Characters / Halloween: Michael Myers

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Michael Myers | Laurie Strode | Samuel Loomis | Jamie Lloyd | Rachel Carruthers | Tina Williams | Season of the Witch | Halloween (2007) | Halloween (2018)

Michael Audrey Myers

I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.

"I prayed that he would burn in Hell, but in my heart, I knew that Hell will not have him."

—Dr. Sam Loomis, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

The main villain of the Halloween film series, he killed his older sister when he was 6 years old and was sent to a psychiatric hospital for the remainder of his natural born life. Years later, he escapes, returning to his hometown and unleashing a reign of terror. Also known as The Shape in the scripts, as he is "only a shape in the darkness".

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General Tropes

• Alliterative Name: Michael Myers.^note Halloween IV takes this a step further by giving him a middle initial M, though the name isn't revealed. Most continuities still maintain his original middle name of Audrey, though.
• Arch-Enemy: Michael has two across the franchise.
  • Laurie Strode, his main target and the original Final Girl. In most continuities, she's depicted as Michael's younger sister who he ruthlessly tries to hunt down and finish off after killing his older sister all those years ago. The Blumhouse continuity, however, has this relationship being more one-side on Laurie's end, as Michael is no longer her sibling and just a masked lunatic who utterly traumatized her and she's been unable to move on. By Ends, however, the feeling is very much mutual as they engage in their brutal final battle.
  • Dr. Samuel Loomis, his psychiatrist. Loomis was the first, and for a time, only person to recognize how dangerous and beyond help Michael was, and opted to keep him locked up. Whenever Michael inevitably escaped to go on a killing spree, Loomis is often the one on his tail to put a stop to him.
• Ax-Crazy: Every rendition of Michael has always been depicted as a violent, crazed murderer who commits acts of violence on a whim. The Zombie version plays this straighter than the others, being a more aggressive and rage-driven brute whose kills are more graphic and violent than the rest.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Michael never speaks in any of the films and is extremely dangerous.
• Big Bad: No matter the continuity, Michael will always be the boogeyman of Haddonfield. Even when another villain has any kind of presence, Michael inevitably gets the better of them; in The Curse of Michael Myers, despite having been seemingly Demoted to Dragon, Michael ultimately overcomes Dr. Wynn (killing him in the theatrical cut, and overpowering him and stealing his clothes in the Producer's Cut); in Halloween (2018), Dr. Sartain's attempts to study and understand Michael end with him feebly and futilely begging Michael to speak before his skull is crushed beneath Michael's boot; in Halloween Ends, despite Corey briefly getting the better of Michael, whose age has finally caught up with him, Michael finds him within hours and kills Corey, leaving him as the movie's sole Big Bad.
• Character Tics:
  • Michael will do a Quizzical Tilt when he is curious or looking over the aftermath of his butchering.
  • Michael tends to avoid doing anything with his arms that doesn't involve killing, particularly in the Blumhouse revival trilogy. He doesn't swing his arms when he walks, and when knocked down on his back he will sit straight up without using his arms for support. All of this serves only to enhance his creep factor.
• Cool Mask: Michael's iconic white, latex William Shatner mask. It's the one thing he's consistently shown any attachment to, with some continuities even having him wear the very same mask he wore in the original film, albeit with some wear and tear.
• Cop Killer: Michael has no qualms killing any police officers who get in his way.
• Creepy Child: Even before he became a mass murdering lunatic, Michael is consistently described as an off-putting child in every rendition of the franchise, with only the Zombie films exploring his behavior in more detail.
• The Dreaded: Everyone is terrified of Michael Myers, especially Laurie Strode and Dr. Loomis. His notoriety has earned him the moniker of Haddonfield's boogeyman. The Blumhouse continuity really leans into this aspect of Michael, with his fellow mental patients giving him a wide berth and the town of Haddonfield regarding him as the town boogeyman.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: An additional scene made for the television showing of the original film reveals Michael's middle name to be Audrey, and the 2018 film maintains this, with the bus list Hawkins reads from showing an "A" between his first and last name.
• Evil Is Bigger: His height started out average, but from the fourth film onward, Michael has always been depicted this way, especially compared to his victims. The Zombie films jacked this trait up by casting almost seven foot tall Tyler Mane in the role, depicting Michael as an absolute mountain of a man. Downplayed in the Blumhouse films, where Michael is portrayed by the 6'3'' James Jude Courtney, making him quite tall, but of otherwise normal build.
• Evil Is Petty: While he usually doesn't need a reason to off somebody, the few times Michael has a reason to do so are often this. The most notable instance was him tracking down and brutally murdering Aaron and Dana just to get back his old mask in the 2018 film.
• For the Evulz: Michael lacks the usual traits associated with serial killers, being that they were either abused, bullied, or mistreated in some way, shape or form. He just up and decided to murder his own sister one Halloween night and continued to kill on a whim. The Zombie films give Michael a more traditional abusive household backstory, but still goes out of its way to depict him as a psychopath who clearly derives enjoyment from his actions. The Blumhouse films completely disregard his familial connection to Laurie, casting his actions in the original as the senseless targeting of a group of babysitters just because he could.
• Immune to Bullets: No matter what version of Michael we're talking about, getting shot, even multiple times in quick succession, doesn't keep him down for long.
• Insane Equals Violent: Played with; Michael's own mental state runs the gamut from clearly disturbed to incomprehensible, and the man himself spends much of his life in a sanitarium, but in each continuity, other inmates of such institutions are creepy at worst, but non-violent, marking the extremely violent Michael as an outlier.
• Jerkass: It’s hard to tell due to being a silent, masked killer, but Michael is an absolute prick. He enjoys messing with his victims, and sometimes goes out of his way to inconvenience someone, even those he doesn’t kill.
• Made of Iron: All versions of Michael are this, to varying degrees. The Michael from the Thorn trilogy seems to have Nigh-Invulnerability, while the Michael from the Blumhouse trilogy can be killed, but takes much more than it would be to kill an ordinary person.
• Malevolent Masked Men: All of the Halloween films portray Michael as a vicious psychopath who only exists to murder people and always hides his face behind a mask of some sort.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The series typically straddles the line between whether Michael's seeming inability to die is supernatural in origin or he's just an unnaturally tough man. The original and 2018 films played this straighter than the rest of the series, with the Thorn Trilogy and Kills leaning more towards the supernatural side, and the Zombie films and Ends depicting him as an unnaturally tough but still mortal man who can be felled with enough damage.
• Meaningful Background Event: Michael loves doing this. More to the point, he is the background event, lurking just out of focus with the characters unaware of his presence to ratchet the suspense and tension.
• Psycho Knife Nut: While Michael is hardly picky when it comes to weapons, his most frequent and iconic instrument of murder is a kitchen knife. He even used one in the opening of the original film to kill his sister.
• The Quiet One: Dr. Loomis has stated that he hasn’t spoken a word since he was a child.
• Red Baron: While Michael's sobriquet of "The Shape" is left to the credits until the 2018 film, every continuity has him referred to as "The Boogeyman" at least once.
• Ambiguously Human: Not confirmed if Michael is even a human being.
• Serial Killer: One of the most popular slasher villains in pop culture. Interestingly, Michael is a serial Spree Killer, with him going on a murderous rampage in every film, leaving piles of bodies in his wake.
• Sibling Murder: One thing that remains consistent across continuities: Michael's earliest victim (or fourth, in the Rob Zombie films) was his own teenaged sister Judith.
• Spree Killer: Michael's killings typically occur in the span of a single evening or a few days, each time with a relatively high body count. Technically speaking, Michael qualifies as a mass murderer since in each film he kills at least four individuals with no cooling-off period.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Like most slashers, his name isn't terribly impressive or menacing for a mass murderer, let alone for a Humanoid Abomination. In fact, he infamously shares his name with a certain comedian.

Pre- 2018 timelines

Michael Audrey Myers (pre-2018 timelines)

Played By: Tony Moran, Nick Castle, Will Sandin (age 6) (the original film), Dick Warlock, Adam Gunn (II), George P. Wilbur (4 and The Curse), Erik Preston (age 6, "psychic vision"), Tom Morga (bandaged Michael, uncredited) (4), Don Shanks (5), Chris Durand (H20), Brad Loree (Resurrection)

Appearances: Halloween | Halloween II | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later | Halloween: Resurrection

The original Michael.

