“He’s Coming To Get You, Laurie!”: What Dr. Dementia’s Halloween Horror Movie Marathon Tells Us About Michael Myers And Laurie Strode
Michael Myers has always been a more interesting character the less we know about him. In John Carpenter’s Halloween, he isn’t really given much motivation for the killing spree he goes on. Simply and comparatively, he’s a lot like the shark in Jaws: he stalks and he kills because it’s in his nature, and that’s all we really need to know. I will admit, however, not having too much of a problem with his revised relationship to Laurie Strode in Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II. As a matter of fact, Halloween II is my favorite of all the sequels. Not to throw shade on David Gordon Green’s new, canonically retconned sequel. Quite the contrary; I enjoy the new film immensely. Halloween ‘18 has wisely returned Michael Myers to being mortal and not a supernatural force (we’ll see how long that lasts), and reversed Laurie Strode’s connection to him (again), rescuing the franchise from the soap opera contrivances of the last few sequels. But tweaking Michael Myers’ and Laurie Strode’s characters to justify an altered narrative for this franchise isn’t something new. I think David Gordon Green–and not to be left out, Danny McBride–have done a very good job, but John Carpenter and Debra Hill did it first, so one might say David and Danny were following a cycle. I find Halloween II to be more of a piece with its predecessor, and maybe, just maybe, more satisfying from an analytical, subtextual standpoint.
As we all know by now, Halloween II softly retcons stalker and prey to be long separated siblings, tying Myers’ pursuit of Laurie to his compulsion to kill his sister Judith when he was six years old fifteen years prior. Carpenter admits to diving into his (reluctant) screenwriting duties on the sequel without a proper story in mind, and made the choice to just recycle the plot from the first film. Myers killed one sister fifteen years ago, now he’s escaped from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium to kill the other. I always thought that scenario worked for Halloween II. Is it formulaic? Sure it is. But sometimes formula works. It’s only with subsequent sequels where I think this MO became seriously and horribly contrived. And even with all his exposition, Dr. Loomis’s soliloquies on Michael Myers (“He was my patient for fifteen years,” “He had the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes,” “An hour ago I stood up and fired six shots into him, he just got up and walked away,” “I am talking about the real possibility he is still out there,” “This isn’t a man,”), even his mock grade school lecture on the festival of Samhain in Halloween II, failed to lift the veil completely on Michael Myers. However, I do believe we still get some real insight into The Shape’s motivations in Halloween and Halloween II; only it’s implied rather than expounded upon. I believe his motivations, and his link to Laurie, are implied in an intertextual fashion by the line-up of Dr. Dementia’s horror movie marathon, viewed in the original Halloween by Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, and by Mr. & Mrs. Elrod (well, mostly Mrs. Elrod) and Haddonfield Memorial Clinic security guard Mr. Garrett in Halloween II. Dr. Dementia’s marathon creates a Freudian throughline that bridges the two films, and stalker and prey, together.
Dr. Dementia shows three films that fateful night: Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951), and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). All three are favorites from Carpenter’s childhood. On the surface, one might conclude Carpenter programmed this marathon for sentimental reasons, especially with a ‘50s science fiction tale like Forbidden Planet kicking things off.
In Forbidden Planet, Leslie Nielsen and his crew of space travelers come to the aid of a scientist, his daughter and Robby the Robot, defending them from a creature of the subconscious–an Id monster–on an exotic planet. But what does this have to do with Michael Myers?
In his insightful analytical essay, ”The Tao of Michael Myers: or the Hidden “Shapes” of John Carpenter’s Halloween” (1978), genre film analyst and critic John Kenneth Muir points out: “Michael Myers is a physical representation of Laurie’s Id.
“This is the Freudian-interpretation of John Carpenter’s Halloween. As you may be aware, the Id is a component of Freud’s so-called ‘psychic apparatus’ or ‘structural model for the human psyche.’ Basically, the Id houses our unconscious, our basic drives, our instincts. It controls our desire for sex and our other appetites too. It is amoral, chaotic and egocentric.
“Consider now the buttoned-down Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), both a good student and a responsible babysitter. She clearly symbolizes the rationalist Ego, the part of us that holds the reigns of control over our lives and seeks to ‘please’ the Id in a socially and culturally acceptable fashion. The Ego represents common sense; even consciousness itself. This is the Freudian ‘borrowed face,’ the veneer of appropriateness we all put on over our Ids.
“Accordingly, underneath the mask, Michael represents Laurie’s Id, unfettered and on-the-loose, lashing out at those around her who more ‘honestly’ contend with their drives and libidos (Annie and Linda) than do the Ego. Laurie even seems to ‘activate’ Michael Myers, at least in a sense, by singing aloud a modern magical incantation (a ballad) on the day he stalks her. The lyrics to that ballad go: ‘I wish I had you all alone, just the two of us,’ and set up, rather nicely, the thrust of Michael’s murderous mission on October 31st. He systematically kills all of Laurie’s friends and acquaintances until it is, indeed, just the two of them. They have sex (or hope to have sex), and he destroys them because they express what Laurie cannot.”
