Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and the Resurrection of a Franchise

The climax of John Carpenter's original 'Halloween' (1978) was the perfect way to end the story of Michael Myers, Dr. Sam Loomis and Laurie Strode. Carpenter never had any intent on making a sequel.

The Resurrection of a Franchise

Going back to my conclusion of the segment on the first film when talking about its closing moments in Halloween II (1981) - A Worthy Companion Piece to the original or Not? - “...After firing six shots into Myers the devil incarnate falls off the balcony of the Doyle’s house and we get a lingering long shot of his supposedly dead body laid out on the ground of the front lawn. Laurie then asks: "Was it the Boogeyman?" Loomis replies: "As a matter of fact, it was." When he looks down and sees that Michael Myers has disappeared, his expression is not of shock but like he knew this was going to happen. We then go to a montage of shots showing everywhere The Shape has been throughout the night, accompanied by the sound of his heavy breathing behind the mask and the film’s closing frame featuring the Myers' house. He is still out there and could be in any of these places. This is a representation of no matter what you do you cannot kill evil and that is what Michael is the embodiment of that - the personification of evil. It is left open ended to leave it up to the audience to interpret what he is and is not the gateway for a sequel. However, moviemaking being a business and business is to make money we got one anyway. 

This wraps up the points I made earlier in the article - “Because of the franchise that was born from the success of ‘Halloween’ it would be easy for viewers not to separate the sequels from it. It is even easier because of those later instalments and understandably too for audiences to misinterpret the original’s ingenious ambiguous ending which has been set up right from the outset. Throughout the course of the entire film, the late great genre veteran Pleasance as the unhinged Loomis constantly warns the other characters of the extreme danger that Michael Myers is. Smith’s Grove officials and Haddonfield’s Sheriff Brackett believe none of it. Given some sublime dialogue, the actor delivers great monologues about how Michael is pure evil and the devil incarnate. He is very convincing in his conviction that Myers is something other than a man. This serves as a narrative purpose.”

I then went on to say before I reached my conclusion quoted in the paragraph above - “These powerful lines coupled with Donald Pleasance’s powerhouse performance are used as a superiorly effective device to help turn Michael Myers into more than just a mad psycho killer. Tommy Doyle believing that the Boogeyman is coming for him this Halloween night supplements this. Michael realizing this belief. To enhance all this is the superiority of the cinematography by Dean Cundey. John Carpenter has Cundey shoot The Shape in such a way that he becomes an enigma. Is Laurie seeing him or not? We actually start to believe that this unstoppable murdering machine although born of the world he is not part of it - a detached reality. Myers’ mask itself represents pure evil. It is subtle in its image of evil as you read into it as to what it signifies and is much like how Loomis describes Michael Myers - “…blank, pale, emotionless”. This all contributes to a supernatural theme with Michael as an ominous force of nature.”

We really did not have to have a continuation of these events. However, with an open ending that could easily be misinterpreted by many as a door left open for a follow-up and what with the movie going on to be the most successful independent production ever made at the time both commercially and critically it was unavoidable that a second instalment would be made. Three years later in 1981, we got Halloween II. Again written and produced by Carpenter and his professional partner Debra Hill and directed by Rick Rosenthal this is a sequel I actually like a lot and is by far the best one of the series. The film might not have been needed but if you want to see “more of the night He came home” then it sure is one helluva an entertaining carry on of that night of terror and sends out this concluding part of the story with an explosive bang - literally! The ending is very much finality to the storyline and it really would have gone out in a blaze of glory here - again literally. Read more about 'Halloween II' (1981) here.

Halloween II was again a box-office hit. Therefore, pressure was on John Carpenter and Hill to produce a continuation of the franchise. They were reluctant to make a direct follow-up to the previous entry as they considered both Myers and Loomis to be dead. They wanted to turn this brand name into a horror anthology series that would obviously entail each new movie being a completely different story to open of course on every Halloween. Written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace reworking a screenplay by Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale, the following year's 'Halloween III: Season of the Witch' was met with a massive negative backlash from fans. Their reaction was simple - no Michael Myers. However, this is a narrow-minded view to say the least. As it is a standalone film that was supposed to usher in a series of one-off stories and if it had of in fact been released simply as 'Season of the Witch' and not bear the Halloween title the movie would have been treated with a far warmer reception.

