One bizarre early death in Halloween Kills sees the Halloween franchise subvert a cliche that both the original movie and its many imitators often indulged in. The Halloween franchise, like the countless slasher movies that followed in the wake of its success, has never been bulletproof when it comes to logical character decisions. As the Scream series satirized, many teen horror movies rely on their heroes making some silly choices like running upstairs when pursued to keep a steady stream of gory demises coming.
However, the antagonists of slasher movies in general, and even the original Halloween, are also prone to some inexplicable decisions. For example, most slasher villains (including Michael Myers) tend to not only linger at the scene of their crimes but also set up elaborate displays for the final girl to uncover later in the movie. While it is always scary to see a heroine like Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode walk into a dark room and see her friend’s body fall from the doorframe, it is rarely clear just why her attacker bothered to set up a corpse solely for the sake of scaring her.
One of the oddest scenes in Halloween Kills, besides unmasking Michael Myers, subverts this cliche by showing Myers in the process of decorating a recently dead victim and depicting an onlooker’s horrified reaction to his gruesome handiwork. The bizarre moment occurs early on when, after breaking into the home of Laurie’s neighbors and quickly stabbing them, Michael picks up each knife out of a butcher’s block and pokes each of them into an already-dead victim, Phil, in front of his dying partner, Sondra. Sondra’s mystified horror highlights how strange it is for the Halloween franchise villain—and most implacable slasher killers—to spend so much time arranging and decorating their kills, and underlines just how deeply creepy a character Michael Myers is.
Many characters throughout the franchise, including Halloween’s Dr. Sam Loomis, attempted to find the underlying meaning behind Michael’s homicidal tendencies. However, this sequence makes it clear that there is no getting inside the head of the character, who is so obsessed with violence that he lingers to decorate a victim’s corpse instead of fleeing the scene of his latest brutal crime. The Halloween Kills scene gives viewers a glimpse into Michael’s unhinged mind and explains why the slasher villain bothered to heft Judith Myers’ gravestone upstairs in the original Halloween when he could have been escaping or hunting down Laurie.
Even if the sequence does look pretty weird and bleakly comedic, the Halloween Kills scene is a clever subversion of expectations that forces viewers to accept that there’s no making sense of Michael. While many of the later Halloween movie franchise installments used magic, pseudo-psychology, and genetics to justify Michael’s murderous rampages, Halloween Kills offers a simpler, scarier solution. Michael likes to kill people—and elaborately arrange their corpses—for reasons that will never be clear, and anyone who comes across the killer should run as fast as possible in the opposite direction instead of trying to analyze and explain his intentions. In a sequel that otherwise divided fans and critics, the weirdest scene from Halloween Kills stayed true to the legendary’s villain’s essence.
