Making sense of the Halloween films

The other day saw Rosie and I watch the final Michael Myers Halloween film. So here, after 7 films of terror, I attempt to explain what actually happens in the Halloween series, from start to finish, obviously excluding Halloween III, which is the only film not to follow the Michael Myers story.

On Halloween 1963, 4 year old Michael Myers, without reason or remorse, stabs to death his older sister, Judith. After 15 years in a mental institution under the eye of his Doctor, Dr Loomis, he escapes on Halloween night 1978, and stalks Laurie Strode, his younger sister, and her friends. Laurie had her name changed in the sixties after her parents died in an automobile accident and she was put up for adoption. The name change was so she would never realise who her older brother was.

After successfully killing her friends, Michael goes after Laurie, who is babysitting a boy called Tommy Doyle. However Dr Loomis saves her after he shoots Michael off of a balcony. Michael survives the fall and makes off to kill more people whilst Laurie is taken to Haddonfield hospital because of her injuries, and once there begins to have flashbacks about her original family, being adopted by the Strodes and visiting a young boy in a mental institution. Meanwhile, Michael hears on a radio broadcast about Laurie’s whereabouts and goes to the hospital. After killing all the doctors and nurses, Michael attempts to kill Laurie. However Dr Loomis and a sheriff arrive, Loomis fills a room with ether gas and sets it on fire, engulfing both him and Michael in flames. It is unclear until the next film whether or not either survive.

In 1979, soon after her experiences on Halloween, Laurie found she was pregnant. Traumatised, she put the child up for adoption and faked her own death and moved away from Haddonfield. By Halloween 1988, 8 year old Jamie, Laurie’s daughter, is in intense danger after Michael Myers, who has been in a coma since Halloween 1978, awakes whilst being transferred between institutions. He overhears that Jamie is his only surviving relative and sets off to Haddonfield to kill her. After single handedly killing the local police force and plunging Haddonfield into darkness by interfering with an electrical substation, a lynch mob forms in Haddonfield led by Dr Loomis, who also survived the fire 10 years earlier. After Michael enters Jamie and her family’s house, Jamie and her babysitter flee and run Michael over in the process, and after continuously hitting him with their truck, he flies towards an abandoned mine shaft. Jamie touches Michaels hand before the angry mob from Haddonfield shoot Michael into the mine shaft. Later, on returning home, Jamie appears in a clown mask after stabbing her adoptive mother who was running her a bath. The film ends with Dr Loomis and the rest of her family looking at her and screaming.

However Michael doesn’t die in the mine shaft, he falls into a coma and floats down a river and is found by a hermit who lives in a shaft near the river. On Halloween 1989, Michael reawakens, kills the hermit and returns to Haddonfield to kill Jamie, who after Halloween 4 has become mute and admitted to a psychiatric hospital for children. A man in a black cloak also begins to stalk Haddonfield, and appears to be aiding Michael. By the end of the film, after a large chase through the woods and a farm, Michael is arrested and Jamie is safe. However the man in black blows up the police station and Jamie is taken by Michael and the mysterious man and is held hostage in a large abandoned church and impregnated by Michael several years later. 

On Halloween 1995, a nurse helps Jamie escape with her baby and she hides with it in an abandoned bus station. Michael arrives and kills her, and the baby is left in the bus station toilets. Tommy, the boy who Laurie Strode babysat on Halloween in 1978 who has since become obsessed with Michael Myers finds the baby and takes him home. Tommy tells Dr Loomis of his suspicions that Michael has returned to Haddonfield. He then explains to Dr Loomis of his research into the ‘Curse of Thorn’ that Michael has. The curse involves someone having to make a blood sacrifice of their next of kin each Halloween. This also explains why Michael cannot die. Tommy suspects that Jamie’s incestual baby will be Michael’s ‘final sacrifice’, or that Michael has created the ‘definition of evil’ through this baby. Later on Tommy and Loomis are led to an abandoned factory and Michael arrives and attempts to kill them both. They both escape, however Dr Loomis goes back in as ‘he has unfinished business to attend to’. It is the assumed that Michael and Loomis fight, resulting in Dr Loomis’ death.

While all this was happening, Laurie Strode had been living a new life with a new family in Illinois and had become principal of a school there. However on Halloween 1998, Michael finally finds Laurie after 20 years, and attempts to kill her and her son. After a night of bloodshed, Laurie decapitates who she thinks is Michael. However, it is a surgeon who had had his larynx crushed by Michael and had been put in his mask. Because of this, Laurie is put in a mental institution. On Halloween 2001, Michael finds Laurie and successfully kills her. Her son had been relocated because of a witness protection programme.

A year later, Michael returns to Haddonfield to kill a group of teenagers who are filming a tv show in his old family home. The film ends with Michael being killed with a spear. However on a slab in the mortuary, Michael’s eyes open and he awakes once again. It is never revealed what happened to Jamie and Michael’s baby.