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• Adaptational Heroism: Subverted in the original novelization. The book explores Michael's psyche more thoroughly than the films and offers a possible theory why this kid became a killer, but it doesn't hold back on his evil actions at all and shows he ultimately came to embrace the dark forces tempting him. It later becomes a case of Adaptational Villainy, as his kills are much more brutal than they were portrayed in the original film. Instead of simply strangling or stabbing his victims, he's particularly fond of leaving them Gutted Like a Fish, and he stabs his sister so many times that her body is mangled beyond all recognition.
• Adaptational Villainy: As bad as he normally is, Michael is somehow even worse in the Devil's Due comics. Not only does he kill without remorse as usual, but he also takes time to sadistically torture and humiliate his victim for sick thrills. He also makes it very clear he Would Hurt a Child by slashing a boy's throat, and has apparently been pure evil since birth, fantasizing about cutting open his mother's stomach while Laurie was in the womb. Oh, and the fucker gets away with everything.
• The Adjectival Man: Referred to as the "Boogeyman" by the characters until they learn his name. Jamie also calls him "the Nightmare Man" in 4.
• Ambiguously Human: In stark contrast to say, Jason or Freddy, Michael seems to be an ordinary (albeit ridiculously tough and strong) man, but it's heavily implied he's only this on the outside.
• Animals Hate Him: Dogs hate Michael, barking ferociously at the sight of him. Michael isn't terribly fond of dogs either.
• Antagonist Title: The fourth, fifth, and sixth films all feature his name in the subtitle (The Return of Michael Myers, The Revenge of Michael Myers, and The Curse of Michael Myers respectively).
• Awesomeness by Analysis: According to the novelization, this is how he was able to escape from Smith's Grove without a driver's license: he observed Loomis driving very carefully, to the point that he could procure a getaway vehicle when the time came.
• Axe Before Entering: Either this or he just smashes his way through doors.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Kills and eats a dog in the first film, and his mistreatment of animals has been a character trait of his across all media.
• Back from the Dead: Not as bad as Jason or Freddy though. Most of the time, he's just Not Quite Dead.
• Bait-and-Switch: He occasionally shows a fondness for tricking his victims into thinking he's someone else before killing them. In the original, he leads Lynda to believe that he's her boyfriend, and in The Return of Michael Myers, he lets Kelly think that he's a deputy until she notices the dead body of the real deputy.
• Bait the Dog: In the sixth film (theatrical cut only) when Jamie tries a second time to reach out to her uncle, Michael briefly pretends it's working, before killing her in a gruesome manner.
• Bandaged Face: At the beginning of 4. How he was able to see anything with his face completely wrapped up is a mystery for the ages.
• Berserk Button: One of the few times we've known why Michael was trying to kill people was in Resurrection, when a reality TV show starts filming in the Meyers house in Haddonfield. Michael is living in the utility tunnels under the house, and very clearly does not take well to trespassers.
• Beyond Redemption: Dr. Loomis spent eight years trying to reach him with psychotherapy and reform him. As of the first film, he's convinced that Michael is too evil to be redeemed and has to be stopped, one way or another.
  Loomis: I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Loomis describes them as "the devil's eyes". His mask often makes him look like he has no eyes at all when he's shown in low light, particularly in the first film.
• Bloodbath Villain Origin: His first act of villainy (at the age of six) was to murder his own sister in cold blood.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Whatever motivates the Shape is incomprehensible to both the characters and audience. He simply kills on a whim, for no discernible reason except the thrill of the hunt. He also tends to be selective about who and when he hunts, as he may spend 40 years doing nothing unless he's provoked or pass over killing certain people to go after someone else. Either way, Michael is impossible to reason with and is presented as an inhuman horror that has to be put down.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Laurie's Abel.
• Canon Welding: The Chaos Comics run tries to directly tie the 4-6 movies with Twenty Years Later. However these comics were made non canon due to the release of Resurrection.
• Character Tics: His slow, almost robotic, movements, his shallow, creepy breathing, tilting his head at people or things that confuse him, and sitting up (usually after getting knocked down) without using his arms to push himself up.
• The Comically Serious: Maybe unintentional, but the fact that Michael can maintain his emotionless status even in front of someone who yells at him or even makes fun of him can generate a laugh or two albeit in a very dark humorous way.
• Convenient Coma: Between II and 4 (lasting ten years), and 4 and 5 (lasting a year).
• Covered with Scars: Following being lit on fire in the second movie, Michael was shown with burn scars on his hands. Though we didn't see it on-screen for ourselves, the implication is that this was the case for his entire body.
• Covert Pervert: Described as such in a number of sources. The Nightdance comic implies that Michael is sexually fascinated by his victims and sisters, adding a sexual aspect to his killings. He also all but stated to have raped his niece Jamie in the sixth movie (confirmed by its creators), and the screenwriter of the sixth movie describes Michael as being a sexual deviant. John Carpenter himself said Michael originally killed Judith "for sexual reasons" before stopping himself mid sentence.
• Curse: He's said to embody the curse of Thorn, at least in one timeline. It's never been defined just what drives Michael, but it clearly isn't the wants of any human being and seems to ensure he can never stop killing, not even through death. It's quite likely even Michael himself doesn't know what it is.
• Dark Is Evil: White mask notwithstanding, Michael is very fond of hiding in the shadows.
• Demoted to Dragon: In The Curse of Michael Myers. Though near the end of the Theatrical Cut he turns on the cult of Thorn and slaughters them, taking back the Big Bad position.
• Death by Adaptation: In the Chaos Comics miniseries (which ties together the Jamie Lloyd trilogy with H20) it is clarified that Michael was indeed decapitated by Laurie at the end of Twenty Years Later. However these comics were later ommited from canon due to the release of Resurrection which clarifies Michael faked his death.
• Demonic Possession: The novelization of the original suggests this is why Michael is what he is, driven to kill by the undying spirit of a disgraced ancestor. The later movies take it a step further with a curse, but this doesn't amount to much.
• Depending on the Writer: Although Michael's silence, white mask and seeming indestructibility are consistent across multiple films, exactly whether or not Myers is actually supernatural varies depending on the timeline. Michael does seem to possess possibly superhuman abilities in the first two films (breaking through doors, recovering from dozens of bullets, teleportation), the only explanation given is that he is pure evil. In the Thorn trilogy (parts 4-6), Michael's bloodlust and immortality are explained to stem from an ancient sacrificial curse. They go as far as implying that Michael may be regretful of his crimes. Subsequent sequels have since reinstated Michael's original mysterious and remorseless nature.
• Determinator: Powers or not, Michael shrugs off gunshots; stab wounds; and explosions...and yet keeps on going.
• Dirty Coward: His murder of Rachel in the fifth film is the best example of his somewhat cheap if pragmatic way of dealing with his more formidable opponents, Rachel spent most of the fourth film getting the better of Michael and even running him over in the end, so once he wakes up the first thing he does is hide in Rachel's closet and gets her while she's unprepared before she could ever become a threat again.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's implied Annie yelling at him in his car is the reason he spends so much time terrorising her in the original.
• Does Not Like Guns: Michael oddly enough never uses a gun properly, even when he has an opportunity to grab one. When he actually did hold one, he used it to impale someone rather than fire. In this case, it's likely he just finds it more satisfying to kill up close and personal rather than shoot from a distance.
• The Dreaded: Everyone is absolutely terrified of Michael and with very good reason, particularly Laurie and Sam.
• Empty Shell: Myers could be considered a villainous version of this device. He has some moments of cunning and dark humor, but these are mainly used to serve his homicidal goals. Outside of that, Michael is a vessel of pure bloodlust and rage. He has no real motivation, killing randomly and unpredictably, is utterly devoid of emotion, and isn't deterred by how many times he gets battered or "killed." A rare instance where this doesn't make a character pitiful or tragic and only highlights how much of an absolute abomination he is.
• Enfant Terrible: His first kill was his older sister Judith, at age six.
• Establishing Character Moment: Stabbing his older sister to death in the opening of the original film. He's six-years-old at this point.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Has a history of sparing his fellow Smith’s Grove inmates, it’s possible he’s been around them so long even he’s grown attached and refuses to kill them.
• Evil Is Bigger: While average-sized in the first two films, the films starting with the fourth one have him played by stuntmen well over 6 feet tall.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Michael never shows emotions (except the occasional hint of rage), but at points displays a macabre sense of humor: dressing up as a ghost for no other reason than to freak out Lynda and displaying the corpses of his victims to scare their friends as they're found.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: As the Cult of Thorn discovers, trying to control Michael Myers will never end well.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Subverted; despite his horrifically evil nature, Michael's looks are unaffected until he was severely burned at the end of the first sequel.
• Evil Uncle: The fourth, fifth, and sixth movies have him target his niece Jamie. In the H20 continuity, he's also this to John, Laurie's teenage son.
• Evil Wears Black: His coveralls in most films are either charcoal or grey.
• Expy: A masked figure in black who breaths deep and husky. He started out as a normal boy before being consumed and corrupted by an unforeseen darkness and chases a younger hero who turns out to be a long lost relative, as revealed in their second movie. Sound familiar? The difference between Vader and Michael is that while the former still had enough humanity to turn on evil and redeem himself, the latter was already beyond saving even before he met Laurie.
• Eye Scream: Michael is stabbed in the eye with a coat hanger in the original film and shot in both in the second. Despite these injuries, his vision is unimpeded in subsequent films; the very eye Laurie stabbed with a coat hanger is shown in close-up to be perfectly intact in Halloween 5.
• The Faceless: Originally, his adult face was seen once in the original film at the end of it. However, as pointed out by James Rolfe as part 2011's Monster Madness, in Halloween 5 you could see it when Jamie asks to see his face, despite the use of shadows.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: When he was a child. When unmasked as an adult in the first movie, even with the stabbed eye, his face appears to be normal and actually somewhat innocent.^note Carpenter specifically wanted him to have an "angelic" face, to juxtapose with his horrible actions.
• Fatal Flaw: Michael's sheer refusal to give up the hunt often kicks him in the balls in the end. When he finally gets a hold of Laurie in the 1978 original, he doesn't notice Loomis about to shoot him out the window. His continued pursuits lead him into places where the heroes get the edge on him.
• Faux Affably Evil: Due to his immaturity, Michael has moments of coming off as a playful, curious child, just look at his famous head tilt. That said, his playfulness is sadistic and any moments of humanity are faked. A particularly humorous example occurs in the sixth movie, when Tim Strode is taking a shower and Michael is on the other side of the curtain, waiting to ambush him; Tim asks for a towel, thinking that he's talking to his girlfriend and Michael politely complies.
• Flat Character: A deliberate and chillingly deconstructed example. John Carpenter described Michael as "an absence of character" and true to form, there really is nothing to Myers' personality beyond his bloodthirsty, unrelenting love of killing. He does occasionally show signs of confusion, playfulness, and in one odd instance sadness, but the rest of the time he's so devoid of expression it's impossible to tell what goes through his head or why he's such a monster. Most of the time he's treated more like a grim force of nature than an actual character.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Combined with being dressed as a Bedsheet Ghost, he is this while posing as Bob, who wears glasses that Michael takes and wears after he kills him.
• Freudian Excuse: Averted. Unlike other cinematic serial murderers he has no excuse like a tragic past, abusive parents or else. He's an homicidal maniac because he choose to be one. In the "Cult of Thorn" timeline (at least in the producers'cut) however it's implied he's forced to kill because it's under a curse cast by an evil cult and maybe he doesn't even like what he is.
• Genius Bruiser: Killing is all he does, and he does it well. Other than that, he is a master at stealth, can drive a car (when did you ever see Jason do that?), and creates traps, places corpses in places to scare other victims, and usually stalks his prey, learning what he can about them before killing.
• Green and Mean: Michael wears a spruce-green jumpsuit in the first two films.
• Healing Factor: He was shot in the eyes once, but got over it by his next movie. Just one of many examples.
• Hero Killer: Kills Rachel Carruthers in 5, Jamie Lloyd in Curse, and Laurie Strode in Resurrection.
• Humanoid Abomination: Although it's never explicit in the original film, a lot of the tension comes from the lingering suspicion that Michael Myers might not be fully human anymore. The movie treats him less like a character and more like an unreasoning force of pure malignancy, with no comprehensible motivation, an unshakable determination to do evil, and a preternatural resilience. When one of the sequels revealed that Michael was the recipient of an ancient curse, though, a lot of viewers found that the overt supernatural elements ruined the character's mystique, preferring the original's ambiguity.
• Iconic Outfit: His white, expressionless mask and charcoal/grey ^note  The color of the coveralls have frequently been mistaken for blue due to the abundance of low-light scenes. His coveralls have also been green and blue in the second and fifth films. mechanic's coveralls. While the exact details of the mask change from film to film (unavoidable, as there are several different actors wearing different recreations of the mask), he's almost always shown wearing them as an adult, and in The Return of Michael Myers, goes out of his way to get replacements.
• Immortality: Hard to explain in the first few films, but John Carpenter's stated repeatedly that the Michael of the later films isn't a human - he's the living embodiment of pure evil. Thus, "killing" him just slows him down a little.
• Immune to Bullets: He's shrugged off bullets, only getting knocked down (and/or pissed off) and getting up everytime. He's even been shot up by several police officers with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, causing him to fall down a mine shaft in the fourth film; he lived.
• Implacable Man: In the first film alone, Michael takes a knitting needle to the neck, a coat hanger to the eye, a kitchen knife to the chest, and six bullets to the torso. And he just keeps coming. The best anyone can manage is to temporarily disable him.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: In 4, he impales Kelly with a shotgun.
• Inexplicably Awesome: In H20 he's ostensibly just a normal man (albeit one usually characterized as pure evil) - but yet his preternatural stalking ability and ability to survive injuries that would kill normal people many times over are never explained, and really stand out given that these continuities don't delve into the supernatural angle of the 4-6 timeline.
• Instant Expert: In the first film, he learns how to drive simply by carefully watching how others do it.
• Intro-Only Point of View: The original Halloween follows Michael's perspective in the first person as he murders his older sister.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Stabbed, shot, set on fire(multiple times),beaten senseless, rammed with a car, we could go on forever. It doesn't bother him as long as he can get up to kill again, though.