Muir cites his conclusion thusly, citing Vera Dika’s slasher study, ”Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle“:
“Horror scholar and professor Vera Dika wrote that ‘Carpenter openly represents Michael as Laurie’s id. This reading is supported by the inclusion of footage from Forbidden Planet (1956)…The earlier film had portrayed a situation in which the unconscious desires, or the id, of the main character became manifest and threatened to destroy him and his world. Similarly, Laurie is almost destroyed by the strength of her repressed unconscious impulses. Her battle with Michael is a substitute for the sexual act.’”
Muir further legitimizes this analysis with a quote from John Carpenter himself, interviewed in Danny Peary’s invaluable book Cult Movies:
“John Carpenter himself lends some credence to this Freudian interpretation of Halloween by noting that Laurie, ‘The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife…Not because she’s a virgin but because all that repressed sexual energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy…she doesn’t have a boyfriend, and she finds someone — him.’”
Forbidden Planet does more than kick off Dr. Dementia’s horror movie marathon or strike a parallel between The Shape and the Creature of the Id. It is the focal point from which all of the subtext for Michael’s motivations stems. Even Loomis’s sermon on the festival of Samhain in Halloween II--“Samhain isn’t evil spirits, it isn’t goblins or ghosts or witches; it’s the unconscious mind”–harkens back to the Creature of the Id and Forbidden Planet.
Now, if Forbidden Planet suggests that Laurie represents the Ego and The Shape represents the Id, it would then stand to reason that Dr. Loomis represents the Superego. All three–Id, Ego, Superego–serve Freud’s psychoanalytic model. Primarily, the function of the Superego is to stifle any inappropriate urges of the Id, just as Loomis is in Haddonfield to end The Shape’s killing spree. Superego is ethical, critical. The Superego symbolizes a parental figure, typically a father figure. Laurie’s parents serve no real function in either the original Halloween or Halloween II outside of authoritative demand (Laurie’s father assigning Laurie to drop off the keys to the Myers house for him) and renouncing any parental bonds whatsoever (Laurie’s mother’s stern pronouncement that she is not Laurie’s biological mother). In Halloween II, no one can locate Laurie’s parents. We know they were guests at a party; in fact, they were at the same party as Dr. Mixter, Laurie’s attending (and very inebriated) physician at the hospital, and yet they never rush to Laurie’s bedside. The duty nurses keep trying to reach them, to no avail. Maybe they don’t know Laurie’s there or no one told them. If they don’t know, they may be nowhere near a tv or a telephone or a radio. Or, worse still, they just don’t care. Whatever the reason, they’re not around, and therefore Loomis serves this parental function for Laurie.
The Thing From Another World also stands as an example of what Muir calls “visual form echoing narrative content,” just as Forbidden Planet does. The creature terrorizing the USAF team in the Arctic, played by James Arness, while he resembles man, is actually not a man. Arness’ space monster is essentially a vegetable in the form of a man. It parallels Dr. Loomis’s insistence that, while Michael Myers may look like a man, he is not; rather, he is pure evil personified, a Shape masquerading as a man. In both films, it is fear of the Other out to do us harm. In The Thing From Another World, an alien Other. In John Carpenter’s Halloween, an evil, psychopathic (and as we move further along the narrative, into Halloween II country, supernatural) Other. Neither of them exactly human. One might even see Robert Cornthwaite’s Dr. Carrington as Dr. Loomis’s mirror opposite; while Carrington wants to communicate with The Thing and learn from it, Loomis knows everything he cares to know about The Shape and considers its destruction to be the only viable solution.
The first Halloween leaves Laurie a shattered, neurotic mess, believing Michael Myers to be superstitious Tommy Doyle’s boogeyman. In this moment, in a sense, Laurie has a lot in common with Sally Hardesty-Enright at the end of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre–she’s hysterical and traumatized, rescued from impending death just in the nick of time. Laurie successfully fended herself off from The Shape three times, but turning her back on him for only a second left herself vulnerable, and almost cost her her life, if Dr. Loomis hadn’t arrived when he did. Now, as a stand-alone film, this ending works in much the same way the ending of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre does, with the heroine safe and the “faceless” killer still on the loose. Halloween works perfectly as a stand-alone film. But coupled with Halloween II, Laurie is given a much more satisfying arc.
Halloween II finally brings us to the last film in Dr. Dementia’s marathon. When we meet Barbra and Johnny at the start of NOTLD, we’re reminded of Forbidden Planet’s intertextuality with Halloween. Barbra, like Laurie, is pent-up, buttoned-down, and represents the rationalist Ego, while her brother Johnny is all Id, complaining about the drive to the cemetery to pay respects at their father’s gravesite, teasing Barbra while she prays. Then, Johnny’s killed after a scuffle with a ghoul in the cemetery, and that’s when Michael and Johnny really begin to parallel each other. Johnny becomes a ghoul, an undead “thing,” and, later in the film, finds his sister, vulnerable and trapped in a farmhouse; and with a mob of other hungry ghouls, does Barbra in.