It is a nasty smart fun satirical little horror story with lashings of irony incorporating a sub-textual anti-corporate message on consumerism. All this is depicted in a story about a mad toymaker who wants to murder children on Halloween with an ancient Druid Celtic ritual using a boulder stolen from Stonehenge and with Halloween masks made by his company. In addition, Tom Fucking Atkins stars in it! Rightfully so, the film now gets the love it deserves from genre fans building a very strong cult following.

It would be six long years until the Halloween series returned. With Carpenter's idea  of turning it into a horror anthology series crashing and burning, head producer the late Moustapha Akkad obviously tired of seeing the Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises raking it in with their horror Icons decided he wanted a piece of the action milking the cash from the cow. At this point in 1988, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger were in their seventh and fourth outings respectively with the largely terrible but guilty pleasure watch of ‘Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood’ and the so so but passable piece of entertainment with ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master’. The production history of 'Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers' is more interesting than the finished film itself. Initially, Carpenter was apparently first approached by exploitation kings Cannon Films to write and direct a sequel to Halloween II with Debra Hill returning as producer. It was actually rumoured to be a  Leatherface vs. Michael Myers movie as Cannon owned the rights to the former character there having just produced and distributed Tobe Hooper's own sequel to his landmark masterpiece 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' with the severely underrated The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).

If this supposed idea existed it was eventually scrapped and John Carpenter enlisted Dennis Etchison to co-write the script with him. Etchison had adapted into novel form under the pseudonym of Jack Martin Halloween II and 'Halloween III: Season of the Witch'. The writer's idea was intriguing. Again set in Haddonfield where Halloween has been banned the screenplay did not actually feature a living Michael Myers but was a ghost story. This was an Elm Street like concept. The fears and anxieties of Haddonfield's parents and children due to the events in 'Halloween' and Halloween II was so strong and due to them trying so hard to suppress it all to try to erase the memory of Michael Myers that it ironically allowed The Shape to return to once again stalk n’ slash the teenagers of the town. I am assuming this would have been in a form much like Blake and his ghostly motley crew in Carpenter's The Fog (1980).

Unfortunately, Moustapha Akkad hated the script calling it “too cerebral” adamant that the premise should return to the roots of the series with Michael being once again a flesh and blood psycho killer. With that, John Carpenter and Debra Hill sold their shares to the Halloween series to Akkad and we now have the film that exists today... a tired routine slasher with plot holes and other flaws galore. Although, despite its problems it has some genuinely great moments all encapsulated in a twitchy atmosphere in a well shot movie. It also reinstates the “boogeyman” theme going right back around to the original film that was sadly absent in Halloween II.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

The opening is excellent. Against a black background, we see the date of Halloween eve - “October 30, 1988”, we are introduced to Alan Howarth’s original atmospherically haunting and unsettling drone like musical score that then plays over the title sequence shots of a deserted farm I am assuming is on the outskirts of Haddonfield. We see a montage of various sinister looking Halloween harvest images situated around the farm with a feel of dread in the air. This very creepy 1-minute perfectly sets the tone for the movie oozing an eerie atmosphere that remains constant throughout the course of the running time.

Soon after however the problems with the screenplay start to become apparent. Myers is supposedly in a coma incarcerated in another metal institution other than Smith’s Grove. Surprise surprise! He is up for a transfer back for no reason except of course screenwriter Alan B. McElroy’s implausible excuse to find a way for The Shape to escape on an exact same stormy night as in the first film. I cannot give the producers too much of a hard time as their intension here is to bring back both Michael Myers and Loomis for a 10^th anniversary reunion, but still it does not escape the fact that both of them surviving that literally explosive finale in Halloween II is just fucking stupid. There is no way anybody could even the indestructible devil incarnate has his limitations. Oh, and somehow magically Michael’s eyes have grown back after Laurie shot both of them out and blinded him. We find out that they have survived through the dialogue of the security guard who leads down to where Myers is being kept the two paramedics who are taking him to Smith’s Grove.

When in the ambulance we discover that The Shape is not in a coma at all overhearing the paramedics talking about a niece he has living in Haddonfield. With that, we see the first underwhelming kill of the movie - a thumb through the forehead of the male of the two paramedics. After director Dwight H. Little and producer Moustapha Akkad watched a rough cut, they decided that the violence was not visceral enough and so an extra day of filming was added to make the murder set-pieces just that. This is much like what Carpenter did with his reshoots of Halloween II to compete with the increasingly gory slashers of the day. Special effects make-up artist John Carl Buechler the director of that previous Friday the 13^th entry was hired to make these scenes more gruesome.

