This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!
We all should be afraid of the boogeyman.
"There's a reason we're supposed to be afraid of this night."
— Deputy Hawkins
With Blumhouse Productions behind the movie, everyone's entitled to one good scare.
- Michael's never been in any way a merciful individual, but there's a cold brutality to him here that is truly unsettling, like the filmmakers blended some of the sheer violent force of Rob Zombie's version with the cold precision and terror tactics of the classic Carpenter Michael. Indeed, some of the kills here show off a Michael that's gotten a lot more Ax-Crazy during confinement, as if he's spent 40 years getting steadily more internally angry and more violent and is now free to unleash it totally.
- On the other side of the coin, the fact that he doesn't make a beeline for Laurie until he's delivered to her, and he doesn't recognize her immediately — it's only the slow head-turn in the movie's final act, after he hears her yell Ray's name (after he's strangled him to death), that indicates to the viewer that he's realised who he's dealing with. His kills may be more brutal, but for the most part, upon being freed, he simply coldly and calmly picks up where he left off.
- Once he has indeed recognized Laurie after killing Ray, and the movie makes it damn clear that he does, he immediately acts on it. In just mere minutes he attacks her through the door and nearly strangles her to death as shown in the page image, only stopped when Laurie blasts off two of his fingers with a gun. Naturally, this only pisses him off even more and when he finally enters the house we are treated to the pleasant sight of his dark outline standing in her living room, visibly fuming. Said moment is capped off by the appropriately monstrous cue "The Shape is Monumental"
, perfectly translating Michael's sheer rage.
- Dr. Loomis' testimony that Dana listens to briefly. It is haunting to say the least. Dr. Loomis outright tells those he is talking to that Michael Myers needs to be cremated so that his evil will finally stop. The tape ends with Loomis repeating "It has to die!" over and over, the tape distorting his voice more and more each time he says it.
- Michael’s murder of the young boy as he escapes. In the original film, he seems to be unconcerned with harming children, as shown by his leaving Tommy and Lindsey alone to focus on Laurie note Here, Michael is shown to actually wait in the back seat, similar to how he once killed Annie Brackett, for the terrified kid (who can't be more than 12) to come back from searching for his (now-dead) father, so he can kill him before stealing his car. It's particularly appalling because it's implied that Michael could have simply stolen the car while the boy was gone, but instead waited for him out of sheer sadism.
- Later, when the police get to the crash scene, the father is shown lying by the bus, his neck bent at a hideous angle, no doubt by Michael.
- The way Michael kills Dana and Aaron in the truck stop bathroom. He first drops a bunch of freshly extracted teeth into Dana's stall in order to terrorize her, then grabs underneath the door to try and drag her out. Aaron, discovering the two bodies of the station workers, runs in to save her, only to have his crowbar strike be a total No-Sell. Michael then slams Aaron's head repeatedly against the door until it breaks down, leaving his head a bloody mess, then breaks Dana's neck. It is supremely unsettling to watch, like he has become a being of pure rage.
- Where he got the teeth. Aaron finds the gas station clerk apparently unconscious as he searches for Dana...and then the camera pans over to the other side of the clerk's head, where we see that that his mouth has been opened impossibly wide and all his teeth ripped out. No other injuries are apparent, so Michael tearing open his mouth was probably the cause of death.
- The utterly unsettling shot of Michael, distant in the background, murdering a station attendant while Dana and the clerk remain oblivious in the foreground.
- Even more so: throughout the scene, the sound of a mechanic working on cars can be heard, specifically an impact wrench. Shortly after Michael walks across the background, a 'clanging' sound is heard, and the sounds of the power tools stop completely.
- While working as Julian's babysitter, Vicky is asked to close the closet door. She tries, only to find it won't close, so she tries again... and again. She finally decides to open the door to see what is jamming it. Lo and behold, Michael is standing right inside, knife in hand; the resultant scene is horrifying, with Vicky trying desperately to escape, only to be dragged kicking and screaming back into Julian's bedroom, leaving nail marks on the floor as she tries desperately to claw her way to freedom. What's really unsettling is the way the camera focuses on Michael's mask as he stabs her to death, and the way his breathing changes. He genuinely seems to be enjoying himself, a terrifying contrast to his usual cold rage.
- The buildup to this scene heavily implies that Michael was in the house with Vicky and Julian for some time before he attacked them. He was very likely lurking in Julian's room during all of Julian's screentime, just watching and listening, waiting for someone to open the closet door. Julian escapes, but has to see his babysitter violently murdered in front of him, and there's no reason to think Michael would have spared him.
- There's also the horrifying implication that Michael sees Vicky as little more than an Expy of Laurie... or Judith. If one takes into account the original novelization's explanation that Michael was hunting Laurie there because she reminded him of his sister, it might explain why Vicky (who looks the most like Laurie or Judith at that age) is the only kill Michael visibly enjoys as he slaughters her.
- Afterward, Michael poses Vicki's corpse in Julian's bedroom under a sheet cut to resemble a ghost costume, purely to freak out the first responders.
- The Signature Scene as the re-masked Michael goes on the rampage.
- It starts with Michael following a woman a few yards away from him into her home with a hammer he took from her gardening shed. Michael follows her into the kitchen before killing the woman offscreen. All we hear at first is a scream and a loud crunch before the camera pans to reveal her bloodied corpse.
