[Editorial] He Is Everyone’s Boogeyman: Trauma in Halloween Kills (2021)

*Warning-this editorial contains spoilers for Halloween Kills *

Halloween Kills is the long awaited sequel to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018). The second part of a trilogy, the film finds Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) recovering from surgery to repair injuries sustained while battling masked killer Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle) in her home and trapping him in her now burning basement.

Believing she has finally defeated the monster that has been haunting her for four decades, Laurie is shocked to learn that Michael survived the attack and is on the loose in Haddonfield again. This piece was intended to be a continuation of two previous essays examining the trauma Laurie experiences throughout the franchise, however Halloween Kills is essentially about the collective trauma shared by the residents of Haddonfield. Also affected by Michael’s crimes, they channel their rage, grief, and terror into a violent and uncontrollable mob bent on murder. 

Like John Carpenter’s Halloween II, Laurie’s role in Halloween Kills is minimal. Stabbed in the stomach, she undergoes abdominal surgery and spends the majority of the film recovering in her hospital room with Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). The two share a close bond due to their connection to Michael and both feel responsible for his crimes. Faced with the death of her son-in-law, Laurie struggles with guilt over having involved daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) in the attack, a typical response to trauma involving loved ones of the primary victim. Laurie has no control over Michael’s actions and has done nothing wrong. Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) was the one who brought the killer to her door, however she feels responsible for having infected her family’s lives with violence. 

Laurie’s understanding of Michael seems to shift throughout the film. When she discovers he has escaped, she’s desperate to fight, taking unprescribed painkillers to dull the pain of her surgery. She throws herself into battle and only backs down when she further injures her hours-old surgical wounds. In conversation with Hawkins, she vacillates wildly between accepting that Michael is simply a murderer with no larger connection to her life and proclaiming him a superhuman monster who grows stronger with each kill. While both of these would be reasonable responses to living through an attack from a homicidal monster and could be held simultaneously in the mind of a survivor, the film is frustratingly confused about Laurie’s mental state and Green can’t seem to choose which thread to follow. 

Recovering from his own wounds, Hawkins also attempts to unpack his feelings towards Michael and we learn that he has his own traumatic history with the killer. A police officer tasked with hunting Michael (Airon Armstrong) down immediately after the 1978 murders, Hawkins and his partner Pete (Jim Cummings) follow Michael into the Myers house. When Pete is attacked and held hostage by Michael, Hawkins fires at the killer, but accidentally shoots Pete in the neck. Michael escapes and Hawkins watches his partner bleed to death on the floor. When Dr. Loomis (Tom Jones Jr.) asks him if Michael has killed again, Hawkins has no answer. Though he pulled the trigger, Michael is the one who caused the deadly situation and ultimately to blame for the tragic accident. Though part of Hawkins likely knows this, it’s clear that he’s carried guilt over his partner’s death for 40 years. 

Hawkins also feels responsible for Michael’s current rampage. After his partner died, he prevented Dr. Loomis from executing Michael on the front lawn of the Myers house. It’s possible that having been confronted with the reality of death just moments ago, he wanted to prevent any more unnecessary bloodshed. He feels guilt, but his decision was the responsible one. Michael was unarmed and in police custody when Dr. Loomis attempted to shoot him at point blank range and preventing his murder was absolutely the right thing to do. Hawkins is likely dealing with hindsight bias, expecting his younger self to have knowledge of future events unavailable to him at the time. There’s no way he could have predicted in 1978 that Michael would escape and kill again forty years later.

Also recovering are Allyson and Karen. They stay with Laurie as she recovers from surgery and recount their story for the police while mourning the loss of their husband and father. When they are told Michael is still at large, their responses take them in opposing directions. Allyson feels called to join the mob and avenge the death of her father, while Karen commands her to stay safely barricaded in the hospital. Though they have both lived through the same attack, their responses vary based on their experiences with Michael. Allyson describes not being allowed to talk about Michael growing up and her mother’s greatest fear was that Laurie’s delusions were real. Like her grandmother, she seems to crave the relief in finally vanquishing the boogeyman who’s haunted her family for her entire life. 

Karen knows how lucky they were to survive Michael’s attack in the first place and doesn’t want them to put themselves in harm’s way again, but she is eventually dragged into the fight out of a motherly instinct to protect her daughter. When she finally does join forces with the mob, she is the one to land the killing blow, stealing his mask and luring him into a waiting trap. When given the option to walk away, she buries her knife into his back as an act of cathartic revenge for the loss of her husband and the harm that has come to her daughter and mother. 

