still escapes.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) brings back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, who crushes her brother against a tree with an ambulance and decapitates him with an axe. However, this was apparently not Michael (as revealed in Resurrection, 2002).

In Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Michael suffers an electrocution. He is also lit on fire.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), the slasher gets shot multiple times, stabbed in the chest, falls from a second story window (like the first film) and then gets shot in the face.  He survives.

And Rob Zombie’s sequel, Halloween II (2009), Michael was stabbed many times with a butcher knife, wounds both in the chest and face. Despite this film depicting him dead, he always seems to escape somehow. 

Will Michael Myers Ever Die?

Michael always seems to surprise fans. No matter how many ways they have tried to kill him, he appears to have infinite strength and infinite lives.  Still, the Danny McBride 2018 rewrite frames a mortal, much more human slasher. McBride has explained that the Halloween franchise has gotten too corny and that it deserves to reboot, back to the original Carpenter-style horror it was in 1978. Carpenter must agree, as he is listed as the lead producer on the 2018 Halloween remake.  In fact, Michael Myers has been made out to be much more vulnerable than ever before in the upcoming film.

Halloween (2018) After Michael is trapped in a fortified basement and the house explodes the camera cuts back to the smoldering ruins. Alas these is not real evidence that he was destroyed.

After many attempts it seems clear he cannot be killed by any conventional methods. Is he immortal is still TBD, but he sure is not easy to kill. Can you really kill True Evil though?

What Is The 3^rd Halloween Movie About?

Halloween’s second sequel, the 3^rd movie in the franchise, left a lot of fans really confused.  Whether having seen it when it was released in 1982, or later down the road after many other Halloween movies were released, it is undeniable that it does not seem to fit in with the rest of the franchise.  Halloween III: Season of the witch (1982) is extremely well-done, however, and is absolutely scary in its own right. The oddball in the franchise is about a shady Halloween mask company called “Silver Shamrock Novelties,” who produce some super realistic and terrifying looking masks. These masks glow in the dark too, but that’s not all…they also take over your brain!

Literally, the masks are micro-chipped and every kid in America wants one! The mask company releases these creepy commercials that hypnotize kids into reciting the eerie Silver Shamrock theme song.

A Different Type of Fear

The Silver Shamrock Novelties company is creepy in every way. They utilize high-tech (for 1982 any way) surveillance equipment, mind-control devices, and implant microchips into their masks.  They have brainwashing commercials and maintain control over an entire town. They even implement a curfew! This new type of fear that is created in Halloween part 3 is that of conspiracy and the control of society…almost a 1984 meets The Matrix (1999) kind of fear.  Plus, if someone learns too much or if they get too close to figuring things out, they get taken out!

Why Isn’t Michael Myers In Halloween Part III?

Most Halloween fans instantly recognize this as the only film in the series that is not focused on the slasher who made the franchise famous.  Michael Myers is not present in the film because the creators believed the franchise deserved to become much larger than just one single horror slasher.  John Carpenter (Halloween creator) and Debra Hill, produced and helped direct this film.  They were also involved on many other Halloween films (basically all of them in one fashion or another).  Thus, their opinion mattered greatly when they explained the franchise should become an anthology series in the horror genre.  They believed there should be a new fear in each Halloween movie…each focusing on the holiday by which the movies are titled.  The director, Tommy Lee Wallace, shared this belief and had written Season of the Witch with the intention of it being the first of the attempt at an authentic horror anthology series.

Mind Control Instead of Traditional Slashers 

Writer Debra Hill has explained that the idea behind the third Halloween movie was to create a mind control type of “pod” movie.  She has cited Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) as inspiration on more than one occasion. The name of the film, Season of the Witch, is a tip of the hat to George A Romero’s Season of the Witch (1973).

Worst Grossing Halloween Movie

Unfortunately for Wallace, Carpenter, and Hill, and everyone else involved, Halloween III: Season of the Witch was the worst grossing Halloween movie of the entire franchise.  The movie had a budget of $2.5 million and only grossed a little over $14 million in the United States. Most people have attributed the negative reviews and poor earnings from having been marketed as a part of the Halloween franchise. In fact, it could be suggested that if it were to have been marketed on its own it would have done much better (such as being called “Season of the Witch,” maybe notating that it were BY the creators of Halloween). 

This was an experiment that could have been great, but terribly which left critics under-impressed for the hype.  While the movie may be underrated (it is actually decent), making the Halloween franchise an anthology series would have been a fantastic idea.  Sure, some of them would be worse than others, but the idea has had real success previously with other franchises and concepts.  Examples include the very popular Friday the 13^th TV series, the Outer limits, the Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, the Crypt Keeper, and others.

Final Words About Season of the Witch

Ultimately, there has probably never been a bad film produced, written or directed by John Carpenter. Having Debra Hill co-producing and involved on the project also instantly makes it better. That said, Halloween’s Season of the Witch creates a deeper paranoia than the traditional Halloween stories. And although Halloween 3 was totally separate from the Michael Myers story line altogether, it contributed greatly to the ‘conspiracy horror’ genre and has burned a mark in the Halloween franchise, forever!