Historically, The Boogeyman transcends time and culture, initially rooted as a deterrent of waywardness in children. Think about La Llorona, and the purpose of the weeping woman in steering would-be drowning victims away from bodies of water. Even Santa Claus occupies a similar station in the everyday lives of most Western children. There exists an inherent, even if unspoken, warning among all iterations of this archetype. The version of this entity with whom I grew up—as affected by the women in my family—was Manners the Butler. This butler was less a housekeeper, more an on-call disciplinarian, and was never described physically, nor were my cousins and I ever told what he would do to us upon being summoned. But, any time one of us was behaving poorly, we were threatened with Manners the Butler setting us right.
It is unsurprising that many kids possess an innate fear of the dark and of things that go bump in the night. Even parents who don’t raise their children to behave by employing such curbs will often find their kids requesting an under-the-bed check or an all-clear for their closet. This assurance that it’s safe to sleep doesn’t necessarily mean these kids won’t still fully envelop themselves in their blankets; it’s just an added precaution.
That same superstition can continue into adulthood, perhaps when housesitting or staying somewhere foreign for the first time. Do we not find ourselves wondering whence the strange creaks and groans in a house emit? Do we not double-check the windows and locks on the doors? The Boogeyman can be as simple as a genetically programmed survival instinct, as we see too often that life is inhabited by its share of nonfictional monsters.
Serial killers like Richard Ramirez and Jack the Ripper: humans yes, but grotesqued by an inexplicable need to kill, the latter seemingly a ghost, who—like the Zodiac Killer, later—disappeared without a trace. But, if we are to look at this idea of a Boogeyman, don’t we also find ourselves applying the term to mass shooters or angry mobs? In each case, there are misguided individuals with sinister ends in mind, no matter the bloodshed enacted as a means to achieve them. The justification, the method is not what is important, not what is frightening. It is the drive to kill, whatever its source or the scale to which it is realized, that provokes fear.
The incarnation of The Boogeyman with which I am—and have long been—most fascinated, is The Shape: Michael Myers from the Halloween films. In October 1996 (and I’m sure plenty of other times before and after), USA Network aired the original Halloween. My first exposure to the film was a promotional spot they ran, appropriately utilizing Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” to score the ad. I was immediately obsessed and, of course, watched the network broadcast, later renting the uncensored movie from our local video store.
To proactively address a potential elephant in the room, let’s touch on Rob Zombie. While it is interesting to watch Zombie’s attempt to humanize Michael—spending nearly half of his first Halloween developing the character and identifying traumatizing childhood events as the impetus for his transformation into a killing machine—it strips him of what makes the character truly frightening: his facelessness, his non-being as a human, hence being originally credited as The Shape. Michael is personified by the neutrality and emotionlessness of his white mask with its black eyes, a face that could belong to anyone, while also belonging to nobody. The qualities Zombie prescribes to Michael’s troubled youth—being bullied and generally having a difficult time in school, a mother who can hardly make ends meet with her single income as a stripper, her verbally and potentially physically / sexually abusive boyfriend, Michael torturing and killing small animals—make sense for the version of Michael that Zombie intends to develop. They also void the idea of Michael as The Boogeyman.
With exception to a handful of satisfying kills and aesthetically pleasing shots, the one redeeming quality in the Dimension Films release is the epigraph, a quote that does not exist anywhere else in the franchise and is attributed to Dr. Samuel Loomis: “The darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss, but those which choose to break free from the abyss and move silently among us.” This quote subscribes to the idea of Michael as The Boogeyman, which is ignored for the remainder of the film and its sequel. As for Zombie’s continuation of the franchise, his version of Halloween II is hardly worth acknowledging. Suffice to say that it deviates so fully from source lore that it has the feel of a standalone Zombie flick, with Michael shoehorned in as an afterthought.
A similar flaw informs The Thorn Trilogy (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers). The first of these three was an overcompensatory response to fan backlash after Halloween III: Season of the Witch—even despite its eventual cult following—abandoned Michael altogether. Too much misguided effort is spent detailing a curse that compels Michael to slaughter his entire bloodline. By the time a mysterious man in black springs a wrist-tattooed Michael from his cell at the end of Halloween 5, any resemblance to The Boogeyman is fully muted.
The mythos of Michael Myers is established by John Carpenter and Debra Hill in the original, 1978 Halloween, and continued through Blumhouse Productions by David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, et al, with Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends. For the purposes of this discussion, Halloween Ends is not of service; the final installment of the Blumhouse trilogy utilizes Michael Myers sparingly, instead focusing on a symbolic passing of the mantle to a younger killer.
The new releases have made a point to ignore all Halloween canon following the ’78 original, including the aforementioned films, as well as Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and Halloween: Resurrection—the last two both eschewing the curse/cult of the Thorn Trilogy, while simultaneously doubling down on Laurie Strode being Michael’s sister. In doing so, the Blumhouse installments have reiterated Michael’s role as The Boogeyman, having freed him from any human motivation for killing. As such, it’s worth noting that allegations of the Blumhouse films’ version of Michael being racist, homophobic, or possessing a hatred for firefighters, is unfounded. Michael, as The Shape, does not discriminate among his victims. In fact, close attention paid to the new films reveals that it’s not even necessarily Laurie whom Michael is pursuing. The Boogeyman does not select; he stalks and murders arbitrarily. Laurie, same as Michael’s other victims, has simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Michael’s incidental kills are victims of his warped utilitarianism.