• Ironic Name: "Michael" shares his name with the Archangel Michael, who is most well-known for defeating Satan during the latter's rebellion in Heaven and casting him out into Hell. Michael Myers on the other hand... the rest of this page should tell you which of the two he more resembles.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: In part due to his belief that Michael is pure evil, Loomis refers to him as an "it" more than once.
• It Gets Easier: A very subtle instance in the 1978 original. When his terrified parents unmask 6-year old Michael after killing Judith, he has a look of quiet shock and confusion on his face, suggesting even he can't comprehend what he just did to his sister. Depending on how you look at it, this might be because whatever had a hold of him was only beginning to influence his young mind.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He's a brutal mass murderer, but there's an element of cruelty to Michael's attacks that places him squarely in this mould. He stalks his victims mercilessly, seemingly to give himself kicks as they rarely know he's there, plays pranks on them seemingly to amuse himself (witness his locking Annie in the laundry room outside) and is fond of arranging their bodies to scare future victims even further (as seen by his macabre display of Laurie's friends at the end of the first film, or having Rachel's body on display to terrify Jamie in 5). However, in the sixth movie, he appears to reach towards Jamie in a rare moment of humanity...and then he kills her by impaling her on a corn thresher.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: If only by adaptation. In the Chaos Comics miniseries, which tied together to storylines of the Thorn trilogy, and H20, Michael has spent years terrorizing Haddonfield, killing numerous people and haunting Laurie, Jamie and their family, only for Laurie to finally kill Michael in that version of events. However Resurrection later thumps these comics from canon and in the context of the story, the victory is nullified by Laurie becoming the new killer.
• Kick the Dog: Michael has a tendency to murder dogs as well as people, usually toward the end of a film's first act. He goes so far as to eat a dog (off-screen, thankfully) in the first film.
• Kill It with Fire: Attempted by Loomis at the end of Halloween II. It didn't take. Freddie in Resurrection also pulls it off, but the final shot indicates this one didn't stick either.
• Lack of Empathy: He never shows the slightest sign of empathizing with or even thinking about the feelings of his victims, or, really, anyone else.
• Lean and Mean: In the first couple of movies, the actors who played him have a slim build.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • His iconic white mask is eerie and disturbing, and when it's ripped off at the end of the first movie, he looks like any other normal person - certainly not like the monster he had been behaving as.
  • In installments where Michael is incarcerated before escaping, he wears a white hospital gown or something similar before ditching that once he finds a convenient mechanic to kill for a set of coveralls.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Is the biological father of Jamie Lloyd's baby, Steven.
• Made of Evil: Dr. Loomis refers to him as "evil on two legs". Indeed, he does everything he does because he's a pure evil serial killer. This is highlighted in the original films novelization and the producers cut of the sixth film which clarify Michael to be a puppet of supernatural forces beyond his control. The theatrical cut of the sixth film doesn't treat the curse all too seriously and it almost comes off as a Red Herring for Michael's rage.
• Made of Iron: At least in the first two films. Later films have him as borderline Nigh-Invulnerable.
• Mad Artist: The way he disposes of the corpses of his victims are...very theatrical and extravagant to say at least.
• Malevolent Masked Man: They don't come much more malevolent than Michael, and he always kills while wearing some kind of method of hiding his face.
• Menacing Stroll: Seeing him move at a speed higher than a power walk would be quite the spectacle, though he does run briefly during his escape from Smith's Grove in the first film.
• Monster Clown: Michael's first costume at the age of 6 was a clown, when he stabbed Judith. He was originally supposed to don a similar clown mask as an adult, but they found the William Shatner Mask more intimidating. He does don a clown mask in The First Death Of Laurie Strode briefly to menace his sister.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Given the series' infamous multiple timelines, details of Michael's childhood usually vary. The Devil's Due comics show he was a twisted psychopath even at age 6, while in the 1978 Novelization it seems he was a normal albeit troubled boy before his first murder. The Thorn timeline reveals he was afflicted with a curse that turned him into a monster while in other timelines his nature is unexplained, but the Novelization implies he was similarly possessed by the wrathful spirit of a Celtic murderer. Halloween Kills recently claims Michael wasn't a budding serial killer who tortured animals, but he had an eerie habit of staring through his sister's window at something only he could see.
• Mythology Gag: In the comic Halloween: The First Death Of Laurie Strode he disguises himself in a clown costume to kill Laurie. The costume is based off the one he killed Judith in and the mask he wears with the costume is a Don Post Emmett Kelly mask, which was considered to be Michael's original mask in the first film before going with the now iconic altered Captain Kirk mask.
• Never Found the Body: At the end of the first film, Michael just disappears after Loomis guns him down. The sequels and remakes all offer one explanation or another for his escapes, and on a few occasions, his body is found and recovered, but he's Not Quite Dead.
• Not Quite Dead: Rather notorious for this. In the first film alone, Michael rises from seeming death no fewer than three times.
• No Social Skills: Befitting someone who never speaks and devotes life to spreading bloodshed, Michael lacks any ability to pass for a normal man and spends most of his time looming in the background where nobody notices. This also extends to his eating habits; rather than just steal food from houses when he's hungry, he savagely devours animals raw like a wild beast.
• Not So Invincible After All: Downplayed; Michael is an implacable, soulless monster, but he can and has been beaten, sometimes badly enough to need a lot of recovery time. After the fire in Halloween II, Michael, though he survived, was left inert and comatose for the next decade; the onslaught of gunfire and subsequent fall he suffered in The Return of Michael Myers left him similarly comatose for the next year; and he was tranquilized, beaten, and captured in The Revenge of Michael Myers.
• Not So Stoic: In Halloween II and The Revenge of Michael Myers, Michael's emotionless demeanor falters when Laurie and Jamie appeal to his humanity, but both times, he switches right back to the cold-blooded killer he usually is in short order. After Laurie calls his name, Michael pauses, and tilts his head, apparently confused before he shrugs it off and keeps coming. When Jamie calls him "Uncle", Michael stops, and complies when she asks to see his face. A close-up on Michael's eye even shows him shedding a Single Tear, but when Jamie tries to wipe it away, Michael reacts angrily, puts his mask back on, and resumes trying to kill her.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Being a Stealth Expert who can come out of nowhere, Michael's had quite a few of these, most notably butchering the bulk of the Haddonfield police force, sans Sheriff Meeker, in the fourth film.
• Pater Familicide: His one consistent motivation.
• Pet the Dog: Very downplayed, but anytime Michael spares someone's life could be considered this given what he normally does. In the original Halloween II he breaks into an elderly couple's house to steal a knife but leaves without revealing himself or harming them and later hides in the hospital's maternity ward without killing any of the babies. In Halloween: H20 he is poised to kill a mother and her young daughter, but instead steals their car and leaves without harming them. It says quite a bit about Michael that the greatest decency he's capable of is not killing everyone he comes across.
• The Power of Hate: Michael's evil is apparently so great and all-consuming it gives him a healing factor and inhuman strength. It was even there as a child, according to the novelization. Fellow inmates who gave Michael trouble would suffer nasty accidents and fall ill.
• Psycho Knife Nut: His most iconic weapon is a pointy kitchen knife, although he's perfectly fine with using whatever he can find, or just his bare hands if nothing else is available. He also loves nothing other than murder.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He loves to provoke his victims, tormenting them with merciless stalking games and obviously taking joy in their terror - just like a cruel child bullying others. Justified since he's been institutionalized since he was six, so he obviously didn't mature properly.
• Quizzical Tilt: He often tilts his head at the corpse of a person after he makes a kill, as if to admire his work.
• Reduced To Rat Burgers: The original film has Loomis and Sheriff Brackett discover a partially eaten dog offscreen in his family home. Resurrection also has the contestants of the reality show find rats he has killed for food in the basement. And not all of them are dead.
• Reverse Grip: Typically holds his knife like this.
• Riddle for the Ages: It has never been explained just where Michael's nigh-immortality, inhuman strength, and unrelentingly murderous nature comes from, or whether he's a supernatural being or just a sick man determined to kill. While a few timelines have tried to explain what Michael is, even then it's not completely clear.
• Sadist: Film critic Kim Newman put it best in the 25 Years of Terror documentary when he noted that for Michael scaring people is perhaps more important than killing them. He seems to enjoy ratcheting up his victims' fear before he kills them - most perfectly exemplified by stringing the bodies of Laurie's friends up for her to find in the first film. And that's not even getting into the increasingly elaborate and brutal ways he dispatched his victims as the series went on...There's also the way how he tilts his head after usually killing someone, as if he wants to admire his work from another angle.
• Sibling Murder: His first victim, at six years old, was his older sister, and it just got worse from there.
• Silent Antagonist: In the original films, Michael never says a single word. Most of the sequels don't even make Michael's breathing audible. In the remakes, however, it's made clear that he can speak, but he chooses not to, at least until the end of the sequel.
• Slashers Prefer Blondes: He stalks Laurie and Lisa in Halloween: Nightdance, who are blondes. At least one blond teenager/woman is counted as one of his victims in every film except Curse where there are no blonde victims and H20 where the one blonde girl survives.
• The Sociopath: Has no emotions, empathy, remorse, mercy, you name it. This quote from Dr Loomis seems to hammer the point home: "I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong." Sounds like it alright.
• Stalker without a Crush: Has voyeuristic tendencies, stalking his victims from a distance or just creeping around them.
• Stealth Expert: Especially in the first film, where he vanishes from view despite him having no obvious means of escaping notice, and once, without any sign that the person watching him had ever looked away.
• The Stoic: Ever since he killed his older sister. In the original films, Michael's mask perfectly demonstrates his emotional state; cold, detached, and inhuman.
• Super-Strength: He can lift grown men and crush their skulls without so much as grunting with effort, and is also capable of ripping a tombstone out of the ground.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: When Laurie unmasks Michael for a few brief seconds at the end of the original film, he looks... just like a completely ordinary man.
• Tragic Villain: Subverted in the 4-6 timeline; while it's implied in the fifth film that Michael is ultimately a victim of the rage that drives him to kill, and he sheds a tear when Jamie appeals to his humanity, and the sixth film reveals that Michael is cursed to murder his family, suggesting that Michael has no choice but to kill. However, in both cuts of the sixth film, Michael ultimately proves himself a monster despite it all, either by slaughtering the cultists who supposedly control him or by attacking Dr. Wynn while his curse is neutralized, showing that, curse or no curse, Michael really is pure evil.
• Tranquil Fury: He's completely emotionless while killing, and in general. The sixth movie speculates he is driven by a constant rage.
• Troubling Unchild Like Behavior: Besides the whole "sister homicide" thing, Michael proved to be a little terror during his days institutionalized, according to the novelization. He drowned a girl who teased him in the apple bobbing tank during a Halloween party and other kids who gave him trouble would suffer similar misfortune. And yet he was able to convince the heads of Smith's Grove he was still just a catatonic little boy.
• Uncertain Doom: In the Theatrical Cut of The Curse of Michael Myers, he is last seen being beaten by Tommy with a lead pipe so that the corrosive chemical he injected him with gushes through the eye hole of the mask, but his mask is shown laying on the ground along with the syringes. It could be that Tommy killed him and knocked his mask off in the process, and Loomis is heard screaming which may or may not be Michael killing him. It was hinted by Loomis in The Revenge of Michael Myers, however, that Michael's rage will eventually kill him. In the non canon Chaos Comics, he survived Tommy's attack only to be decapitated by his younger sister Laurie.
• Unexplained Recovery: His appearance in Twenty Years Later (ostensibly set in a different continuity than 4-6) shows Michael alive and well, with no sign of damage from the fire that nearly killed him in Halloween II. It's also never stated how Michael can see again after being shot in both eyes in the second film.
• Ungrateful Bastard: In The Revenge of Michael Myers, a hermit takes care of a comatose Michael for a year. Within a minute of waking up, Michael repays this kindness by strangling the hermit.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: He's a murderous, cruel killing machine, but his first murder came as such a shock because he was initially a timid, ordinary little boy. The novel expands on this by showing he had nightmares of his ancient predecessor Enda's tragic story and was frightened by what Enda was telling him to do. In time, however, he came to relish in the power and abandoned his humanity to become the boogeyman we know today.
• Vader Breath: In the first film, Michael's heavy breathing is heard whenever he's in focus. The sequels largely drop this trait, although it occasionally comes up again, albeit very downplayed compared to the first film.
• Villain Ball: In entries where Michael has a specific target, he has a bad habit of wasting time on needless acts of random violence and sadistic games, leaving room for either his target to escape or for help to arrive. Justified by Michael's sadism; hurting and scaring his victims is just as important as killing them to him.
• Villain Protagonist: Michael is this for the franchise as a whole, since we follow him from the tender age of six on his neverending quest to bring bloody chaos to Haddonfield. This is avoided in H20, since he gets considerably less screentime in the former and Laurie and her family are the main focus of the latter.
• The Voiceless: Michael never speaks, although it's unclear if he can't, or simply chooses not to. The original films take this even further; most of the time, Michael doesn't make a sound even while exerting himself or being injured.
• White Mask of Doom: So iconic that he goes out of his way to replace it in The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween H20 after losing it in the fire in Halloween II.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In the original film's novelization, he is cursed to do what he does, in contrast to the Made of Evil portrayal he is famous for. The 5th and 6th film imply that he's been forced to kill by a great evil, later revealed to be the work of the Cult of Thorn. It also implies that he hates what he has become and cries briefly in the fifth film. The future films starting with H20 would drop this element.
• Would Hurt a Child: Played with, to the point of Depending on the Writer. The films go back and forth over whether or not Michael is interested in killing children.
  • In the original film, the worst thing Michael ever does to a young child is scaring a boy who bumped into him and terrifying Tommy and Lindsey. He ultimately ignores both children in favor of targeting Laurie and her friends. In Halloween II, a maternity ward full of newborn babies is ignored by Michael, other than briefly hiding there. By the end of the film, those babies are the only people Michael has come across that he didn't at least try to kill.
  • In the fourth, fifth, and sixth films, Michael's main target is his niece, Jamie, who is eight when he first comes after her, and later targets Jamie's newborn son. He repeatedly tries to kill Jamie (eventually succeeding in the sixth film) and nearly runs over a young boy who is with Jamie in the fifth film, but doesn't go out of his way to attack any other children. The only reason Jamie was notable exception was because the Curse of Thorn has those inflicted kill every other relative of their bloodline.