As a therapist, Karen feels called to protect the other escaped inmate now being targeted by the mob. Learning from her mother the frightened man they chase is not Michael, she attempts to stand between him and the hordes of rampaging townspeople, barricading him in a hospital hallway. The less said about the conclusion of this plot line, the better. Green fails to fully examine his premise of the dangers of vigilante violence and exploits the suicide of a mentally ill man in gruesome detail. This is also in direct opposition to the assertion that Hawkins was wrong to prevent the murder of an unarmed suspect in police custody. The film’s moral compass is all over the map and it’s difficult to tease out a coherent message.

Laurie was not the only person Michael targeted in 1978. Both she and Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) approached the Myers house as he watched from inside and were followed by Michael throughout the day. He and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards) were sleeping in the house Michael invaded and hid together while he attacked Laurie. Believing him dead, she sent the children screaming into the night for help. This type of trauma occurring at such a young age has likely left deep psychological wounds. The two friends, along with fellow survivors Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) and Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet), commemorate the holiday each year at a local bar, finding comfort in sharing their pain with others who’ve been through it as well. Though the last day of October likely brings up painful memories, they seem to have recovered reasonably well. Tommy stands in front of the talent show audience and tells his story to the bar patrons, raising a glass and honoring the victims of Michael’s attack while highlighting those who lived to tell the tale. But when they learn that Michael is on the loose again, their demeanor quickly changes. 

The news of Michael’s escape, and seeing his face again, triggers horrific memories of that traumatic night forty years ago. Tommy’s fear manifests as an urgent need to act and he takes it upon himself to kill Michael. No longer a child, but a grown man, he stalks who he mistakenly believes to be Michael with a baseball bat, leading a vigilante mob through the town. He was unable to do anything but run when first attacked by Michael as a child and he now sees an opportunity to take a position of dominance against the monster that has plagued him for most of his life. But his fear clouds his judgement. He is unable to see that the escaped inmate they are following is not Michael and in fact looks nothing like him. But Tommy needs to act. Sitting with his fear again likely reminds him of the moments he spent hiding with Lindsey listening to Laurie scream in the closet and wondering when the monster would come for him. His fear overwhelms him and he lashes out at the first person who gives him an opportunity to feel powerful. He wants so badly to conquer his monster that he ends up threatening the lives of others.

Tommy and Lindsey are not alone in their pain. As news of Michael’s most recent killing spree breaks, friends and family of his victims reel from the attack. Neighbors see their own streets on the news and wonder if the killer is currently in their homes. Family members flood the hospital desperate for news of missing loved ones. The intense emotions feel unbearable and they channel their pain into murderous rage. Anger is often an easier emotion to experience because it is action oriented. Rather than process their grief or wait indefinitely for bad news, the residents of Haddonfield choose to act, even if their actions are dangerous or ill conceived. Led by Tommy and Leigh Bracket (Charles Cyphers), who sees an opportunity to punish Michael for the 1978 murder of his daughter Annie, they take justice into their own hands for better or worse. The residents form small groups that troll the town looking for Michael and warning others. While this is not inherently bad, it quickly spirals out of control. 

In the final scene, Laurie describes Michael as a shadow that grows stronger by feeding off of the fears of others. She has fed that fear for forty years and now the residents of Haddonfield have joined her. Though they would probably view their actions as empowerment, they are driven by trauma and the fear of an unknown force who could rob them of their lives or loved ones at any moment. Some act out of rage and grief, hurting so badly in the midst of their loss that they demand someone else suffer as well. Their terror outweighs their reason and they put themselves and others in danger. Many of the mob’s leaders lose their lives to Michael. In an attempt to overcome their fear, they have put themselves in his path again and paid the ultimate price. 

Laurie notes that no mortal man could survive what Michael has, and though it makes no practical sense, he grows stronger with the collective fear he inspires. In this way he’s like a psychological trigger, an external stimulus provoking memories of past trauma. The more it’s avoided and worried over, the larger it looms in the minds of the people it haunts. Michael is not just Laurie’s boogeyman, but he haunts the whole town with the legacy of his emotionless face and his sharp knife. He transcends the young boy who murdered his sister and the young man who murdered the people unlucky enough to fall in his sights. Now more than simply a masked killer, he is empowered by Haddonfield’s fear. He has truly become the boogeyman.

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