To some extent, Halloween ’78 introduces the premise of sex = death, which Friday the 13th and other franchises would later employ, some almost to the point of parody. When Michael stabs his sister, Judith Myers, to death, she is partially nude and ostensibly post-coital. This theme reoccurs with later kills, and yet, Michael, like many slashers, is characterized as asexual in his predilections. Despite periphery overtones, Michael does not sexualize his victims, no matter their state of undress. It is germane, however, that semi-nude victims find themselves in a heightened state of vulnerability, like a child without a blanket to hide beneath.
Michael’s murder of his older sister occurs as a seemingly spontaneous act at the hands of the six-year-old, implicating an almost fatalistic predetermination for his role as The Boogeyman. When he puts on the clown mask, he becomes the creaking in the house, the thing that goes bump in the night. Even unmasked by his parents after the murder, Michael’s countenance remains inhuman, indifferent to the life he has just taken.
This quality flourishes under Michael’s hospitalization, as he spends the next fifteen years refusing to speak, simply waiting for his next opportunity to stalk and kill. Dr. Loomis, well-familiarized with Michael as his patient, is under no illusions about Michael or what he is, referring to him as “it.” Loomis maintains this view of Michael as inhuman in later conversations with Sheriff Leigh Brackett, when he reaffirms that Michael isn’t a “man,” and discusses the blackness of Michael’s eyes, “the devil’s eyes.”
Loomis and Nurse Marion Chambers are en route to transport Michael to a hearing when they arrive at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium to find Michael and other patients wandering outside the hospital in the dark. Loomis’s intention—like Robert DeNiro’s Donald “Shadow” Rimgale with Donald Sutherland’s cheeky Ronald Bartel (the former’s own personal Boogeyman) in Backdraft—is to ensure Michael never again experiences freedom. Both characters know what their respective Boogeymen are capable of.
Haddonfield, Illinois—Michael’s hometown and intended destination once he’s stolen Loomis’s vehicle—is the perfect setting for his reign of terror. The Boogeyman does not need to exist or operate within any special locale. The nondescript town is seemingly safe, same as the outwardly pleasant, secure neighborhoods terrorized by real-life Boogeymen like The Night Stalker. Perhaps it is occurrences like these that suffuse any and all communities with cautionary urban legends or local myths.
Consider the story Angus Taylor attempts to tell Loomis at Mt. Sinclair Cemetery. No matter that Loomis has an understandably one-track mind, as far as finding and stopping Michael, thus interrupting the graveyard keeper before he can finish his story. What is important is that the Russellville tale about Charlie Bowles, and whatever it is he ends up doing with the hacksaw, is in circulation, and its tone is foreboding.
Of course, Michael’s slaying of his sister occupies Haddonfield’s public consciousness. Every kid in town knows to stay away from The Myers House, as Tommy Doyle warns Laurie at the beginning of the film. That same day, Tommy is harassed by other boys at school about The Boogeyman, in a perhaps not coincidental exchange. Later in the film, we continue to see instances of this folkloric energy transfer: Tommy attempts to scare Lindsey Wallace from behind the living-room curtain, only to be frightened by seeing Michael outside; Lonnie Elam, one of the same bullies who harassed Tommy, is scared away by Loomis, who is, in turn, startled by Brackett. Not to mention Lonnie’s experience during the opening flashback of Halloween Kills.
Later, when Laurie is at school, the audience listens in on a classroom discussion of fate in the work of Costain and Samuels, the former perhaps based loosely on Thomas B. Costain, the latter fictionalized. This establishes a provocative idea about the relationship fate has with the characters in these films. Is it simply fate that puts Laurie, Tommy, Judith, and so many others in Michael’s path? Or, in his role as The Boogeyman, perhaps Michael exists as an agent of fate. In the classroom discussion, Samuels establishes the idea of fate existing as a natural element, in this case embodied by The Boogeyman. Because fate never changes, but simply is, the possibility revealed here skews toward Naturalism on a Venn Diagram shared with Fatalism. In either case, it is appropriate that the first time Laurie sees Michael, standing across the street from her classroom, occurs during this discussion.
Whether across the street, in a stolen car, behind a bush, or among clotheslines outside the window in Laurie’s bedroom—where we spot an appropriately placed self-portrait of James Ensor, a Belgian expressionist known for depicting humans in grotesque masks—Michael is seemingly an apparition, always disappearing from view and unobserved by anyone but Laurie. Who ever believes us as children when we express fear about The Boogeyman?