Zombie Remake Duology

Michael Myers

Michael as a child.^note Chase Wright Vanek (pictured right) replaced Daeg Faerch (left) since Faerch had a noticeable growth spurt between Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009).

Played By: Tyler Mane (age 27), Daeg Faerch (ages 10-12) (2007 remake), Chase Wright Vanek (age 12) (H2)

Appearances: Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Serving largely the same role as in the original Halloween, this Michael is given a more realistic and sympathetic portrayal than his counterpart, while still remaining a vicious and brutal killer.

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• Abusive Parents: His stepfather, Ronnie, was a schoolyard bully in the body of a bitter old redneck, constantly spitting homophobic insults and threats at him.
• Accidental Hero: In the Director's Cut of the remake, Michael murders two orderlies at Smith's Grove who broke into his room to rape a female inmate. Michael notably isn't acting in the woman's defense; he's upset that the orderlies touched his collection of masks, though he does leave the woman untouched.
• Adaptational Dumbass: Downplayed, but still. Unlike his Genius Bruiser portrayal in the originals, this Michael is more of a straightforward brute with little interest in setting traps for his prey. He's also never seen driving.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Unlike the Ambiguously Human boogeyman of the original films, this Michael is just a man, albeit an exceptionally large, strong, and tough one. The idea of him being "pure evil" is explicitly shown to be melodramatic exaggeration on Loomis' part, with Michael having a genuine psychological disorder, his seemingly inhuman silence is just an extreme method of coping with his incarceration, and his superhuman strength and durability are simply him being abnormally large and strong. Case in point, the sequel shows Michael to be as mortal as any other human being, ending with his unambiguous death.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed, but still present: Michael is portrayed as mentally disturbed and psychopathic, but still human, unlike the soulless embodiment of evil he was in the original films. His motivation (to reunite with his sister Laurie, the only person he actually loves) is also much more sympathetic than his motives in the original films (kill as many people as possible, especially Laurie and any other member of his family). On the whole he's portrayed far more sympathetically here than he ever was in the original films, being more of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds than a purely evil monster.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • In the original continuity, Dr. Loomis concluded that Michael was nothing less than pure evil and became his nemesis; here, Loomis didn't stop trying to reach Michael until the case was taken from him, and he considered Michael the closest thing he had to a best friend. For his own part, Michael shows Loomis some limited mercy, which is more than the doctor ever got from his patient in the original films.
  • The original films had Michael seek out Laurie so that he could murder her (either because of a curse or For the Evulz); here, Michael tracks down his sister so that they can reunite and be a family again, and he only attacks her when Laurie (unaware of their relationship and justifiably terrified of Michael) tries to kill him first.
• Adaptational Sympathy: This version of Michael is shown to have a Freudian Excuse, genuine psychological issues, and a capacity to care about others, albeit a warped and downplayed one, all qualities distinctly absent from the original (and subsequent) incarnation, giving him a degree of humanity that his original incarnation was never capable of.
• Adaptational Ugliness: Michael is much dirtier looking than in any of the original films; the coveralls he wears are darker and dirtier, and his mask is much older and more degraded. By the time of the sequel, he's reduced to filthy-looking, scavenged clothes, while his mask has all but fallen apart. His unmasked face is also less handsome than in the original, although this is justified; in the original, Michael had just recently escaped from a respectable sanitarium, where he was looked after, but in these films, Smith's Grove is much shabbier, and when we see Michael's face in the sequel, he's been living as a hermit for two years.
• Adaptational Villainy: Very downplayed. In the original films, Michael as a child was never shown or stated to be anything but normal prior to killing Judith, adding to the sudden, horrifying nature of his actions. Here, he's portrayed as much more crass and clearly troubled, though the extent of his Bloodbath Villain Origin is still shocking. The original Michael was also both described and portrayed as emotionless, with moments of genuine rage or humanity being few and far between; in the remake, he's more visibly driven by rage and human emotion, giving his killings a personal edge that the original Michael lacked. Despite this, he also has a tragic backstory involving having an abusive stepfather and bullies constantly behind his back and even tries to reunite with his long-lost sister, Laurie Strode.
• Adaptational Wimp: Zig-zagged. While he's still very strong, very durable, and incredibly persistent, this Michael is just a really big, really strong lunatic instead of the immortal and supernatural monster he was in the original films. Case in point, the remake's sequel shows him definitely being killed, either by Laurie, or being gunned down by the police.
• Age Lift: In the original film, Michael was six when he first took a life, and 21 during the majority of the film. Here, he was ten when he killed his sister, and 27 for the latter half of the film.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In the alternate ending to the first film, where he releases Laurie into Loomis's arms, only to be gunned down by the police after making a sudden movement.
• Ambiguous Situation: As a child, in Smith's Grove, Michael claimed to remember nothing of the night he murdered five people; the film never confirms if he's lying or if he genuinely experienced a dissociative episode.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: As a child, Michael killed his pet rat to exercise his sadistic impulses.
• Barbarian Longhair: As a child, Michael wore his hair long, and he continues as an adult, showing how little he cares for his own appearance.
• Beard of Evil: In Halloween II Michael has a huge beard, grown during his time as a hermit.
• Berserk Button: Touching his masks or getting between Michael and his sister will end badly for anyone in his way. Better yet it's best to stay away from him.
• Bloodbath Villain Origin: Even bloodier than the original; Michael starts by beating a school bully to death with a tree limb, then later that night, brutally murders his mother's boyfriend, his sister Judith's boyfriend, and finally, Judith herself with a kitchen knife. Judith's murder is far more brutal and sadistic than in the original as well; instead of just stabbing her, Michael stabs her, then chases her into the hall before slashing and stabbing her to death while she cries and begs for mercy. Before the main events of the film begin Michael has a body count equaling that of the first film.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Unlike the original's Black Eyes of Evil, this Michael has light blue eyes, with the "creepy" aspect being played up during his scenes as a child.
• Death by Adaptation: The remake's Michael is the first version of the character to die onscreen; in Halloween II, he's either gunned down by the police (in the unrated version), or fatally stabbed by Laurie with his own knife (in the theatrical cut).
• Decoy Protagonist: The 2007 film starts out following him before the Time Skip switches the focus to Laurie.
• Disappeared Dad: There is little to no talk about Michael’s biological father.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Unlike the originals, this Michael loves his mother. Even after her death, Halloween II shows him seeing her in hallucinations and obeying (what he believes to be) her will.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In stark contrast to the originals; Michael loves his little sister and his primary motive is to reunite with her.
• Expy: This version of Michael has quite a bit in common with Jason Voorhees; bullied as a child, loves his mother, lives as a hermit when he isn't killing, massive build, and extremely violent kills. Ironically, the original Friday the 13th film was directly inspired by the original Halloween.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: As a child, Michael looks almost angelic, with his boyish features and long blond hair, his innocent appearance contrasting with the horrors he carries out. Interestingly, Michael considers himself ugly, and he wears masks in an attempt to cover up "[his] ugliness".
• The Faceless: Averted. The original films went out of their way to avoid showing his face, but this Michael is seen without his mask as an adult on more than one occasion, particularly as his mask falls apart in Halloween II.
• Freudian Excuse: Michael grew up being bullied while living in borderline poverty and receiving little help for his already apparent sociopathic tendencies until it was too late. He also had a sort-of-stepfather in his mother's boyfriend, who routinely belittled and abused he and his mother and sister. Once Michael decides to give into his dark nature, he's one of the first ones to die.
• Immune to Bullets: Subverted; while he can take shots from a .357 Magnum Colt Python, including one to the head with no ill affects (except the surreal hallucinations), two alternate endings for the first and second films have him get shot to death by police.
• It's All About Me: Michael is a textbook psychopath with no empathy; this is a given. His world is insular, and when he's acknowledged to care about someone else, he doesn't show any regard for the person themselves beyond their connection to him. His fondness for his mother didn't stop him from causing her untold anguish by murdering her daughter and boyfriend, and his love for Laurie, such as it is, is so obsessive that he brutally murders her friends to have her to himself.
• Kick the Dog: Ismael Cruz treated Michael with more kindness than any of the other guards at Smith's Grove ever did. When Ismael tries to stop Michael's escape, he is shown no mercy. In fact, Michael treats Ismael with even more sadism and cruelty than he did with the other guards, drowning him while Ismael pleads for mercy.
• Killed Off for Real: The first Michael of any continuity to officially die on-screen, either by impalement on farm equipment and stabbed repeatedly or shot down in a hail of gunfire by the police in the unrated version. In an alternate ending of the first Zombie film, Michael is explicitly shot dead by police officers after making a sudden movement that freaks them out. Possibly justified in that this version of Michael is ultimately a mortal man despite his massive build unlike previous iterations where he may or may not be supernatural.^note SPOILER WARNING!!! The producer's cut ending of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers has Michael live whereas the theatrical version leaves his fate much more ambiguous. Meanwhile, in the H20 timeline, the very last shot of Halloween: Resurrection shows a seemingly dead Michael awaken indicating he ultimately lives in that continuity. He wouldn't be unambiguously killed again until the H40 timeline.
• Lack of Empathy: Obviously for his victims, whom he kills in horrifically brutal and sadistic fashions, but for his loved ones as well; after he dives into killing, Michael has no reaction to the suffering he causes his mother, and as an adult, he doesn't seem to even understand why Laurie is so afraid of him or why killing all of her friends isn't the best way to reach out to his little sister.
• Made of Iron: He's not as indestructible as the original Michael, but he can still take quite a lot of punishment. In the first film he's shot by Loomis, but within minutes, is back up with no sign of stopping. The end of that film and opening of the sequel has him survive being shot in the head (albeit a glancing shot from someone who had no experience with guns) and the subsequent crash of the ambulance transporting him, walking both injuries off with no sign of lasting damage.
• The Mentally Disturbed: The second film features several scenes from Michael's perspective, showing that he suffers from hallucinations of his mother commanding him to kill and to reunite with Laurie.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: He doesn't screw around with the mind games and merciless stalking nearly as much as the original Michael. If he wants you dead, chances are you'll be bleeding out not long after.
• No Social Skills: When dealing with the one person he doesn't want to brutally murder, Michael, after many long years of silence and total introversion, he doesn't even think to speak to Laurie, and seems to expect pointing to a picture of the two of them as children (during which time Laurie was a baby) to be enough to communicate their familial relationship. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work.
• Pet the Dog:
  • About as close to this trope as he's capable of; in the first film, Michael holds back from harming Dr. Loomis, even when the doctor shoots him in the shoulder, until Loomis tries to physically get between Michael and Laurie. It's not much, but it's more than anyone else who isn't Laurie ever gets from Michael.
  • Michael's fondness for Laurie is a subversion; while he does love her, his affection for her drives his villainy, and what shows of compassion he does give her are undermined by his massacre of her loved ones.
  • He brutally murders the two orderlies who rape a female patient in his room after they touch his masks, but he leaves the woman unharmed. In a strange way, he could be considered an Accidental Hero since he did save her from being raped.
• Poor Communication Kills: Due to his No Social Skills he never is able to communicate to Laurie that they're siblings and he's looking to reunite with her rather than wishing her harm.
• Sadist: More blatantly than in the originals; he killed small animals as a child, and when he killed as a ten year old, the kills were drawn out and brutal. As an adult, his kills are extremely brutal and gruesome, with special mention going to a victim in the sequel, who has his face stomped in by one of Michael's boots.
• Silent Antagonist: Downplayed compared to the original and Reboot versions. Michael speaks as a child until he eventually closes himself off. While he eventually stops speaking, he still makes more audible grunts of pain and rage compared to other versions of the character. Finally, he says a single word in the Director's Cut of the sequel.
• The Sociopath: A textbook low-functioning sociopath; tortured and killed animals as a child, no empathy or impulse control, and extremely violent and sadistic.
• Tragic Villain: Unlike the original timelines, Michael had a tragic backstory involving growing up with a dysfunctional family and being bullied at school. After he snaps and escapes as an adult, he goes on a mission to reunite with his sister and kill anyone who gets in his way.
• Tranquil Fury: In this continuity Michael is a ball of rage and hatred brought on by his terrible upbringing. So while he may come off as the same silent killer he was in the original, his more violent nature in these films show off how much angrier he is.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • A guard at Smith's Grove named Ismael Cruz treated Michael kindly, even giving him advice on how to cope with his captivity. During his escape, Michael killed Ismael even more brutally than the other guards as soon as Ismael tried to get him back to his cell. As he pleads for his life, Ismael even mentions that he was good to Michael, but Michael shows neither pity nor hesitation.
  • Loomis spent years trying to reach Michael, even considering him the closest thing Loomis had to a best friend. The biggest courtesy Michael shows him is to not kill Loomis on sight. As soon as Loomis tried to stop him from taking Laurie, Michael nearly crushed his skull and left him to die.
  • A woman apologises to him after her father and husband beat him up. He kills her just as brutally as the two men.
• Unstoppable Rage: Much like his other slasher counterpart Jason, Michael's actions in the remakes are driven by pure hate and rage he isn't as cold and calculating like the original. This is probably due to his Dark and Troubled Past as he had to deal with bullying and abuse so he uses this anger to brutally murder his victims.
• Villain Protagonist: The first half of the remake follows Michael's Start of Darkness and the miserable conditions that contributed to it.
• The Voiceless: After taking advice from Ismael about closing himself off to help cope with his captivity, Michael all but abandons verbal communication. Even when he's trying to explain to Laurie why he's after her, he just points at a picture of them as children instead of telling her. Unsurprisingly, Laurie has no idea what the masked and apparently mute lunatic who has slaughtered her friends and family is trying to say. The extended cut of the sequel has Michael say exactly one word ("DIE!") near the end, but apart from that, he remains silent.
• Would Hurt a Child: Played with. Despite being within striking distance of them several times, Michael never lays a hand on Tommy or Lindsey (even when he's directly hovering over her), and in the sequel, he doesn't even respond to a random child who encounters him on the street. As usual, however, many of his victims are teenagers whom he kills very brutally and with zero remorse.