This combined with the extremely odd look of Michael Myers and how stuntman George P. Wilbur acts in the role having never studied the previous performers in the first two films contributes to a distinct sense of disconnect in the franchise between this and the movies it follows. Michael is no longer the personification of evil but your average typical overpowering maniac slasher - a Jason clone. This coupled with the over the top preposterousness of the deaths makes the case even more so. I would not have minded this so much if these kills were actually effective in achieving that gut wrenching desire the filmmakers had set out for but nothing here works to make it an efficient slasher in this respect. There is not one memorable demise for any of the characters here. Well they are memorable in the respect that they are so unbelievably stupid. Take the aforementioned “thumb in the forehead” for example - fucking ridiculous! If this were a Jason Voorhees kill from the character’s zombie incarnation Kane Hodder era then it would have worked just fine. However, this is not Friday the 13^th but Halloween and unlike Jason’s transformation into a super powered walking dead killer there is no narrative reason for Myers’ sudden change here. Before The Shape would methodically stalk his victims, but here he is more aggressive and just there in the faces of his intended kills.

The movie then cuts to the introduction of Michael Myers’ seven-year-old niece Jamie Lloyd played with such conviction by an 11-year-old Danielle Harris. She is up late on the same stormy night due to restlessness kneeling on the living room’s sofa of the house of her foster parents the Carruthers. Jamie was orphaned after her mother Laurie Strode and I am assuming her father being Jimmy Lloyd from Halloween II was killed in a car accident just eleven months previous. Jamie is sad staring out of the window and we see what is supposed to be the Smith’s Grove ambulance that Michael has used for his escape. Her older teenaged foster sister the immensely likable Rachel (Ellie Cornell) comes downstairs to comfort her. Here we see some of the film’s main strengths and yet again more of its weaknesses.

Harris escapes the curse of the annoying kid in a movie in a leading/supporting role by successfully managing to help carry the film in every scene she is in conveying a range of emotions. The character of Rachel carries on this series’ tradition of actually well written teen characters unlike the usual obnoxious brats we are used to seeing pollute the screen in the slasher sub-genre. She is smart and resourceful and Cornell’s performance is very solid making for two very memorable protagonists who I cared about and was emotionally invested in unlike most slashers in which I usually witness annoying arseholes being gruesomely offed.

When Rachel takes Jamie back upstairs to her bedroom this is where the viewer sees for the first time that this in fact the daughter of Laurie when Jamie takes out a photo of her mother from a box in a wardrobe and looking at it starts to cry. There is a prime example of how well McElroy re-establishes the “boogeyman” theme from the original movie with a nightmare sequence following this involving Michael trying to kill Jamie. Of course, we the audience do not know at the time it is in fact a dream scene until it is revealed to be when Jamie’s foster parents come running in hearing her screams and they find Jamie hiding in the wardrobe. Unfortunately, also here we get our first look at Myers and how off his looks are compared to his appearances in the first two films - a terrible mask that not only does not resemble The Shape’s visage in those previous movies but also looks more Michael Jackson (R.I.P.) than Michael Myers. He also has padding to make him look bulkier and hunched up shoulders than make his neck disappear.

Myers first sees his niece Jamie when she is shopping with Rachel for a Halloween costume. As The Shape grabs his new mask Jamie is trying out her clown costume in the shop’s mirror. Michael Myers wore this exact same costume as a child when he killed his older sister Judith in the opening prologue sequence of the original movie. As Jamie looks in the mirror, she sees her reflection change to that of her uncle as a child wearing the clown costume covered in blood holding a butcher knife in his hand. As she sees this, out of fright she drops the costume and backs away into Michael as he appears behind her. As Jamie turns around and looks up at him and screams the camera goes to a close up of Myers as he puts on his new mask. This scene realizes Jamie's nightmare that the "boogeyman" is coming for her and  foreshadows the movie’s chilling conclusion.

