Halloween!

The way that Michael Myers gazes at his sister is the first time he releases his fury. The way that Michael acts in nicely summed up by Carol J. Clover in Her Body, Himself, where she says, “The notion of a killer propelled by a pyschosexual fury”, which is exactly what Michael is. The majority of Michaels kills are people in relation to sex. His first kill is his sister after he sees her having sex, which triggers something inside of him. The two girls Laurie is friends with die when they only have sex on the mind. Annie was in the process of going to pick up her boyfriend and Lynda had just had sex with her boyfriend when they both are killed by Michael. This shows how Michael hasn’t escaped from “the grip of boyhood” (Her Body, Himself), and he hasn’t gotten past the trauma of his sister in his childhood.

Michael isn’t just a normal person according to Dr. Loomis. Loomis claims that Michael isn’t even a man. This falls into line with how Clover says that the new type of killers, “only role is that of a killer” and “they may be recognizably human, but only marginally so”. Dr. Loomis keeps telling people Michael isn’t a man. Loomis also touches on how Michael’s eyes are like the devil’s eyes, and that he has black eyes. They say the eyes are windows to the soul, and Michael having black eyes lends to the idea that he isn’t a man, just a killer, whose soul is only darkness.

    Laurie is the basic final girl. At first, she doesn’t realize anything is wrong, and she just assumes that her friends are messing around with her like they usually do. She’s in denial, until she goes to check on her friends and finds them all dead. In an excerpt of Her Body, Himself, Clovers says, “she is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril”. Laurie knows she’s next once she finds the bodies of her friends, and runs for her life. She embraces her final girl situation, and uses what she has nearby (first a knitting needle) to incapacitate Michael. While this doesn’t work out for her in the long run, it is long enough for her to get the kids to safety and enough time for help to arrive in the form of Dr. Loomis.