Blumhouse Revival Trilogy

Michael Audrey Myers / The Shape

Played By: Nick Castle (the window scene and breathing), James Jude Courtney (the unmasked scenes and as the stunt performer), Airon Armstrong (flashback scenes)

Appearances: Halloween (2018) | Halloween Kills | Halloween Ends

A mute lunatic who killed his sister at the age of six and broke out fifteen years later to go on a killing spree. Defeated and captured, he has broken out forty years later to resume his rampage, leading to a final confrontation with Laurie.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: A bit downplayed given this version's age, but this Michael lacks the burn scars received from the hospital explosion at the end of Halloween II (1981) (which didn't happen in this continuity) and looks like a relatively normal, late middle-aged man. As of Kills, the burn scars are back, though they're less extensive than the scarring shown in the 4-6 timeline.
• Adaptational Badass: Despite the below mentioned case of Adaptational Wimp, this trope is also in play as of Halloween Kills; in previous films, Michael almost always avoided confronting large groups, preferring his usual ambushes and sneak attacks. In this continuity, he twice faces off with enemies many times his number head-on, while being significantly older than most of his opponents to boot. He wins both fights, butchering a group of firefighters with their own tools and managing to get a second wind after taking a savage beating from an angry mob and slaughtering them all.
• Adaptational Karma: Both previous timelines continuing from the original had Michael survive to kill again. Here, he finally gets his just desserts, suffering a brutal Karmic Death at Laurie's hands and his body being mulched to drive home the fact that he truly is dead.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: Due to Laurie and Michael being Unrelated in the Adaptation, the nature of their antagonism differs in this continuity. In the previous continuities, Michael spent his various incarcerations obsessed with finding Laurie and/or her children and deliberately seeks them out when he escapes. Conversely, in this timeline, while Laurie spends most of the 2018 film and Halloween Kills believing that Michael is on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and is ultimately after her, even believing that, in the latter film, he'll seek her out in the hospital, the reality, as Hawkins informs her, is that Michael has barely spared Laurie a thought in the past forty years and was brought to her by circumstances beyond his control. Even when he's clearly more aware of Laurie, Michael doesn't go out of his way to find her. Their final showdown in Halloween Ends only takes place because Michael wants his mask back from Corey, who stole it for his own murder spree; that Corey was at Laurie's house when Michael finally caught up with him was a total coincidence.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • For the first time in the series, Michael actually kills a child onscreen. In the previous continuities, with the exception of his niece Jamie, the minimum age for Michael was roughly 17. Here he straight up Neck Snaps a pre-teen no older than at least 12. This is only the first time he succeeded - he's attempted to kill children multiple times in previous movies, a child even being his primary target in Halloween 4 and 5.
  • In all previous sequels to the original film, Michael, while certainly unrelenting in his evil, had an actual target for his rampages, and in the one film where this wasn't the case (Halloween: Resurrection), he still had a motive for killing (intrusion into his home). This version of Michael lacks even those meager traces of humanity, simply killing at random for his own amusement.
  • In the 4-6 timeline, Michael had been cursed to kill his family, affecting his agency in his crimes. Here, to all appearances, he's purely evil of his own volition.
• Adaptational Wimp: Downplayed, but still there considering the other Michaels. This version of Michael lacks the Healing Factor of the original and is blinded in his left eye from the clothes hanger Laurie used against him. He also is much older, with his age slowing him down. However, despite his aging body, Michael makes up with ferocity and malice. Not that it stops him from shrugging off stab wounds, blunt force trauma, and being hit by a car.^note This is in fact an Enforced Trope, as in interviews co-writer Danny McBride stated that he grew bored of seeing Michael turned into another Jason-esque unbeatable monster. He finds it much scarier when the thing chasing you is mortal, but simply has the cunning and willpower to fight through what you throw at it. Seemingly downplayed in Kills, where he is a virtually unstoppable villain, powering through many all-but-certainly fatal circumstances and ultimately killing dozens of people by the time the film is over. Played straight in Ends, where age and injury have finally caught up to Michael; although he puts up a fight, he's overpowered by Corey, and in a final fight with Laurie, he's ultimately defeated and slain.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Several characters throughout the movie speculate as to why Michael does anything he does, with no answer to be found. Only Michael truly knows, and he certainly isn't talking.
  • Did he spare Corey's life out of mercy, a sense of kinship, or a belief that he might be useful? Again, only Michael knows, and he never says a word on the subject.
• Ambiguously Human: As per usual, Michael is highly resilient and strong, and survives bodily mutilation that would kill a normal human, but doesn't appear to heal from it. His mask alone seems to carry a dark aura. The "human" part is officially subverted in Halloween Kills, with Laurie speculating that he's become a sort of transcendental force of evil. Double Subverted in Halloween Ends, where both Corey and Laurie, after overpowering and unmasking Michael, declare him nothing but a man, which Laurie proves doubly true by killing Michael once and for all.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Michael Myers's weak point is his mask. He's very attached to it, taking the time to adjust it if a victim shifts it around. As Karen proves in Halloween Kills, it can be used to lure him into a trap if it's taken from him. During the final fight with Laurie he had the upper hand and was about to kill her. The only reason Laurie won is because while being stabbed she grabbed his mask. Instead of finishing her off Michael takes a second to let go and adjusts his mask. Laurie then takes this opportunity to get the upper hand and finally Michael Myers is Killed Off for Real.
• The Bad Guy Wins: For a time, anyway. Michael ends Halloween Kills the most triumphant he's ever been, not only surviving the film but killing off many of the returning characters from the original movie and seemingly growing stronger than ever.
• Bald of Evil: A downplayed example. While it can be hard to notice, scenes where he's unmasked show his hairline is receding. The "Evil" part, however, is a given.
• Beard of Evil: While his face is never properly seen before he dons his mask, from what can be glimpsed he clearly has stubble.
• Berserk Button:
  • Implied; Michael isn't the nicest of individuals at the best of times, but one of the rare times he shows something like genuine anger is when Sartain tries to manipulate and understand him. Michael ignores the closer and defenseless Allyson (the only time in the film he ignores an easy victim without a pragmatic purpose) in favor of attacking Sartain, and when the mad doctor feebly asks him to say something, Michael non-verbally, but eloquently replies with one of the most brutal killings in the film.
  • Michael is very attached to his mask, and tends to respond violently when someone takes it from him. Aaron and Dana die just for having it, and everyone else who takes Michael's mask— Dr. Sartain, Karen, and Corey— all die by Michael's hands soon after.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Many characters in the films speculate on the motives behind Michael's rampages, but his actions sometimes corroborate them, sometimes contradict them. Ultimately his actions make sense to him and him alone.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
  • Michael's relation to Laurie is retconned in this continuity, meaning Michael's stalking of Laurie that fateful Halloween night was purely random. Though the event traumatized and haunted Laurie for decades, Michael barely recognizes her when they meet again. In fact, he only bothers going after Laurie because he was taken to her residence while unconscious in Hawkins's car.
  • This is confirmed in Halloween Kills, with Hawkins outright telling Laurie that Michael wasn't hunting her specifically until Sartain forced their confrontation in the last film. However, there is an implication after Karen and Allyson both have their own battles with Michael with him even killing the former that while he may not have particularly cared who the Strodes were before, he certainly knows them now.
  • A moment in the novelization also has shades of this; after he finishes off the mob by killing Brackett, the text makes clear he neither knows nor cares who the former sheriff is, despite having killed his daughter all those years ago.
• Boom, Headshot!: Karen shoots at his right cheek, leaving a bloody wound, which is enough to stun him and allow Laurie to attack him from behind.
• Came Back Strong: When battling the angry mob in Halloween Kills, he at first has trouble landing hits against multiple opponents, only managing to slice one attacker's arm before a combination of bullets and melee weapons put him down and knock him out. A little later, he wakes up and kills the nearest fighters by surprise before fighting and murdering the rest of the mob without any problem.
• Character Exaggeration: These films put a great deal of emphasis on Michael's habit of Desecrating the Dead; previous films would often have him leaving his victims on display for others to find, but he was just as likely to leave them where they lay. Here, he often mutilates or poses the bodies of his victims as morbid jokes for his own entertainment.
• Clothes Make the Legend: The first thing he does after escaping the bus crash is tracking Aaron and Dana to a gas station, where he murders a mechanic for his coveralls and boots, then murders Aaron and Dana to steal back his mask from their car.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Not usually Michael's style, but his long, drawn-out murder of Cameron in Kills can only be described as this. It's likely to psychologically torment Allyson as revenge.
• Combat Pragmatist: Perhaps the only concession given to Michael's age is that he rarely attacks his victims head-on anymore, using terrain, subterfuge, and the shadows to give him the upper hand in almost every situation. Interestingly, it's also a trait he shares with Laurie.
• The Corrupter: In a sense. When Corey is able to overpower Michael in the sewers and steal his mask, there’s an ambiguous sense that part of Michael’s evil has been passed on to him, allowing him to stalk Haddonfield in the real Michael’s place. Even after Michael’s ultimate defeat, Laurie acknowledges that the kind of evil Michael brought to Haddonfield will never die, not completely, and another Michael could rise to take the original’s place.
• Covered with Scars: Downplayed, but by the end of Halloween Kills, Michael has, at minimum, a scarred and blind left eye (from Laurie jabbing a coat hanger into it), a scar on his neck (from Laurie stabbing him with a knitting needle), two missing fingers from his left hand, and burns scars on the left side of his face (from the fire that nearly killed him).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Michael's first confrontation with a large group of people is a complete stomp in his favor as he massacres the responding firefighters outside the burning Strode residence.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Even as he's beat within an inch of his life by the mob at the end of Halloween Kills, Michael still manages to swipe out and slash the wrist of the man who thought to bring a gun, preventing himself from being shot in the head. While they seem to overwhelm him and put him down for the count, those are the only hits they get in before Michael gets his second wind, and a few minutes later he butchers every single one of them with no signs of damage.
• Crucified Hero Shot: Inverted; Michael Myers's body is given this exact treatment by the town when they put his body into the car crusher. However despite the religious symbolism Michael Myers is FAR from a hero. And for added points when Laurie kills him it is very similar to the way Jesus was crucified, She even stabs him in the side with a butcher knife just to drive the point home.
• Dead Guy on Display: Michael is very fond of setting up morbid scenes with the bodies of his victims. He ends up on the receiving end of this in Ends, with his own lifeless body being strapped to the roof of Allyson's car and paraded through Haddonfield to signify the final end to his reign of terror.
• Deader than Dead: In Ends, Michael Myers is mutilated, has his legs crushed, gets stabbed multiple times in the chest, his throat and wrist slit, his arm broken and, finally, his body mulched into chunky bits by a car shredder to Make Sure He's Dead.
• Death Glare:
  • Gives an especially bone-chilling glare to Laurie, Karen, and Allyson as they leave him to burn.
  • When Allyson confronts him in the Myers house in Halloween Kills, Michael gives her a lengthy, hateful glare before attacking her.
• Defiant to the End: When Laurie has him dead to rights at the end of Ends, Michael keeps struggling despite being pinned to a table, with his throat cut, even ripping one of his impaled hands free to try and strangle Laurie while he bleeds out.
• Demoted to Extra: The Shape himself has a significantly reduced role in Ends. After two films of being the active, driving force of conflict, Michael spends much of this film hiding in a sewer while Corey goes on committing the majority of the murders. Michael only has a handful of kills this time around, one of which he needed help from Corey, and his only prominent scene is the final battle with Laurie.
• Dented Iron: Played with. While Michael retains the scars he gained from his first rampage forty years ago, including being left blind in one eye, they don't slow him down in the slightest. In fact, he accumulates numerous new injuries over the course of the films (from getting his fingers blown off to getting hit by a car) and while it takes him a moment to recover, he's back on his feet and stronger than ever before too long. That said, the films show that, while Michael has an inhuman tolerance for it, he does feel pain, and after his hand is maimed, he takes a moment to bandage the wound rather than simply ignoring it. More overtly in Halloween Ends, where while never said outright, his age and his injuries have finally caught up to Michael, and in a big way. While still lethal, he needs Corey's help to kill a cop he lured to Michael. Later in the movie, Corey overpowers Michael and steals his mask, and Laurie is able to eventually mortally wound and pin him down on her own. Overall, he does only a few of the kills in the movie.