The memory of The Shape and his crimes in the first two films a decade ago have been made the stuff of urban legend in Haddonfield amongst the younger generations who were either too young or not even born yet to suffer the life changing repercussions of Michael Myers’ murder spree. Only the older generations who lived through the nightmare and had their lives changed forever because of it are the cautious ones. This creates a sense of impending danger for the young folk of the town while its elders are the threat to Michael in fighting back. Other moments throughout reconnect to the “boogeyman” theme that could be cynically called rehashes but I feel it is more of an effort by the writer to get back to the roots of the original movie. Like for example the scene set in Jamie’s primary school that is a variation of when Tommy Doyle is picked on by a group of three boys about how the “boogeyman” is coming for him that night on Halloween. Here we have another group of three two boys and a girl bullying Jamie about how her uncle is the “boogeyman” and then proceed to nastily tease her about how her mother is dead. Children can be so cruel.

Another example of going right back around to the first film is a great scene involving Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and a crazy old preacher Rev. Jackson P. Sayer (Carmen Filpi) as he gives chase after Myers after a tense confrontation in a petrol station where The Shape acquired his overalls from a mechanic he murdered. Loomis is only partially injured from that explosion at the end of Halloween II. Like I am assuming Michael Myers is as well from seeing his burnt hands in a POV shot when he sneaks into the Carruthers’ house and finds in that same box in Jamie’s wardrobe a photo of himself as a boy in the clown’s costume and a photo of her with her mother learning that she is his niece. Sam Loomis just has a rather horrible facial scar, one burnt hand himself and a limp now having to use a cane. Not only is it way too farfetched that they would have survived such a huge explosion they are not even severely hurt from it. In this scene Loomis is forced to hitchhike after his car was destroyed by an explosion in said petrol station. There is some great humorous dialogue here in relation to him hunting down Michael -

Jack Sayer: “You're huntin' it, ain't ya? Yeah, you're huntin' it alright. Just like me.”
 
Dr. Samuel Loomis: “What are you hunting, Mr. Sayer?”
 

Jack Sayer: “Apocalypse, End of the World, Armageddon. It's always got a face and a name. I've been huntin' the bastard for 30 years, give or take. Come close a time or two. Too damn close! You can't kill damnation, Mister. It don't die like a man dies.”
 

Dr. Samuel Loomis: “I know that, Mr. Sayer.”

Alan B. McElroy really understands the source material and goes out of his way to be as faithful to it as possible reigniting the fire of the hearts of these characters that worked so well in the first two films. He replicates the points made in the first two paragraphs of this article with my quotes from Halloween II – A Worthy Companion Piece tothe Original or Not? From his understanding of the protagonist Sam Loomis and the antagonist Myers and reintroducing the “boogeyman” concept while simultaneously maintaining the family revelation that was innovated in Halloween II, McElroy in just a mere 11 days writing time in an effort to beat the writer's strike so production could commence meshes all this together successfully… on paper.

There are three different versions of a movie when production starts - the one that is written, the one that is then filmed with different creative decisions between the director and cast of actors and the one that is made in post-production. While the script is far from being good overall, all this is something the screenwriter gets right but is let down to an extent by what is filmed. The Jason clone performance of Wilber and The Shape’s awful look cancels out all these aspects of the character. However, Pleasence is as great as ever with a more over the top manic turn as Loomis. This is due to the character’s traumatic experiences in what is one of his very best performances in the role. As the series went on with two of the absolute worst entries - ‘Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers’ (1989) and ‘Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers’ (1995) - Donald Pleasence was the main draw of these sequels keeping the fanboys invested in sub-par filmmaking with Dr. Sam Loomis very much becoming the Van Helsing to Michael Myers’ Dracula.

Director Little really helps to bring to the screen Alan B. McElroy’s intentions on bringing the franchise back to where it began. He is certainly no hack and while he is no auteur like John Carpenter, he is a very capable skilful director for hire. He really does envision the best qualities of McElroy’s screenplay very well and successfully recreates much of the original film’s atmosphere with his director of photography Peter Lyons Collister employing the same lightening choices as the first movie’s cinematographer Dean Cundey. The best examples of this can be seen in the scenes of the house of Sheriff Ben Meeker (Beau Starr) where together with Loomis, Jamie, Rachel, her boyfriend Brady (Sasha Jenson) and Meeker’s daughter Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont) who Brady is cheating on Rachel with are all held up in and have un- knowingly locked themselves in with Michael. In another of the film’s stupid kill scenes Myers has cut off Haddonfield’s electric by throwing an electrician onto the town’s power lines so they are all in complete darkness save for some oil lamps. These scenes are filled with a thick atmospheric air of dread and offer the movie’s most suspenseful moments.

