Halloween (1978) Revisited: Why Michael Myers Kills, and Why the Boogeyman Still Works

John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween is the film I have rewatched every October since my parents stopped paying attention to what I had on TV, and this year, for the first time, I think I finally went cuckoo enough to understand the psychology of Michael Myers. I mean why he kills, why he appears in the background at the exact moments he does, and what a killer like him represented to audiences in 1978 compared with what he represents nearly five decades later.

Here is a hint for where this piece ends up: it is the same sick thing. To get there, it helps to look at why Halloween is considered the primordial slasher film, and why the most popular theory about Michael's motive runs straight into the people who made it.

Laurie Strode's key under the mat puts her in Michael Myers' sights

On Halloween night in 1963, in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, teenager Judith Myers is stabbed to death after hooking up with her boyfriend. We only see the killer from their point of view until the reveal: it is her six year old little brother, Michael. Fifteen years later, Michael escapes from his mental institution, and Dr. Loomis, well aware of the evil Michael represents, is on the hunt.

Michael returns to his abandoned home, where he sets his sights on Laurie Strode. Her unfortunate mistake was listening to her father, who told her to leave the key to the Myers house under the mat for prospective buyers because he plans to sell it. Nice going, Laurie. Michael then stalks her and Tommy Doyle, the boy she will babysit that night, in a string of creepy sightings. Some happen so fast that he seems able to appear and disappear like a ghost. He wears mechanic coveralls and a mask the costumers made by painting a 1975 Captain Kirk mask white, making the eyeholes bigger than William Shatner could ever open them and brushing back the hair.

Loomis finds Judith's headstone missing and assumes Michael will return to the Myers house. That night, Laurie babysits Tommy while her friend Annie babysits Lindsey Wallace across the street, planning to put the kids in one house so the girls can hook up with their boyfriends. Michael kills the family dog, then kills Annie after hiding in her car. Their friend Linda and her boyfriend Bob arrive at the Wallace house, where Michael pins Bob to the wall with a knife, poses as a ghost for Linda and strangles her as she tries to call Laurie.

Laurie finds her friends' bodies, starting with Annie posed in front of Judith's headstone, and flees back to the Doyle house. She fights back, but Michael never seems to die. Loomis shoots him out the upstairs window, yet when he looks over the balcony the body is gone, and the film ends on Michael's breathing over shots of Haddonfield.

Jamie Lee Curtis, a hidden fly and a tiny budget made Halloween the slasher blueprint

Every component of Halloween is seen as iconic and deeply influential on the slasher films that followed. There is the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis in her first ever film role. She is the daughter of Hollywood royalty Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, yes, the Janet Leigh, scream queen of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which made her someone destined to play this role.

Since I have referenced Psycho before, I feel obligated to point out an incidental Easter egg not enough people talk about. In the opening titles, look closely at the jack o'lantern and you will see a fly crawling around that crooked smile, which I choose to see as the horror film gods calling back the final line of Psycho, about how she wouldn't even harm a fly.

Then there are the staple elements cited in films like Scream: the final girl archetype, the suburban setting, and rules like teenagers who have sex get killed, or never say "I'll be right back." There is even the meta touch of characters putting on a classic horror film. In Scream, it is Halloween. In Halloween, it is Howard Hawks' 1951 The Thing, which Carpenter would ironically remake four years later as yet another horror masterpiece.

Carpenter's own work here is incredible. He shot the film in South Pasadena on a $300,000 budget and grossed $70 million, one of the hugest returns on investment of any movie ever. He composed the haunting score himself and crafted every scene with incredible suspense.

Michael Myers is always lurking somewhere in the background of Haddonfield

From the early minutes, you sense Michael is always observing from somewhere in Haddonfield's suburban streets, plaguing them even in broad daylight. We hear him breathing inside the Myers house when Laurie drops off the key, and he steps into the foreground as she walks away humming. He appears outside her school, eyes on her through the window, then disappears after she answers a question about fate, a shot that came back later in movies like It Follows and Hereditary.

He grabs Lonnie after Lonnie bullies Tommy and breaks his pumpkin, then follows Tommy home for a block or so. He drives past Laurie and her friends in Loomis' stolen station wagon and gets mad when Annie yells "speed kills," probably triggered by the word kills. He stands behind the hedges in the famous shot and vanishes when Annie rounds them, then stares up at Laurie's bedroom from the clothesline and disappears again. When Loomis arrives at the broken into hardware store just after the girls pull away, Michael turns onto the main road right behind him. I love this shot, because Carpenter must have timed it perfectly in a very natural long take with lots of other traffic.