• Desecrating the Dead:
  • Michael's raison d'être after his escape. He showed signs of it in the original film, but he actively makes a habit of posing corpses and otherwise humiliating his victims when he's allowed the time to do so. After killing a sheriff's deputy, Michael beheads the corpse, then hollows it out to make a crude jack-o-lantern, his twisted idea of a joke.
  • His kills grow more complex and increasingly gruesome in Halloween Kills, posing corpses still in their masks and setting up two others in a twisted lover's embrace.
  • In Halloween Ends, he ends up on the wrong end of this. Laurie and the Haddonfield citizens run his corpse through an industrial shredder as a posthumous "fuck you" towards the boogeyman and to make sure that this time he stays down.
• Determinator: Michael shows both incredible patience (waiting 40 years for an opportunity to escape captivity) and an almost admirable tolerance for pain in pursuit of his goals, shrugging off or all but ignoring injuries that would disable or kill a younger man. In Halloween Ends, even with his throat cut open and both hands impaled to a table, Michael keeps trying to fight, ripping his right hand free (splitting it down the middle as he does) to try and strangle Laurie. It's only when Michael's free arm is broken and he can't move anymore that he stops fighting.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: Here, Michael is clearly blind in his left eye, the result of Laurie jabbing a wire hanger into it. The original films, by contrast, have Michael's vision be unimpeded, even after taking a bullet to each eye in Halloween II (the injury blinded him temporarily there, but had no effect in subsequent sequels). The climax of the 2018 film also features Michael losing two fingers from his left hand to a shotgun blast; all previous sequels had all of Michael's appendages remain intact.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Defied. It's heavily implied Dr. Sartain, in his madness, sabotaged Michael's escape, and facilitated the ensuing slaughter but Michael largely acts on his own accord without regard for Sartain's agenda. When Sartain brings an unconscious Michael to the Strode residence, he appears to be emerging as the film's villain... until Michael brutally offs him well before the climax, reaffirming his status as the true Big Bad.
• Dumb Muscle: Michael isn't by any means unintelligent; he can actually be quite cunning when he wants. It's more like he's barely sapient, more of a soulless, malicious animal than anything resembling a thinking human. For example, in the novelization for Kills, when it starts "raining indoors" thanks to firefighters extinguishing the flames, Michael not only lacks the common sense to understand that it's coming from a firehose, but lacks the basic human ability to even be curious about it or question it, simply not caring.
• Elective Mute: Dr. Sartain says Michael, indeed, has the ability to speak, he just simply chooses not to for some reason. While the film version of Sartain makes it clear he's never heard him speak before, the 2018 novelization implies Michael not only spoke to Sartain, but manipulated him into freeing him. To call Sartain an Unreliable Narrator would be generous, however.
• Empty Shell: Michael has the "personality" of a natural disaster. The novelizations imply he doesn't even enjoy killing in the way a human enjoys things, no more than a normal person enjoys breathing.
  Kills Novelization: He feels no exhilaration at having killed the vehicle's occupants. He observed the scene with clinical detachment. But the prey has escaped. This does not dismay him. Perhaps he will run across them again, but if not, it doesn't matter. The world is filled with prey and one is the same as another to him. They bleed. They die. And that's all he requires of them.
  Kills Novelization: She could hear his heavy breathing muffled by the latex. It was steady. Calm, even. And she realized that he felt... nothing. No thrill at the prospect of ending her life. No sense of victory at besting an opponent. He was as simple as a one-celled organism mindlessly fulfilling its genetic programming. He killed because he was made to kill. No more. No less.
• Establishing Character Moment: While his malevolence was well on display in the original film, the audience is acquainted with Michael's new depths of savagery shortly after he escapes from the prison bus: when a father and son leave their car to investigate the crashed bus, Michael kills the father offscreen, then, rather than simply steal the car, waits for the son to return, then breaks the boy's neck out of nothing but sheer cruelty.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Downplayed. Michael seems to have some genuine connection to Corey, taking him as a protégé and leaving him alone when he's with Allyson. Even after he kills Corey for stealing his mask, he gently strokes Corey's face almost a sort of apology or display of affection.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Played with; Michael does occasionally show mercy, but whether this is due to genuine standards or some other motive is as unknown as any of the other inner workings of Michael's mind.
  • He'll nonchalantly kill some children and make the conscious choice to leave others alone, including a crying baby...whether this is out of pragmatism, because he doesn't get as much pleasure out of it, or some twisted sense of ethics, only Michael knows.
  • Michael also never attacks his fellow Smith's Grove inmates after the bus crash, even though that's not the case for the guards and the people who stumble upon the crash site. He either doesn't derive pleasure from killing the mentally handicapped, or he feels a sort of kinship because they're almost like him.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor:
  • In one of the few signs of actual personality we see from Michael, he decapitates a sheriff's deputy, then uses a flashlight to turn his head into a makeshift jack-o-lantern in what seems to be his idea of a joke about the occasion.
  • After killing Big John and Little John, Michael poses them to copy a romantic photo of the couple, and plays a romantic Anne Murray song, showing a twisted sense of irony.
• Evil Mentor: He takes on the role towards Corey in Ends, showing him what it's like to kill and eventually giving him the outlet he was looking for after being ostracized by everyone else in town. Unfortunately for Michael, Corey learns from him a bit too well as he decides to rob him of his mask and go on his own killing spree. Unfortunately for Corey, he finds out what happens when you double cross a homicidal maniac and rob him of the one thing he has any attachment to.
• Evil Old Folks: Advancing age has done nothing to dull Michael's evil. It's Deconstructed in Halloween Ends; while he's as evil as he ever was, Michael's body can no longer keep up with his bloodlust and he proves weak enough to be overpowered and eventually killed.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • Michael quickly demonstrates to Dr. Sartain that he cannot be understood or controlled; seconds after regaining consciousness, he attacks the doctor, and replies to his final, feeble plea for Michael to say something with a boot to the skull.
  • Zigzagged in Halloween Ends. After doing their first murder together. Cory fights and takes Michael's mask briefly claiming the title of the Shape. This however doesn't last. Cory attempts kill Laurie and is easily defeated. Michael then tracks them down reclaims his mask and knife and snaps Corey's neck.
• Eye Scream: His left eye was blinded after Laurie poked him there with a clothes hanger. What little we see of his face shows that the eye is clouded and surrounded by scarring.
• The Faceless: Played With. Michael's genuine, flesh and blood face is visible for several scenes in the first act, but he is always in motion and the camera never depicts him clearly. The implication being that, yes, he does have a face under the mask, but that detail is unimportant. Other characters see his face clearly and apparently don't find anything unusual or frightening about it, but the audience never gets a clear shot of his face because it's scarier that way. In fact, if you see him without his mask, aside from the scarred eye and the murderous intent, he looks like somebody's granddad.
• Facial Horror: It's revealed in Halloween Kills that Laurie, Karen, and Allyson's attempt to burn him alive left his face with burn scars.
• The Farmer and the Viper:
  • Everyone who demonstrates a shred of decency to Michael ends up paying for it with their lives. The unnamed dad who arrived to administer first aid had his neck crushed, Dr. Sartain got his head stomped in after saving Michael from Sheriff Hawkins, and a group of firefighters who inadvertently saved him from Laurie's burning house were slaughtered to a man with their own tools.
  • Actually ends up on the receiving end of this in Ends. He spares Corey, and acts as a sort of mentor to him, only for the bastard to attack Michael, steal his mask and decry him as "just a man" while going on to become a copycat killer. Michael rectifies this when he catches up to him later on, however.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Sadism and bloodlust; Michael's love of killing and seeing people in pain and fear is expertly used against him by Karen in the 2018 film, exposing Michael to a gunshot that leaves him open to being defeated by Laurie. Similarly, in Halloween Ends, if Michael had just left Laurie's house after taking his mask back from Corey, he might have lived through the night. By staying to try and kill her despite his weakened state, Michael opens himself up to being overpowered and finally killed.
  • His attachment to his mask ultimately proves to be this, as see under Attack Its Weak Point. Karen was able to lure him into a trap due to stealing it, and leaving the sewers to get his mask back from Corey led him to Laurie, and during their fight, Laurie messing with his mask is what ends up giving her the crucial few seconds she needed to overpower and kill him.
• Feel No Pain: Averted. Unlike most versions, this Michael is human enough to have to resort to bandages and disinfectant when badly injured.
• Feeling Their Age: In Halloween Ends, Michael is 65 years old, and he's clearly feeling the effects of both his age and the many injuries he's sustained in his life. While still stronger than a normal man his age would be, Michael is a shadow of his former self, initially too weak to kill without assistance and ultimately being weak enough to be overcome and finally killed.
• Final Boss: After Corey temporarily steals the role of Big Bad from him, Michael returns in the climax to off his copycat and go one more round with Laurie.
• Fingore: Laurie blows off two of his fingers with a shotgun when he finally comes for her.
• Four Is Death: Michael's fourth film in this timeline is the one in which he dies, and it takes place 44 years after the original.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: His face is clearly visible for a second or two after Aaron hits him with a crowbar.
• Gone Horribly Right: During the opening sequence of the 2018 movie, two documentary makers attempt to get some sort of a reaction out of Michael as he has been catatonic for the last 40 years by taunting him with his mask. They get one: with the help of Dr. Sartain he breaks out, tracks them down to a gas station bathroom, and kills them both with his hands.
• Handicapped Badass: He's half-blind from the injuries he sustained in the original film, but still incredibly deadly. The later loss of two fingers from his left hand is no more of an impediment.
• Hated by All: Given his reputation as a cruel mass murderer, he is despised by the Strodes and the rest of Haddonfield. Halloween Kills pits Michael against all of Haddonfield as the citizens band together, intent to end his reign of terror once and for all.
• Healing Factor: Averted; unlike his original incarnation, this version of Michael never shows any supernatural healing abilities; he's left scarred and permanently blinded in one eye from his rampage in his first film, and he takes the time to bandage one of his more severe injuries. The tradeoff, however, is Michael's obscenely high tolerance for pain as he bounces back from every inflicted injury that would have killed a normal man his age ten times over.
• Hero Killer: Kills quite a few major characters in Kills as they banded together to try and kill him.
• Hidden Depths: Of all characters, Michael gets some hints at this - after brutally murdering a woman in her own kitchen, he stalks through the house following the sounds of a baby's cries, walks up to the baby's crib… and then saunters out of the house and into the street below. There's no explanation given for why he didn't hurt the baby, but the event has inspired all kinds of fan theorization.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Ends reveals the state Michael has fallen into since his triumph at the end of Kills. His injuries and age have finally caught up with him and he's spent the last four years hiding in the sewers as a hermit, ambushing whoever wanders into his den. Michael even requires Corey's help to kill an off-duty cop and is later overpowered when Corey fights him for his mask. Since the film confirms that Michael is, indeed, a man under that mask, it was only inevitable that age would take its toll on Haddonfield's boogeyman sooner or later.
• Humanoid Abomination: A minor one, but there’s no clear answer how he gets his explicitly superhuman ability to survive damage, his mindset is unknown and incomprehensible, to the point of baffling dedicated psychologists for decades (and driving one psychologist thoroughly insane), his presence and emotional state (such as it is) agitates other inmates without Michael saying or doing anything, and Laurie regards him as somehow “transcending” humanity more and more with each kill. Averted as of Ends. Michael may be an unnaturally tough man, but he's not immortal.
• I'm a Humanitarian: In Ends, it's implied (especially in the novelization) that Michael resorted to cannibalizing vagrants in his four years squatting in the sewers.
• Impaled Palm: At the climax of Ends, Laurie pins Michael's hands to her kitchen table to disable him. He manages to free his right hand (splitting it between the middle and ring fingers in the process), but it ultimately does him no good.
• Implacable Man: As always, few of the injuries Michael sustains do much to slow him down, and when he is stunned, wounded, or knocked out, he quickly recovers and keeps on coming.
• Improbable Weapon User: Par the course, but Michael uses a bathroom stall doorway, a hammer, and bell chimes, among other ways to kill people.