Laurie herself, despite having been earlier spooked by Michael, doesn’t take Tommy’s concern about The Boogeyman seriously when she babysits him. When Tommy looks out the window to see Michael carrying Annie Brackett’s body, there is not a moment’s hesitation before the boy identifies the person he sees as The Boogeyman. It needs no further explanation, to the extent that, when Laurie asks Tommy what he looked like, Tommy responds succinctly, “The Boogeyman.” It is appropriate that the movie playing on the television during all of this is the original Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World, a film Carpenter would remake in ’82. The monster in this movie also does not need a face or human characteristics to operate as an agent of fate, lurking in the shadows.
Does The Boogeyman, elementally fatalistic or no, possess any human qualities? One issue that creeps throughout the films is Michael’s creativity and, at times, seemingly fun-loving antics. Certainly, real-life killers are not exempt from the act of trophy-taking or even the pleasure concomitant with the hunt. Here, we see Michael is no exception. Consider, perhaps most significantly, Michael’s disguise as “Bob the Ghost” when killing Lynda Van der Klok. This mischievous game endows Michael with a level of personality that deviates from most of his other characteristics, and yet is all the more sinister for it.
We see this further explored in the Blumhouse sequels. Michael enjoys cat-and-mouse games with his victims because he thrives on fear. Putting together elaborate displays of his kills instills terror in victims-to-be: disturbing hodge-podges that, having been witnessed, one cannot unsee, even if they manage to survive. The macabre installations show up again in Halloween ’18 and Halloween Kills. Even the ghost sheet motif returns in the former. Other examples include the officer whose head Michael takes the time to carve into a make-shift jack-o’-lantern or the Season of the Witch-masked children’s bodies strewn with their stolen candy on a merry-go-’round.
More importantly, Halloween ’18 and Halloween Kills both revisit the insistence on Michael’s true nature as The Boogeyman. In both films, the audience is provided with further glimpses at the now-dead Loomis’s obsession with Michael and his fervency regarding the need for Michael’s own death. In the former, we listen to a tape in which Loomis insists on the need for Michael to die, and in the latter, we are shown that after the conclusion of the events on the evening of Halloween, 1978, Loomis attempted to execute Michael. Had he succeeded, Loomis would have prevented what would become The Boogeyman’s indefinite impact on Haddonfield.
By now, Laurie has adopted the same view of Michael, insisting that he is, in fact, The Boogeyman incarnate. While Laurie believes that nothing can be gained from Michael remaining alive, that death is the only solution for his particular form of evil, she moves a step beyond Loomis’s assessment. Laurie touches on the true power of fear wielded by The Boogeyman. It is not only the people he kills, it is what the idea of Michael, his essence, does to transform the citizens of Haddonfield.
Michael continues his ascent into something paranormally superhuman, simultaneous with the dissemination of his contagious nature on the community that birthed him. The audience witnesses Michael totally undeterred by bullets, bludgeonings, stabbings, having half his hand shot-gunned clean off, even being nearly burned alive—to which he responds only by standing, machine-like as ever, staring up at the women who’ve ensnared him. Michael does not experience fear. He is fear. Like a Cormac McCarthy antagonist, Michael is an unstoppable force of evil. Each time it seems that he is finally dead, he rises again, and continues to kill with that much greater zeal. Michael is fueled by the fear he creates as it spreads exponentially, virus-like. Michael does not need to physically murder a person in order for them to become one of his victims.
Speaking to Officer Hawkins during the conclusion of Halloween Kills, Laurie observes, “Every time somebody’s afraid, The Boogeyman wins,” and continues later, adding, “The more he kills, the more he transcends into something impossible to beat. Fear.” Even Brackett—no longer a Sheriff, now head of security at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital—whose daughter was murdered by Michael forty years earlier, finds himself aware of Michael’s true power: after Lance Tivoli—the other Smith’s Grove inmate who escapes the bus crash in Halloween ’18—jumps to his death to avoid torture at the hands of a blood-thirsty mob, Brackett observes, “Now he’s turning us into monsters.”
Laurie refers to this same night of chaos and violence that envelopes and suffocates Haddonfield, astutely, as “Michael’s masterpiece.” The events that culminate on Halloween night in 2018 display what fear is capable of achieving, even so far as transforming the peaceful inhabitants of Haddonfield into a gruesome, senseless mob. The citizens repeatedly chant, “Evil dies tonight,” without understanding the nature of the evil their witch-hunt seeks to destroy.
It is not coincidental that whenever Michael is unmasked, whether it be in real-time or when his image is broadcast on the news, his face is concealed by shadows or blurred from view. Evil cannot effectively function in broad daylight. It operates in the shadows, both external and internal. Michael’s face, who he is, and what he looks like, are of no consequence. The Boogeyman can be anybody, and no individual is beyond its grasp.
The conclusion of the original film retraces Michael’s path of carnage through the sleeping streets of Haddonfield, and is among the most poignant, perfectly orchestrated scenes in the Halloween franchise. Michael’s signature breathing, laboring to escape from beneath his mask, is ominous and omnipresent. The audience cannot see Michael, but can feel him lingering in the wake of his murders. The Boogeyman is everywhere, with and within all of us. The Boogeyman does not need to be, and more importantly, cannot be killed. He, as an idea, needs to be conquered. The fear attendant to his presence infects every setting he occupies and every life he touches. This is the true power Michael Myers possesses.