User blog:AustinDR/PE Proposal: Michael Myers

https://villains.fandom.com/f/p/3179493162221867344

What is the work? (Beware of spoilers)
Halloween is the classic 1978 horror film directed by director John Carpenter. Many of us already know the premise; a masked killer returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, to continue his killing spree only to get thrown into conflict with teenage babysitter Laurie Strode. I don’t even need to get into how much of an impact the film left on the horror genre or how Michael himself became the progenitor of future slashers. Forty years after the events of the 1978 film, a direct sequel was made, ignoring all the events from the sequels up to and including the second film. During that timeframe, Laurie herself had become a paranoid old woman who had spent the remainder of her days preparing for Michael’s eventual escape. Her obsession with killing Michael had since driven a wedge between her and her family, her having suffered two divorces and her daughter being taken. But of course, her paranoia proves to be correct.

Who is he?
Michael Myers. The Shape. The Bogeyman. Evil on Two Legs. Michael Myers started off as a seemingly normal young boy until one Halloween night. In 1963, after his older sister Judith finished having “fun” with her boyfriend, Michael goes to her room and stabs her repeatedly with a kitchen knife until she died. Shortly afterward, Michael’s parents arrived, speechless to what had transpired. Michael was six-years-old at the time. Michael is then taken to the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium where he is placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis. After spending a few years trying to reach Michael, Dr. Loomis realized that there was nothing salvageable to be found within the child, concluding that he was purely and simply evil. So, he spent the last few years ensuring that Myers would never escape his incarceration. But evil always finds a way…

What has he done?
In the first film, Dr. Loomis and his assistant Marion Chambers are tasked with picking Michael up from the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium so that he could be taken to court. They discover that several patients of the sanitarium were freely roaming the road. Loomis goes out to investigate, leaving Marion unarmed. Without warning, Michael attacks her, forcing her out of the car before driving away. Upon returning to Haddonfield, Michael kills a man for his uniform, and breaks into a hardware store, stealing a few knives, rope, and his signature white mask.

Soon afterward, Michael starts to stalk Laurie Strode and her friends. Michael follows them to their neighborhood with them not being the wiser. Annie Brackett, a friend of Laurie’s who was babysitting at the time, received a call from her boyfriend, asking her to pick him up. While waiting in the car, Michael materializes from the back and starts strangling Annie before slitting her throat. After a few more murders, Michael takes the bodies of Laurie’s slain friends and places them into some morbid art piece, completing it by placing the tombstone of his deceased sister on the bed. Laurie arrives to investigate only to get ambushed by the deranged killer. After a grapple with Michael – and stabbing him in the eye with a clothes hanger-- Dr. Loomis arrives, and shoots Michael six times. Michael plummets off the balcony to his assumed end, but when Loomis turns back to look, Michael vanishes. Apparently during that lapse in time, Dr. Loomis tried to shoot Michael only to come short of killing him by Officer Hawkins. Forty years later, two podcasters – Aaron Korey and Dana Haines respectively – make a documentary about the 1978 Haddonfield murders and wish to interview Michael Myers who hadn’t uttered a word for years. Dr. Loomis had since passed, being replaced by his pupil Dr. Ranbir Sartain. Aaron tries to invoke some sort of response from Michael by producing his mask, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. Aaron and Dana try to convince Laurie to speak with Michael before he was sentenced to maximum security, but that’s a no show.

On the night the bus was to leave, it crashes, releasing the inmates. A father and son were riding at the time, and the father gets out to inspect the crash. The preteen boy leaves the car after his father disappeared, only to discover his lifeless body, his neck having been broken in inhumane fashion. The boy goes back to the car…only for Michael to then kill him by smashing his head against the window until it cracked. Michael goes onto murder the two podcasters as well as a clerk at a gas station, and an engineer so he could take his clothes. Arriving at Haddonfield, Michael goes on a small killing spree, killing a mother with a hammer and another woman with a kitchen knife for no other reason than he could. After murdering Allyson’s friends, he tries to go after her before being run over by Officer Hawkins. Before he could finish him off, Sartain kills him with his pen knife, explaining that he wanted Michael to live so he could use him for his purposes. Unfortunately for him, Michael regains consciousness and forcefully drags him out of the car, stomping his head into a bloody pulp (why can’t they learn that evil isn’t a toy).