• Immune to Bullets: He takes six shots to the torso from a revolver in the 1978 film, and a rifle shot to the face in the 2018 film, both of which knock him down for only a few seconds, at most. In the same movie, he is also seemingly unfazed by having two of his fingers blown off with a shotgun. He is, once again, shot repeatedly in Halloween Kills, but just keeps going.
• Jerkass: As usual Michael is still the sadistic Troll he was before just even more so.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After ending Halloween Kills victorious, with a long string of bodies in his wake, justice catches up to Michael in Halloween Ends; his final confrontation with Laurie sees her overpower him in a straight fight, pin him to a table, and bleed him to death. His body is then paraded through Haddonfield, with the people who once lived in terror of Michael watching as his body is mulched into pulp, never to harm anyone again.
• Karmic Death:
  • It's Laurie, whom Michael stalked and terrorized in the original film, who lived in fear of him for the following forty years, whose daughter Karen Michael murdered and whose granddaughter Allyson nearly met the same fate, who finally puts Michael down for good. Adding to the karma, Allyson, whose parents Michael murdered, arrives in the nick of time to make sure Michael can't take Laurie down with him.
  • Michael's own death has parallels to his murder of the old man toward the beginning of Kills, where he slashes his throat and then drags him over to the kitchen table and tests out every knife in their kitchen on him even after he was dead. Michael himself dies by being pinned to Laurie's kitchen table by knives and also having his throat slashed, then having his own remains destroyed and desecrated.
• Kick the Dog: While For the Evulz is his stock in trade, a few of Michael's deeds stand out as needlessly cruel.
  • A deleted scene has Michael hang a dog from a tree upon his return to Haddonfield. He can be seen lurking in the background, having lingered near the scene to watch the grief and horror of onlookers.
  • When a father and son come across the crashed prison bus that allowed Michael's escape, Michael kills the father, sneaks into their car, and, rather than just steal the car, waits for the son to come back just so he can kill him as well.
  • Rather than just steal his mask back from Aaron and Dana, Michael kills them both, going the extra mile of scaring Dana before doing so.
  • His murder of Cameron is particularly drawn out and brutal just to inflict emotional torment on Allyson as she helplessly watches. He even checks to make sure she's watching as he delivers the coup de grace.
• Kick the Dog: Most of the people Michael kills are complete innocents, being a bit sketchy at worst (which helps drive home how loathsome he is).
• Kill It with Fire: Laurie attempts to do this at the end of Halloween 2018. It doesn't work. Michael escapes burnt but very much alive and proceeds to kill a lot more people in Halloween Kills.
• Killed Off for Real: In Halloween Ends, Laurie finally puts Michael down with a Slashed Throat, along with a lot of abuse Michael took on top of that. But then, just to fully ensure there's no possible way for him to survive, Michael's body is compacted and torn to shreds in a car-crusher with the residents of Haddonfield as an audience, ensuring once and for all that he's dead.
• Knight of Cerebus: Even more so than usual. Not only does this version of Michael kill simply because he can, but he's somehow become even worse than he was in the original film, killing more frequently and more brutally.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • After killing Vicky, he quickly exits the house once Laurie gives his position away to the armed Hawkins, and then immediately flees the area when Laurie takes a shot at him.
  • Halloween Kills reveals that, in 1978, Michael was finally cornered by the Haddonfield police, with half a dozen guns trained on him. He (obviously) didn't verbally surrender, but Michael didn't resist arrest or try to defend himself from Loomis' failed attempt to execute him.
• Lack of Empathy: Unsurprisingly, he still feels no remorse or shame for all the horrible murders he commits.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After escaping justice in Halloween Kills, karma catches up to Michael in a big way in Halloween Ends; not only is he a shadow of his former self, reduced to lurking in a sewer, but his cooperation with nascent murderer Corey Cunningham ends with Michael being beaten and his mask stolen by his newfound protege. When he tries to kill Laurie once again after stealing his mask back, Michael is ultimately defeated and unmasked by Laurie, who cuts his throat with a kitchen knife (just as Michael had done to many a victim, including Laurie's best friend Annie), and his last ditch attempt to kill Laurie is interrupted by Allyson, whose parents, friends, and boyfriend he murdered, breaking his arm. Once Michael is dead, his body is treated just as disrespectfully as he'd treated his own victims, paraded through Haddonfield to signify the end of his reign of terror before being gruesomely mulched to ensure that he won't be back. Finally, after almost 60 years of infamy, Michael doesn't get any kind of tombstone or memorial, dooming him to eventually be forgotten by the people who once lived in fear of him.
• The Last Dance: Ends depicts Michael past his prime with his tenure as boogeyman nearing its end. While still lethal and dangerous, old age and his injuries have taken their toll, leaving him running on fumes. After Corey steals his mask, Michael tracks him down to the Strode residence and kills him before throwing everything he has left at Laurie in a gruesome final battle.
• Mad Artist:
  • While he has had this trait applied to him to his original, 4-6, and "H20" incarnations, it's implied more explicitly in this film, as his kills become more increasing graphic and sadistic in contrast to his earlier kills; he starts off beating people to death, breaking necks, and strangulation, but then, he moves on to ripping a man's teeth out, gruesomely beating a woman to death with a hammer and keep beating her after she died from the first 3-5 hits, slamming a woman's face into a window before killing her, stabbing Vicky several times, sadistically stalking Oscar, killing him, and impaling him on a spiked fence to scare Allison, crushing his psychologist's head in, to turning a police officer's head into a frickin' jack-o-lantern. When he returns to Haddonfield after getting his mask back, he seems bored as he kills the old lady and the younger woman, but acts satisfied after viciously stabbing a frantic and scared Vicky to death.
  • This goes further in the sequel. He poses two corpses on a merry-go-round, going through the trouble of fitting them with Halloween masks. And he recreates the photo of two lovers embracing each other, keeping them upright by pinning them to the wall with knives. He even puts on ironic romantic music with a record player! You can't deny that Michael puts a lot of thought into his kills.
• Made of Iron: Not only did he survive all the injuries he took in the original film and live well into middle age despite them, Michael endures a number of injuries throughout this film (notably a crowbar to the face, several gunshots, being struck with a police car, and losing several fingers to a shotgun blast), almost none of them so much as slowing him down. He barely even reacts to most of them, showing an inhuman tolerance for pain.
• Nerves of Steel: Credit where it's due, Michael never shows fear, whether bullets are just barely missing his head, or he's trapped and left to burn alive, or when he's confronted by an angry mob out for his blood. The closest he shows to actual fear is when Laurie has him pinned and helpless in Halloween Ends, and even then, his violent struggling is just as easy to read as anger at being bested as it is fear for his impending death.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: His attack on Laurie's home and family does much more to help her reconnect with her daughter, and granddaughter, than 40 years of therapy did.
• No-Sell:
  • Downplayed. Michael can be damaged and knocked down in the short-term, but he just keeps getting back up. He notably takes a crowbar to the face like nothing and bounces back from injuries that would have killed any normal man his age. He takes a vicious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from an angry mob of Haddonfield citizens like a champ and slaughters them to the last with no lasting damage.
  • While trapped in Laurie's burning house in Halloween Kills, Michael, despite still wearing a latex mask (which is partially burnt), shows no signs that either heat or smoke inhalation are impeding him, still being healthy and strong enough to easily overpower at least two firefighters (who are wearing protective equipment) before being clear of the blaze.
• Not So Invincible After All: Zig-zagged. While Michael does receive long-term injuries, such as when Laurie blew his fingers off with a shotgun, and he can be incapacitated with enough damage, as he was when Hawkins ran him down with his squad car, very few of the injuries he receives actually appear to slow him down for long. Fortunately, the Strodes demonstrate that Michael can be defeated as they trap him in their basement and all he can do is stare up in silence as the house burns around him. If not for the fire department, that very well could have been the end of him. It's all but subverted completely in the climax of Halloween Kills as Michael is pummeled into the ground by an angry mob, only to get back up and kill them to the last. Worth mentioning is that despite Michael's inhuman strength and durability, at least three times, he only survives by a combination of the intervention of others (Hawkins saving him from Loomis, Sartain saving him from Hawkins, and firefighters saving him from Laurie's trap) and sheer luck. Taken to extremes in Ends, where his old age and the many, many injuries he's accrued have weakened him and slowed him down considerably enough that he's resorted to hiding out in the sewers and living as an ambush predator. The film's conclusion settles the issue once and for all by playing it straight; it takes significantly more effort than killing a normal man would, but Michael is proven mortal after all, bleeding to death from a cut throat and wrist.
• Not So Stoic: Downplayed, but Michael does have a few moments in the film where he shows glimpses of emotion.
  • In the 2018 film, he actually reacts when Aaron takes out his mask, slightly turning his head after having been completely unresponsive up to then. Later, after Laurie confronts him for the first time in forty years, Michael turns tail and runs, and after he wakes up in Sartain's custody, he immediately attacks the doctor and violently crushes his skull upon being asked to say something, his body language betraying a hint of rage. When Allyson is stabbing Michael, he is clearly groaning in pain with every stab.
  • In Halloween Kills, he gives Marion an almost mocking look after her failed attempt to shoot him, and giving Allyson a extended glare that can't be mistaken for anything but hate, especially given his needlessly drawn-out murder of Cameron while Allyson is helpless and begging him to stop.
  • In Halloween Ends, Michael takes the time to murder the already dying Corey as a bit of spite for beating him up and stealing his precious mask, and when Laurie has him pinned to a table and removes his mask, Michael starts shaking his head violently in a desperate and futile attempt to keep her from unmasking him.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Noted in-universe; quite a few people are disturbed by Michael's total silence and the inexplicable nature of his crimes.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Played with: while this continues to be a Michael hallmark (most notably during the leadup to his killing of Ray) it's averted at other points, most notably during the aftermath of his murder of Vicky, where he takes the direct way out of the house down a lit stairwell, despite the presence of Laurie outside and an armed police officer in the next room, getting spotted (and shot at) by both.
• One-Man Army: Even with all of Haddonfield out for his blood, Michael is very capable of slaughtering large groups of residents with little difficulty, demonstrated in his massacre of a team of firefighters and an angry mob at the end of the film.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When he's been brought to Laurie's home and hears her calling Ray's name, he seems to realise who he's dealing with, as he immediately foregoes his stealth terror tactic habits in favour of smashing through her door and rhythmically beating her head off it. On anyone less badass than Laurie, it might have worked. It almost did. She was just lucky enough to have a gun on her.
• Pet the Dog: Like in the first film, Michael spares his fellow escapees after the crash. Whether it’s pragmatism or his feeling of some sort of kinship with them is left unexplained.
  • At one point, he kills a woman, but then when he finds her baby, simply walks away without harming it. Whether this is because even he has some standards or because he wouldn't have felt any satisfaction in killing a person that helpless and unable to understand what was happening isn't clear.
  • Though it eventually comes back to bite him, he spares Corey because, it is suggested, he sees him as a kindred spirit.
  • He also doesn't harm the houseless man who lives near his hideout - either because he doesn't see him as a threat or because, again, much like his fellow escapees and Corey he sees himself in him.
• Phrase Catcher: Several people in the 2018 film ask him "say something!" The closest he ever comes to actually responding to any of these demands is to wordlessly reply to Sartain's last words by way of a boot to the skull, turning Sartain's head into a gory mess.
• Power Born of Madness:
  • Michael explicitly demonstrates superhuman strength on several occasions, breaking necks, impaling victims using little more than a kitchen knife, and tearing open the entrance of a secured "safe room" with his bare hands (after losing fingers, no less), showing little expression beyond icy rage. While he never speaks or expresses any normal human emotion, guard dogs go nuts when he's agitated as do the other inmates at the asylum.
  • In Halloween Kills, it's all but stated that Michael's strength comes from some well of insanity deep inside of him that feeds on every kill he makes. He's not only stronger than any man, but has a degree of Super-Toughness that allows him to survive the unsurvivable.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Michael may be a remorseless mass murderer, but he's not stupid.
  • He doesn't attack the trick-or-treaters because he'd get mobbed and run down in a heartbeat, and one explanation for his not killing a small baby is because it isn't capable of comprehending the situation and feeling fear, meaning there's no point.
  • Despite his reputation for Determination, once Allyson makes it to safety and the people who help her call the cops, he abandons his pursuit; he's later found walking around for someone else to kill.
