Explor­ing the mon­strous desire between Michael Myers and Lau­rie Strode

There’s a moment in John Carpenter’s 1978 hor­ror clas­sic Hal­loween where Dr Loomis (Don­ald Pleasence) turns to a police offi­cer and says, ​“Death has come to your lit­tle town.” It’s a per­fect­ly chill­ing line, and one that turns Haddonfield’s sleepy streets into poi­soned ground. What was once an ordi­nary mid­west­ern town is now the site of a ram­pag­ing demon­ic force called Michael Myers.

For many crit­ics at the time, Myers wasn’t so much a man as a man­i­fes­ta­tion. By tar­get­ing pre­co­cious teenagers who spent their evenings strip­ping down and touch­ing one anoth­er, Myers was seen as a venge­ful god brought to life by puri­tan­i­cal par­ents. It’s a fit­ting role for such a phys­i­cal, dom­i­nat­ing force. As Myers forces his way into the bed­rooms of sub­ur­ban Amer­i­ca, he decon­structs the fam­i­ly home into a hos­tile space ruled by sex and death.

But think­ing of Myers sim­ply as a sym­bol of cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment over­looks his com­plex­i­ties. It’s arguable that Myers isn’t an asex­u­al fig­ure at all, but a man whose stormy, destruc­tive sex­u­al­i­ty is what dri­ves him to kill. That Myers’ entire iden­ti­ty, down to his masked face and sadis­tic touch, feels like it’s born from an obses­sion with sex and a fear of it.

We know this because Myers shows us. As Hal­loween begins, we see the night that comes to define his sex­u­al­i­ty, as he rush­es into his old­er sister’s bed­room and stabs her to death. Through his eyes we watch her naked body writhe and the motions of his thrust­ing knife. In this moment, stab­bing replaces the act of mas­tur­ba­tion. Instead of touch­ing him­self as he watch­es his sis­ter undress, he kills her, silenc­ing her tempt­ing body and the shame it elicits.

Myers’ fix­a­tion on the female body brings to mind the actions of ser­i­al killer Ed Kem­per, who stalked and killed women over a nine-year peri­od between 1964 and 1973. After his arrest, Kem­per said that he didn’t know how to inter­act with women so he killed them. Myers, who spends his ado­les­cence in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal, has nev­er known a female touch either. The only inti­ma­cy he’s famil­iar with is the cold sting of a nee­dle, and the hands that bring him med­ica­tion and food. But mem­o­ries of his sister’s nude form boil his blood, bring­ing him to a fever-pitch of rage that forces him out of the insti­tu­tion and back to the site of her death.

In con­trast to this rabid, uncon­trol­lable desire is Lau­rie Strode, a del­i­cate 17-year-old high school girl. When Lau­rie is intro­duced in the film, she’s the pic­ture of inno­cence, her hair blonde and her skin milk-white. We sur­mise imme­di­ate­ly that Lau­rie is a vir­gin and book­worm – in con­trast to her flir­ta­tious friends, she has no boyfriend, and most scenes she is found hold­ing books and babysit­ting. While oth­er girls spend Hal­loween night get­ting acquaint­ed with their male class­mates, Lau­rie hides away in the nurs­ery of ado­les­cence to look after two children.

The dynam­ic between Myers and Lau­rie imme­di­ate­ly echoes the kind of infat­u­a­tion between a voyeur and his vic­tim. Some of Halloween’s most fright­en­ing images play upon the pry­ing eyes of sub­ur­bia, as Myers stares at Lau­rie from across the street and behind hedges. One mem­o­rable moment sees Lau­rie peek out her win­dow to find Myers out­side her house, half obscured by the wash­ing line. In these scenes Myers takes on the guise of the peep­ing tom or neigh­bour­hood per­vert, hid­ing his iden­ti­ty behind the cen­sored vis­age of a white mask.

Before meet­ing Lau­rie, the young women Myers killed were com­plete­ly dis­pos­able. Unlike Kem­per, Myers doesn’t keep parts of his vic­tims as tro­phies or care about them after they die. The plea­sure of killing is an instant one, a means of snuff­ing out their seduc­tive, nubile bod­ies. Myers can even be seen as a coun­ter­part to the pro­tag­o­nist of Car­rie, where a teenage girl’s sex­u­al repres­sion ends in a blood­bath on prom night. Yet Lau­rie becomes Myers’ first chal­lenge in a sequence of easy vic­tims. She refus­es to die at his hands, and in doing so refus­es to be forgotten.

Myers’ obses­sion with Lau­rie spills into sev­en more films and three time­lines, but he’s not the only one changed by their encounter. On the evening of Hal­loween, Lau­rie becomes infect­ed with the vio­lence that Myers brings to her home. Attack­ing him is like los­ing her vir­gin­i­ty, as she thrusts a knit­ting nee­dle into his neck. It’s a phal­lic act that she repeats with the stab of a met­al hang­er and a knife, the feroc­i­ty of sex and pen­e­tra­tion crash­ing over her like a wave of blood. The hun­gry chase that ensues is like an invert­ed courtship between young lovers, with Lau­rie reach­ing a fate­ful, shud­der­ing cli­max as Myers falls from the bed­room window.

Lau­rie doesn’t sur­vive Hal­loween because she’s pure, but because she’s now tied to Myers. She comes out of the film changed, a sex­u­al being dressed as a lamb. And as Hal­loween slash­es its way into cin­e­mas, Lau­rie loads her gun in antic­i­pa­tion. The per­son who meets us now isn’t a wound­ed girl, but a woman who fol­lowed the mon­ster into his lair and recog­nised his face.