The rest of the proceedings up until the harrowing ending though are just run of the mill boring predictable with bountiful displays of illogical carelessness and lacking death scenes. The Shape magically teleports from one side of town to the other yet is still walking as slow as ever. Meeker is another poor unfortunate Sherriff like Brackett in the original film to have his daughter killed… with a fucking shotgun rammed through her stomach! There is not one good kill here at all which is a shame because it might have offered some enjoyment having to put up with all the standard one noted uninspired slasher goings on with just a well executed set-piece here and there and some T&A thrown in for good measure. Nothing of the latter there at all either. Not even the lame sex scene between Brady and Kelly gives us the goods.

There is a constant array of stupidity to be found here. There is a manhunt out for Michael Myers yet he is not noticed behind a car when Loomis and Meeker drive off with Rachel and Jamie. Michael manages to slaughter an entire police station without anybody noticing. The hillbilly lynch mob shoots a man they mistake for Myers who is hiding in some bushes. First, they do not even get a good look at him to think that it might be The Shape as they just see movement in the bushes and hear a rustling noise. In addition, what was the man doing in there in the first place? Why does Brady choose to hit Michael Myers with the shotgun instead of shooting him? Michael finds a butcher knife in all places in the attic of the Meeker’s house. In this same sequence when he is chasing after Rachel and Jamie who have climbed on top of the roof of the house instead of going back downstairs to cut them off he scales across the roof after them. In the schoolhouse scene how did Myers get under the truck of the hicks lynch mob and was then able to pull himself up onto the back of the vehicle when they are moving without any of them seeing him? There is a whole list of other dumb shit but you can have a fun time picking these moments out for yourselves because it’s the only enjoyment most of you are going to get out of most of the third act.

The ending brings this trilogy of the Michael Myers storyline around full circle and it could have all ended here or at least be a good jumping off point to bring in some interesting further entries only for it to all go further downhill very quickly the following year with the next instalment. After Michael is dispatched with shotgun blasts from the hicks and the National Guard he falls into an old mineshaft, Rachel and Jamie return to their parents’ house along with Sam Loomis and Meeker. In a recreation of the first movie’s opening POV sequence the ending here goes right back around to the very beginning of this trilogy with Jamie repeatedly stabbing her foster mother with a pair of scissors. A trilogy is three long acts of one epic film and the ending of a traditional three-act screenplay for a single movie should somehow always relate to the beginning. At the same time, it also puts emphasis on what the ending of the original film signifies in that evil is forever. Hearing the woman’s screaming, Loomis runs up the stairs and looking up he sees Jamie still dressed in the now blood stained clown costume with mask on holding up the bloodied scissors in her hand resembling just how her then child uncle Michael looked when he killed his older sister Judith.

This is a truly disturbing climax with Sam Loomis’ helpless screams due to witnessing the family history of evil repeating itself through the bloodline sending shivers down my spine. This would have ended the series perfectly. Although, it also works as am effective coda to set up Jamie as being pure evil like her uncle. This direction was actually planned for the series only for it to be fucked right up by the incompetent writer and director of ‘Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers’.

Conclusion

‘Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers’ is a mixed bag then that for some strange reason has been heralded by many horror fans as one of the great slashers and an even better sequel than Halloween II. I could not disagree more. There are some truly great moments here that could have done with being in an overall better executed movie and is ultimately an unnecessary sequel. I stated before that the first film did not need a follow-up but at least its ambiguous ending can be interpreted as a set-up for another instalment as it is open ended. Halloween II is not as unnecessary then as it continues the events of that night and wraps it all up definitively. If I really wanted to, I can see this second sequel (not counting III here) as one way to take it up to a trilogy with the character of Loomis as it all harks back to the original movie taking it back to the beginning and caps it all off. Another way to go is an alternative continuity after Halloween II with Laurie Strode in the equally patchy ‘Halloween H20: 20 Years Later’ (1998) that ignores the events in the previous three films and again wraps it all up.

At the end of the day though, neither of these movies would feature for me in a marathon on Halloween night. For that occasion, I will just stick to the first three entries in this franchise and the rather splendid seasonal anthology ‘Trick ‘r Treat’ (2007).

** out of **** 

Dave J. Wilson

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