Michael follows Allyson to Laurie’s house, and murders two police officers, having turned one of the poor bastard’s heads into a jack-o-lantern. He then kills Ray and goes after Laurie after taking a moment to recognize her. After seemingly succeeding at killing her by throwing her out the window, he gets shot by Karen as part of a Wounded Gazelle Gambit. Laurie returns, forcing Michael into the saferoom and she activates metallic bars to trap Michael inside. Gas fills the saferoom as a flare is dropped into the room, setting it and Michael ablaze. Michael is last seen angrily glaring at Laurie with his one good eye, fully aware he was thoroughly screwed. So, yeah. Michael is “dead.” Well, I guess that means that he is truly gone forever. It’s not like the producers were considering making sequels if the film did well. Oh wait.

Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
No excuses, whatsoever. Michael has no tragic backstory or anything of that sort. Myers initially was a “normal” kid until that Halloween night where he knifed his sister to death in an unprovoked attack. Given that the sequels were ignored in this continuity, there is no connection to some evil cult to draw from, no familial connection between Laurie and Michael…At the very least, one of the recurring elements behind Myers’ character is that he is simply a psychopathic killer. From the time he murdered his own sister to his years living in Smith Grove’s Sanitarium, Myers was nothing more than a psychopath. He was utterly born into it. One of the more notable things about Michael is his sadism. He pins Lynda’s boyfriend to the wall with his knife (and who could forget his “famous” head tilting as if he was admiring his handiwork) before placing a bedsheet on himself and making her believe that he was her boyfriend. Or there was that time that he desecrates his sister’s grave by stealing her tombstone and making some crude piece with it alongside the bodies of Laurie’s friends. But that is nothing compared to his actions forty years later.

One of the first things he does when he escapes? He murders a father and his son by breaking their necks, with the boy, he repeatedly smashes his head against the car’s window until it breaks. This also marks the first time in the series where Michael kills a preteen victim (not counting the comics). Or when he goes to retrieve his mask? He killed a clerk by pulling his lower teeth out before showing them to Dana. He takes Aaron and slams his face on the stall door until it opened. When he finally gets to Haddonfield, Myers decides to recreate his original spree. Only here? It’s even more brutal than before. His kills are more random, one of them being where he grabs a hammer and beats a mother to death with it. As for sparing the woman’s baby…really, leaving a completely defenseless baby to fend for itself because its mother is dead? And the possibility that the baby could die if no one decides to check on the mother? Yeah…not really redeeming. With each of these kills, they all perpetuate that Michael has no logical reason to do what he does. He simply chooses to. Hell, the film even makes it ambiguous on whether he wanted to get revenge on Laurie as he appeared disinterested in facing her again until literally being taken to her abode. Really, the film can be taken as a meta-Take That to all the films that tried to theorize on some plausible explanations for Myers’ nature. At the end of the day, Michael does whatever on a whim that makes sense only to him and him alone. And it is clear that he won’t be talking anytime soon.

Heinous standard?
Meets it, obviously. Aside from Michael holding the moniker of being the progenitor of a slew of slasher films that played Follow the Leader, Michael has a sizable body count. While his original spree ended with five people falling victim to him (which is low for a horror movie), the direct sequel quadruples that. He ends the movie with roughly around 16 victims killed. In addition, the kills this time around are especially gruesome such as repeatedly slamming a person’s head on a stall door; decapitating a man and hollowing the head out to make a jack-o-lantern; stomping a person’s head to mulch, etc. Need I also mention that one of his victims was a child? Other than that, Michael obliterates the heinous standard.