Then things really get cooking. Tommy sees Michael crossing the street and thinks it is the boogeyman, and he's right. Michael lurks outside the kitchen as Annie strips after spilling butter on her clothes, kills the dog, and locks her in the laundry room. He appears in the background when she leaves the kitchen door open and is gone when the shot pans back. I love that when Annie returns to her locked car with the keys, she never wonders why the door is now open. She figures it out too late, finding the windows fogged as Michael pops up in the back seat.

His shadow passes on the wall as Linda and Bob have sex with a jack o'lantern on the nightstand, and he wears a bed sheet and Bob's glasses as a ghost before strangling Linda with the telephone cord. Later his mask looms out of the shadows behind Laurie, he pops out from behind the sofa, and she stabs him in the neck with a knitting needle. Laurie smartly opens the balcony door while hiding, which sets up why it is open when Loomis shoots Michael through it.

The scariest Michael Myers sighting is the one where he is missing

Of all those appearances and jump scares, the scariest is the final one, where Michael doesn't appear in the frame at all. Throughout, you can see an ingenious construction by Carpenter to deliver the maximum amount of suspense.

Making us even more paranoid is a sighting I don't think most people clocked, minutes before Laurie reaches the Myers house as she walks away from her father: a station wagon in the distant background. It is hard to tell if that is Loomis' car driven by Michael or one of the many station wagons in a 1978 suburb. Either way, Carpenter has made us so paranoid that we kind of want it to be Michael this early.

Tommy Doyle is right that The Shape is the boogeyman

There has been no shortage of speculation about why Michael kills. Tommy assumes the thing he saw, which the script and end credits creepily call The Shape, is the boogeyman, and asks Laurie to define it as they flip through his comic books. Those include Marvel's Howard the Duck number 26 from 1978, with Howard asking on the cover, "Have you heard the one about sudden death?"

Laurie spends the film dismissing the boogeyman as mere superstition, the kind of thing Tommy's bullies taunted him about. By the end, Laurie, Tommy and really all of us are left wondering whether evil this tangible shouldn't be called the actual boogeyman.

The Halloween sequels kept rewriting why Michael Myers kills

Halloween 2, set later that same night, reveals Laurie and Michael are siblings, a backstory later retconned. Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the one film without Michael as the antagonist, as the producers wanted to try an anthology story. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers transferred his obsession to Laurie's daughter Jamie, technically his niece, with an implied telepathic link.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and even more so Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the one with Paul Rudd, made him the product of a Celtic cult carrying the curse of Thorn, explaining his seemingly supernatural strength and apparent immortality because hell will not accept him. Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween reimagined his origin as a broken household. But pretty much all of these were retconned, especially by David Gordon Green's trilogy from 2018 to 2022, which built a new continuity from that first night without the bloodline. So the assumption among most fans is that Laurie was in the wrong place at the wrong time and reminded Michael too much of the sister he slaughtered.

John Carpenter and Debra Hill reject the idea that Michael punishes sex

Film scholar Carol J. Clover, in her 1987 study Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, argues that killers in films like Halloween are fueled by a "psychosexual fury" and amount to moral scolding of young women for sexually liberated choices. One could argue Michael's defining moment was seeing his sister have sex when she was supposed to be looking after him, and killing her for it. As an adult, seeing babysitters her age neglect their children for sex triggers a code of punishment he feels obligated to dole out, so after Annie strips down to abandon her charge, Michael does the same to her and even crucifies her with Judith's headstone.

Carpenter and his cowriter Debra Hill have pushed back. Carpenter said: "It has been suggested that I was making some kind of moral statement. Believe me, I'm not. In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers." Elsewhere he argued the most sexually uptight girl is the one who keeps stabbing Michael, not because she is a virgin but because of her repressed energy. Hill said, "There was absolutely no intent for that to be the underlying reason," adding that her Catholic sensibility leaked into the script unintentionally.

Dr. Loomis and a cut script scene insist Michael is pure evil

Loomis, and characters who echo him across the franchise, simplify it: Michael is just pure evil. Loomis recalls first examining the boy and realizing that what lived behind his eyes was "purely and simply evil."