In Halloween II, Michael Myers is the living dead. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s a zombie. His pace is reduced, ever more methodical than earlier in the evening. He takes stairs much slower, a step at a time, eyes forward and trance-like. Just hours before, he was rushing down the stairs after Laurie at Lindsey’s house. And like Johnny in NOTLD, he spends the rest of the night tracking his sister down. (Muir makes some of the same observations I do here. His commentary on Halloween II, found in his book The Films of John Carpenter, albeit a lukewarm reaction, is still probably the best review of the film to date, at least for my money.)
Once Laurie is saved, taken to the hospital, and treated for her wounds, she suffers a catatonic reaction to the meds she’s been given. In NOTLD, Barbra also slips into catatonia; although in Barbra’s case, she’s succumbing to the trauma of the moment. The cause may be different, but the outcome, I feel, is very much the same. Both deal with extreme trauma at different points, and both become catatonic, and it serves to connect the two characters intertextually. Even the wig Jamie Lee was forced to wear in Halloween II reminds me of Judith O’Dea’s hairstyle in NOTLD.
NOTLD’s inclusion on Dr. Dementia gives Laurie and Barbra a connection in Halloween II they wouldn’t have otherwise. It forms a bond between The Shape and Johnny where there wasn’t one before.
In a shot midway through the film, while Michael is sauntering down a hallway, we hear an announcer’s voice, presumably from a TV playing in the vicinity–perhaps the cafeteria–proclaim, “And now back… to Dementia!” From this point forward, Halloween II has become Dementia’s de facto final feature of the night, taking over for NOTLD. We even get to see moments play out in black and white (on surveillance monitors).
The slasher subgenre had truly come into its own by 1981 when Halloween II was released. A slew of slasher films had already saturated the market, and while it can be said John Carpenter’s Halloween only inspired the classic trope, Friday the 13th fully established the iconic, heroic myth of the Final Girl, and antecedents such as Prom Night, Terror Train, The Prowler, Night School, The Funhouse, Happy Birthday to Me, Friday the 13th Part II, Final Exam, Hell Night, and Graduation Day perpetuated it before Halloween II came along. To fit in with the group, Halloween II adapted itself to that formula. If Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t a Final Girl in John Carpenter’s Halloween, she’d certainly reached Final Girl status with Prom Night and Terror Train, and with Halloween II, her last slasher film (for seventeen years, until Halloween: H20 in 1998), she becomes a Final Girl triumphant.
Eventually, Loomis is back at his rightful, Freudian place by Laurie’s side. Id (Michael), Ego (Laurie), and Superego (Dr. Loomis) converge in an OR at Haddonfield Memorial Clinic. In typical Final Girl fashion, Laurie carries the torch for everyone who has been slain before Michael finally confronts her — including (if only intertextually) Barbra, dispatched by her undead brother Johnny and the rest of the zombie horde. Laurie succeeds while Barbra succumbs. Laurie’s trapped in a corner of the OR with no place else to go, like Barbra in that farmhouse. Unlike Barbra, Laurie is armed. She has Loomis’s gun, the gun that was unsuccessful in taking Michael down only hours before. But in Laurie’s hands, the gun does its job. Loomis’s previous eight or nine shots, intended to take down The Shape, were body shots, and they proved impotently harmless. Laurie fires only twice but succeeds in blinding her brother. They’re the first wounds to have a lasting effect, and they came from Laurie’s hand, which permits Loomis to strike the spark to conclusively end The Shape. Michael Myers burns to death, a late night/early morning offering to Samhain. “That’s another one for the fire,” as George Kosana says in the concluding moments of NOTLD.
Now, how you want to perceive this moment is totally up to you: it’s either final, a punctuation mark to The Shape’s killing spree and Laurie’s story; a momentary reprieve before Michael wakes up in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers or appears to Laurie again out of the blue twenty years later in Halloween: H20; or you skip all of it and jump right to David Gordon Green’s Halloween after the original. As Loomis imparted about the festival of Samhain, “By observing the way [they] died, the Druid priests believed they could see omens of the future.” If you Halloween fans put yourselves in the place of those Druid priests, observing the way The Shape dies, what future is it you see for him? Or which sequel? Or do you think The Shape even has a future after Halloween II? Maybe you don’t.
Okay, let’s say you believe Halloween II was the end for The Shape. Then what about Laurie’s future? In those final moments in Halloween II, Laurie is helped into the back of an ambulance and carted away to safety. Her brother–her Id–is no longer a burden to her. Her aid, champion and parental symbol, Dr. Loomis–her Superego–has relinquished his duty to Laurie. Can the Ego survive without the Id? Yes. Base impulses can be repressed, just as The Shape was literally stamped out. Can the Id survive without the Superego? According to Socratic.org, yes. The site explains: “Do not confuse the full experience of life with the motivations of humans or the necessities of biological functions. Whether you would find life experiences or interactions worthwhile without a Superego is a different question. But, a person’s body certainly can continue to survive without one.” I suppose it’s the same as growing up and not needing parental supervision anymore. I’m not a psychoanalyst, so I can’t say for sure. There are learned people who know better. I do know one thing: Laurie can take care of herself. Laurie confronted the boogeyman, her brother, her fate, her Id, and she beat him. The evil is gone.
Categorized:Editorials News
