It’s not a killer with a knife, right? The execution of carefully planned blocking with few cuts.
Michael Myers has gone through different stages, right? What began as a pure evil being with no reason became a man who only wanted to kill his family and anyone who got in his way. This turned into killing anyone who hangs out in or near his house… According to the producer’s cut, he also got his niece pregnant with the essence of evil at one point. This didn’t happen in any of Rob Zombie’s other movies, which makes it even stranger.
Many people have said that Michael Myers would make a great bad guy for a one-off movie, but he doesn’t work well in a long-running series. This is something that John Carpenter knew before he was asked to write Halloween II. He had a hard time continuing a story that he thought had already come to a natural end (Budweiser wrote with him without being credited). In the 1978 movie, Myers is scary because he doesn’t want to go after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). There wasn’t any kind of connection between them, and they were definitely not related.
She walked up to his front door when he was home, which was a mistake. It was kind of like the logic in The Strangers turned around. There comes a point where you have to give him a reason to want to kill people in the sequels. However, that takes away what made him scary in the first place and makes him dull. He looks a lot like the shark from Jaws. He kills without reason or pleasure, except when he stops to admire how strong regular kitchen knives are and hangs people from walls and pantry doors. Giving him a reason to have targets would make him boring and like any other slasher bad guy. This is where Halloween (2018) comes in.
Back to Basics
Even though the 2018 movie has some strange side characters, changes in tone, and that one line about peanut butter that even fans of the movie will never defend, it does a great job of making Michael Myers into a scary monster and bringing him back to earth.
He’s not a cult member or after his siblings or nieces; he’s after the person standing right in front of him…Unless he doesn’t. Most fans’ favorite scene is the three-minute-long continuous take (actually two) of Michael killing people. It perfectly shows this idea.
People probably love the long take more than anything else in the movie. It’s where Michael and Laurie finally face each other, and that’s when Jamie Lee Curtis teaches us that you shouldn’t mess with the mom from Freaky Friday. This movie is so popular that its YouTube clip has almost seven million views, and you would have a hard time finding anyone who doesn’t like Halloween Ends in the comments section. The fun thing about the scene is that it shows Michael’s horrible need to kill people for no reason.
Setting the Scene
At the beginning of the scene, he runs into two kids that he could easily beat up, but he decides not to because he wants to kill a woman who is making a ham sandwich and needs to go to her shed (a perfectly normal choice). He goes to the shed to get a hammer, then comes back into the house right away and uses it to kill her.
The thing that this continuity brings up about Michael Myers is that his killings aren’t very artistic. That guy is not Jason Voorhees. Michael doesn’t come up with strange ways to kill teens out of anger. He just kills them and moves on, unless he has time to do arts and crafts with their bodies. He does take the time to trade the hammer for the knife that is important to him. He’s like Butch in Pulp Fiction going through guns at the pawn shop; all he cares about is how to get the job done best.
On his way out of the woman’s house, he walks right by a baby in a crib and doesn’t bother it. Because this movie shows that Michael doesn’t feel bad about killing kids, that doesn’t mean he will definitely do it, which makes him even less predictable.
He acts so coldly when he’s looking at a possible target that it’s weird. There is free will and conviction in everything that is done. From the way he walks and the way he turns his head, it looks like he can sense who his next target is. He still leaves the house and walks down the sidewalk, coming up behind a couple getting into their car. They get away because he is moving slowly or not interested, which is bad for him.
At the end of the scene, he looks away from the couple as they drive off and at a woman who gives candy to trick-or-treaters. No one in Haddonfield has ever heard of the crazy idea of locking the back door, so Michael quickly slips through the back and stabs her in the throat, killing her instantly. Once more, there’s nothing complicated about how he kills her. He finishes the job and moves on. Even scarier is that she just got off the phone with someone who tells her there’s a killer on the loose. This adds to her deep-seated fear that Michael could be anywhere (people walk right by him on the street) and that, to quote the tagline for Unhinged, he could happen to you.
There is a new version of the classic Halloween theme playing throughout the scene, and the camerawork makes me think of the opening scene of the original movie. Michael Myers is back to his old self as The Shape. He feels like more than just a faceless killer in this scene. He feels like the classic boogeyman that made him such a scary movie monster.