A version of the escape in the original screenplay, which did not make the final cut, has Loomis talk to another escaped patient, then tell the nurse, "He asked me if I could help him find his purple lawn mower." Then, seriously: "It's all right now. He's gone. The evil's gone." I loved reading this because it shows the patients were all tortured by Michael's mere presence. It is like the idea in Halloween 6 that even hell decides he is too evil for it, or the unhinged screaming of the patients in the yard in the 2018 Halloween.

Debra Hill built Halloween on the Samhain idea that you can't kill evil

Producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad reportedly approached Carpenter after Assault on Precinct 13 about a horror film featuring a killer who stalked babysitters, and some say it was originally going to be called The Babysitter Murders. In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Hill explained her interest in Halloween's Celtic origins in Samhain, the harvest night of bonfires and treats when the barrier between the living and the dead was thinnest. "The idea was that you couldn't kill evil and that was how we came about the story," she said, describing Halloween as "the night where all the souls are led out to wreak havoc on the living." She added that Carpenter's idea of a town with a dark secret, whose evil comes back, is what made it work.

I honestly think we can trust Hill the most on Michael's intent. The 2003 documentary Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest confirms it was her hand and arm as young Michael in that opening long take. She was literally the slasher that slashed Judith Myers. So we are getting somewhere: the idea that every hometown has a legend of a freak murder it fears will come back.

Pat Gill's take makes suburbia's false security the real boogeyman

Pat Gill's 2002 study The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family argues that films following Halloween put suburban and small town teenagers in danger again and again. "These films seem to mock white flight to gated communities," she wrote, mocking parents' attempts to shield children from the city. "The danger is within."

I love this take. The real boogeyman is suburbia's false sense of security, the American dream's lie that families could protect their kids by fleeing cities into cul de sacs and neighborhood watch signs. That theme recurs in Poltergeist, The Goonies, E.T., It, and now Stranger Things.

Late 1970s serial killer fears made Halloween terrifying in 1978

Audiences in 1978 had a very real fear: the mind of a serial killer, someone who murders three or more people, a concept entering public consciousness as law enforcement and media linked violent crimes. The Zodiac Killer frightened Bay Area communities through letters and cryptograms in papers like the San Francisco Chronicle. The Manson family was connected to high profile murders, there was the Summer of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler terrorized Los Angeles. From 1972 to 1978 in Chicago, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 young men, and from 1974 to 1978 Ted Bundy killed dozens of young women and girls across western states. The Golden State Killer attacked dozens in California in the 70s and 80s.

Such killers led to the FBI's behavioral sciences division, and in 1981 the New York Times first used the term serial killer in connection with the Atlanta child killings. None of these victims were protected by suburbia. However much the filmmakers insist they never set out to target Dawn and Stacey of the Babysitters Club, that is clearly how society received Halloween and the subgenre it kicked off.

Jamie Lee Curtis' improvised song is why Laurie Strode becomes the target

Laurie isn't targeted for incompetence, inherited sin or being a temptress. She doesn't wander off like the kids in Evil Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, mourn a traumatic death like Ari Aster's heroines, or suffer the gaslighting of Rosemary's Baby and Alien. "All Laurie Strode did was exist in a suburb in 1978." She did a suburban chore and walked away humming within earshot of the wrong guy.

I'm obsessed with that moment because the song isn't real. At a 2014 Beyond Fest Q&A, Curtis recalled Carpenter telling her to make up a tune, so she sang "I Wish I Had You All Alone." My theory is that Michael imprints on Laurie, believing this girl who reminds him of his sister made up a love song just for him. That's why she's the final girl: he will deliver on that promise of just the two of them.

Fate drives Michael Myers, as it drives every boogeyman

So Halloween says that in suburban America, something that sweet can make you a target, until you are pounding on neighbors' doors while they dismiss you as a prank. The girl who cried boogeyman. What drives him is what Laurie names in class: fate, a menace in every hometown that stress tests our security, and the safer we feel in our cul de sacs, the more shattering it is when it finds us.

That's my 2025 contribution: Halloween endures because of American suburbia's hysteria over serial killers and our need to build cozy nests against outside worlds that always find their way in. You may want to grab that knitting needle before looking behind your couch. Do you buy fate as Michael's motive, or do you have a different hot take on Halloween?