  • A flashback to 1978 shows Michael surrendering when surrounded by armed police officers; fearless though he may be, Michael knows when he can't run or fight his way out.
• Psycho Knife Nut: He's explicitly shown discarding a claw hammer in favor of a kitchen knife, which becomes his main weapon. He also steals Sartain's switchblade and impales a cop through the head with it. And he's still just as cruel and murderous as ever, if not more so.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Michael's childish cruelty apparently has not changed. He as usual loves to play pranks on his victims just to scare them a bit before killing them like dropping the teeth of someone he just killed in front of his target. While we never see what he feels like at the moment it's clear he's quite excited like a naughty kid. His actions in Halloween Kills make his decisions seem even more like a child's, with his path of destruction effectively being a straight line from Laurie's home in the sticks all the way to his childhood home, with the subsequent murders he commits along the way simply as a means of amusing himself during his trek. This is even lampshaded with Michael being likened to a six-year-old boy in the body of a man with the mind of a savage animal.
• The Quiet One: It's made clear that Michael is physically (and probably mentally) capable of speech, but he chooses to remain silent. Trying to comprehend why he won't say anything frustrates a few characters throughout the film.
• Rasputinian Death: It takes A LOT to finally put Michael down for good. Some of injuries he survives includes being stabbed in one of his eyes with a wire hanger, shot six times in the torso, hit in the face with a crowbar, hit point blank by a flying car, burned alive in the Strode's house, beaten to a pulp by an angry mob, among others. He finally perishes in Ends, where he has his throat and wrist slit, and subsequently bleeds to death. Knowing about his ability to cheat death, Laurie dumps his body into a car shredder to Make Sure He's Dead.
• Red Baron: The novelization refers to him as "The Shape" almost as often as it uses his actual name. In the movie, he's only called this once, by Laurie, though this is the first time in the franchise that the nickname is actually said by a character in-universe (until now, it's only been seen in the credits and as his title in Dead by Daylight).
• Revenge: Since he had no reason for his original attempt on Laurie's life in this version and she just happened to catch his interest, it is likely that the reason why he is targeting her again when he could go after anyone else is to take revenge for his blinded eye and the other wounds that Laurie inflicted on him forty years ago. Never mind the fact that it was self-defense and he tried to kill her first. Either that, or he's just mildly annoyed that someone managed to escape him and wishes to correct that. However, it’s also hinted in the movie that this is merely a motivation everyone projects on Michael to make him more human and/or to understand his mind. For the most part Michael appears unconcerned about Laurie, randomly killing his way around Haddonfield in a bloody repetition of his original spree, and re-enacting a babysitter killing with the luckless Vicky (who actually somewhat resembles a Generation Xerox of Laurie at the time of the original killings), implying it's the thrill of acting out his kills that drives him. It takes time for him to seemingly recognize her when they meet again for the first time, and only goes after Laurie when, for the most part, outside forces he has no control over bring him near her household. Later on in the final entry in the trilogy, Michael attempting to grind Laurie's fingers in the garbage disposal indicates that he was still resenting her for blowing off three of his fingers.
• Riddle for the Ages: He's the subject of a number of these:
  • How can he just walk off extreme injuries?
  • Why does he never speak?
  • How did he learn to drive?
• Sadist: As ever - he takes the time to really ratchet up his victim's fear before he kills them, like dropping a handful of someone's teeth in front of Dana or hiding in the closet to get the drop on Vicky. Fittingly then, it's used against him in the finale: Karen seems to have a total breakdown, screaming and crying for Laurie to come help them. Confident they pose no threat, Michael steps into view - only for Karen to have been pulling a psychological Wounded Gazelle Gambit, putting a bullet in him the moment he becomes visible, allowing Laurie to get the drop on him and leading to his ultimate defeat.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: While Michael's killings are normally random, when he wants to find someone, he can and will, even with no obvious way of finding them or knowing anything about them. In Halloween Ends, he tracks Corey down twice, first to finish off a woman Corey wanted to kill, and then again to retrieve his mask. Both times, despite not knowing Corey's plans or why he'd go to either place, Michael finds him.
• Scars Are Forever: Unlike other versions of Michael, this rendition has no great Healing Factor, and keeps his injuries. While other versions could get shot in the eyes with a gun and their eyes would heal so he could see again, this version is still blind in his left eye from being poked there by Laurie with a clothes hanger.
• Security Blanket: One of the only insights into what really goes on in Michael's head is that he views his mask this way. The Kills novelization provide insight into Michael's relationship with his mask, calling it his "true face" and stating that he feels incomplete without it. Aaron revealing that he brought his original mask with him is what gets the first reaction out of him and he goes out of his way to kill Aaron and retrieve it. After that, he becomes noticeably more agitated any time anyone touches or tries to remove it.
  Kills Novelization: The Shape hurts, but pain means nothing to him. Whether it's his own or someone else's. There's only one thing that's important to him now: regaining his face. He feels the cool night air on his skin and he finds the sensation... revolting. His true face protects him from the outer world, helps him control the maelstrom that rages inside of him. It gives him focus. Purpose. Without it, he is diminished. With it, he is unstoppable.
• Self-Surgery: In Kills, Michael breaks into an old folks' home and (mostly off-screen) bandages up his mutilated hand and takes some disinfectant from the bathroom's medicine cabinet.
• Signature Move: Michael has developed a habit of repeatedly slamming his victims' heads into nearby walls or hard surfaces, doing so to at least five separate victims or attempted victims over the course of two films.
• Silent Antagonist: A plot point. He apparently is capable of speaking but chooses not to. A major part of certain characters’ motivations is to get Michael to say something. The most noise he ever makes consists of heavy breathing and grunts of pain or exertion. Even as he's dying, Michael doesn't make a sound beyond pained, heavy breathing that slowly stops.
• Silent Snarker: While his sense of humor is twisted and macabre, Michael definitely has one; in Halloween Kills, when a man tries to strangle him with a stethoscope, Michael gives him an mildly incredulous look before fighting back, and when Marion Chambers tries to shoot Michael in the head with a dramatic "this is for Doctor Loomis," only to find that she's out of bullets, Michael briefly inclines his head in a mocking fashion before attacking her.
• Slasher Smile: It's nearly impossible to catch, but when he walks past Dana's stall, one can just make out a grin on his face as he prepares to attack, hinting at the joy he takes in his rampage.
• Slashed Throat: Laurie cuts Michael's throat open in their final fight. But even this does not kill him. At least not right away, as it takes Laurie slitting one of his wrists too before he dies.
• The Sociopath: One thing that hasn’t changed about him in this is the fact that he’s a violent, vicious murderer with an absolute lack of empathy, remorse, and humanity who kills out of nothing more than whim and a lust for senseless violence.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Michael's mask gets this treatment; in previous continuities, his original mask burned in Halloween II, but here, it remains intact 40 years after Michael's rampage, even surviving another fire with only superficial damage. In Halloween Ends, the mask even manages to outlive Michael himself.
• Spree Killer: As always, but taken to new heights in this continuity. Unlike most prior Halloween movies, Michael's rampage is completely random, with no specific targets — he simply roams from place to place, killing everyone he finds seemingly just for the sake of it. Kills slightly changes things up by having Michael make a path toward his childhood home, though he still commits random acts of needless violence along the way. His 2018 rampage is also singularly large-scale, with a final death toll of around 50 people.
• Stronger with Age: A variant, in that Michael's lethality only appears to have increased as he's aged. Not only is he an absolutely vicious killer, but he's also immensely strong and easily outfights men half his age. Tellingly, in Halloween Kills, he appears to overwhelm and kill a squad of firefighters on his own, and eventually a mob of over a dozen Haddonfield citizens. Subverted in Ends, where Michael's age and litany of injures have finally caught up to him and he's reduced to hiding out in the sewers, ambushing any unfortunate soul who wanders too close. It gets to the point where Corey actually manages to overpower him when he steals his mask.
• Taking You with Me: In Halloween Ends, a dying Michael attempts this with Laurie by strangling her after just having his throat slashed. Allyson manages to break Laurie free, allowing her to finish him off by slicing his wrist.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Michael spends the first part of the film without his mask, and while his face is never completely in focus we see enough of it to see that for all intents and purposes without the mask he looks like a regular, albeit somewhat more physically-fit-than-usual, 60 year old man — though he does have a Red Right Hand in the form of a blinded eye, and later two missing fingers.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: The injuries he received from Laurie and Loomis, combined with spending another 40 years in prison, seem to have made Michael even worse than he was before. Here, he kills much more frequently and brutally, and he is far less likely to spare someone. See the other tropes here for details.
• Tranquil Fury: As the house burns down around him, Michael remains completely still and emotionless, then it closes in on his eye to reveal that absolute rage at being defeated by Laurie and her family. He remains in this state throughout Halloween Kills; he never audibly expresses his anger, but his actions become increasingly violent (even by his standards), showing that he is fuming about his defeat.
• Two-Faced: In Halloween Kills, the left side of Michael's is mask blackened and burnt from the fire that nearly spelt his doom in the previous film. And upon being unmasked, it's revealed that the burns went down into his face too.
• Uncertain Doom: In the 2018 movie, Michael is Left for Dead in the burning Strode household, but he's nowhere to be seen in the last shot of the burning house, and the credits close on his breathing, leaving unclear whether or not he truly died. Halloween Kills removes this uncertainty by explicitly showing him escaping the house fire courtesy of interference from an unfortunate firefighter crew and continuing to kill.
• Undignified Death: His death is rather mundane and ordinary for such a legendary killer, consisting of a slashed throat, broken arm, and sliced wrist (the latter doing him in), before stopping out of blood loss. There is a climactic confrontation with his opposite number, but he is still an old man, and cannot put up a major fight on his own anymore. Even more undignified is how his corpse is paraded around Haddonfield to send a message of his being truly dead, culminating in destroying his body in a junk crusher.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Sartain saves an unconscious Michael from being executed by Deputy Hawkins. As soon as he wakes up, Michael violently attacks Sartain and brutally crushes his skull upon being asked to speak. He reiterates this trope in the sequel by brutally killing the firefighters, up to shoving a buzzsaw used by one back into their face, that inadvertently helped him to escape the burning Strode house.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation: He and Laurie are not siblings in this continuity.
• Villainous Breakdown: Downplayed; when Laurie has him dead to rights in Halloween Ends, Michael starts struggling desperately to keep her from removing his mask, and after she cuts his throat, he rips his right hand free and starts strangling her in an attempt to take her down with him. As with most things he does, Michael never speaks a word during this breakdown.
• Villainous Valour: For all Michael's despicable qualities, one thing he's not is a coward, as shown twice in Halloween Kills, first when attacking the firefighters who unwittingly saved his life, and again at the climax. Both times, Michael faces off with a group that has the advantage in numbers and equipment, and in neither case does he hesitate to fight. This is particularly true in the climax, where he's surrounded, unmasked, by an angry mob out for his blood. All he does is calmly put his mask back on, then start slashing at every available target. Even when seemingly killed, Michael is soon back on his feet for round 2, winning handily. Even as a weakened shadow of his former self in Halloween Ends, Michael doesn't hesitate to face off with Laurie one last time, and he absolutely refuses, even at the point of death, to stop trying to fight, only stopping when he literally can't move anymore.
• White Mask of Doom: He steals back his signature white Captain Kirk mask, although forty years of poor preservation have turned it gray.
• Worthy Opponent: Clearly regards Laurie as this, with the novelization for Kills having him (internally) refer to her as She Who Will Not Die.
• Would Harm a Senior: Brutally kills an elderly couple in Kills, though it is downplayed a bit in that Michael himself would also be over 60 at this point.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • He senselessly kills a teenaged boy and is poised to kill Julian before his running to get help, although notably, he leaves the other children he runs across alone, despite having ample opportunity to kill a baby, once again showcasing his unpredictability.
  • He continues child-murdering in the sequel, decapitating a trick'r treater no older than 12 and carrying his skeleton-masked severed head around.

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