- Michael continues to walk through her house with the knife, drawn towards the sound of his victim's crying baby. He approaches the crib, knife raised... and just leaves. He doesn't spare the infant out of compassion, standards, or regret. Judging from his body language, it just seems like Michael doesn't feel like killing it. Ironically, this one act of "kindness" makes Michael even scarier, as it shows that he's not just a bloodthirsty monster incapable of stopping himself; he's making a conscious choice to kill every time he does so.
- Next, Michael goes to a nearby house and looks at a reflection of himself through a window. A woman who's just received a phonecall about the news of his escape looks outside and sees no one there. Michael walks up right behind her, slams her head into the window sill, and stabs her through the throat with his new knife. Perhaps the most chilling thing about this is that, similar to the feel of the first film, there's nothing supernatural at all about these two killings. Michael is just a madman, and this could easily be a home invasion anywhere in America or the world.
- Particularly frightening is the feeling Michael's just going through the motions of killing here. There's no lingering over the lives he takes, no morbid fascination as with Bob's death in the original, just a mechanical precision. With the second woman he kills, he stabs her through the throat and is already walking off before the corpse even hits the ground. He takes two lives in a matter of moments and the impression the viewer gets is one of dissatisfaction, that he's trying to replicate that original feeling he had during the 1978 murder spree and not finding it, something that gives a new and brutal meaning to the sense he's enjoying Vicky's death later on.
- The sheer randomness of the murders is also remarkable, more like those of the 1978 movie than anything else. In every movie but the first, he's specifically looking for Laurie or some other relative. Here, he has no particular target and no clear reason for starting at that particular time or place. In the first movie, Loomis and Brackett bring up the idea that Haddonfield's homes might be "lined up for a slaughterhouse," and 40 years later that's exactly what happens. Michael decides to start killing at a specific house for no reason, then goes to the house next door, and then the one after that - Julian, Vicki, and Dave simply had the bad luck of being in the third house on that street, and had Laurie and Hawkins not chased him off, Michael might simply have continued down the street, going house by house and killing everyone he found. It's Michael at his roots, as John Carpenter originally envisioned him - evil for evil's own sake, wholly without purpose or motive.
- When it's clear that Michael has come to town, Laurie, Karen, and Ray experience what parents/grandparents should never have to go through: not knowing where Allyson is while Michael is roaming Haddonfield, killing indiscriminately.
- Dr. Sartain revealing himself to be just as crazy as Michael. When Hawkins hits Michael with his SUV, the cop is prepared to shoot him. During all this time, we expect Michael to pop up, not dead, and kill them; but of all people, Sartain stabs Hawkins in the neck, leaving him to bleed out (saying afterwards, "So this is what it feels like.") , puts on Michael's mask, showing how unhinged he is, as he drags Michael's body to Hawkins' SUV, putting him and his mask besides Allyson. Then, as he drives away, he runs over Hawkins body, laughing. He rants to Allyson later, saying how he wants to know what makes Michael ticks, see him react in a "uncontrolled environment", intending to deliver him straight to Laurie; this is implying, that he most likely helped Michael escape, not caring who he killed, all just to see The Shape in action.
- Ray opens a car door and finds an eyeless, severed human head that Michael has hollowed out, mutilated the mouth and cut the nose off, and shoved a flashlight through the bottom of the neck, making a crude human jack-o'-lantern. He barely has time to react before Michael sneaks up behind him and strangles him to death.
- The scene where this page's picture is taken from, which has Laurie getting grabbed by Michael through a door and nearly killing her then and there.
- In the actual scene, he's shown lifting her up a couple of inches off the ground through the door, by her head.
- The poster is already a little unsettling even though it's just an image of Michael's face looking downward emerging from a pitch-black background, but you when brighten up the picture, you'll then see he's actually looking directly at you◊.
- Michael stalking Oscar as the motion sensor lights turn on and off. When Michael finally kills him, Allyson finds his corpse impaled on the gate to the property, which he tried to climb during his last moments.
- What makes it freakier is that, much like Lynda in the original, he had all this time to kill Oscar during his drunken rant. But he instead prolongs it, playing into his confusion and soon fear before he goes in for the kill.
- When Allyson comes back to find Oscar's body hanging from the gate, John Carpenter delivers one of his famous synthesizer scores...which suddenly gets interrupted by the most awesome Scare Chord in music history as Michael simply steps out into view.
- Allyson's situation after Sartain attacks Hawkins is utterly terrifying. She is trapped in the back seat of a police car directly next to Michael fucking Myers. She has no means of defending herself, and no easy way to escape. All she can do is hope that he doesn't wake up, or if he does, that he doesn't immediately decide to kill her. And when Michael finally does wake up, he just stares at her. The only thing Allyson manages to get out is a Precision F-Strike. The only saving grace is that he decides to turn his rage elsewhere.
- Michael stomping Sartain's head into a bloody mess. He may have had it coming, but it's still freaky. It's even more alarming if you compare it to the Zombie films. In Halloween II (2009), that Michael — a 7 foot giant — crushes a man's skull with his foot, but takes 5 strikes to completely destroy it. Here Michael, who is both smaller and older than his Zombie counterpart — does it to Sartain in only one.
- In the end when Laurie, Allyson, and Karen set the safe room ablaze with Michael trapped within, Michael's only reaction to the trap is one of disinterest. He doesn't angrily try to bash his way out of the trap, he doesn't try to reach out as to try to take any of the survivors with him. He doesn't as much as freak out over his situation. He just... looks so bored. He even does his famous head tilt right as the flames begin. What in God's name could he be thinking?
- Throughout the film numerous characters mention how Michael has never spoken in his 40 years of imprisonment and while this isn’t new to the Halloween franchise, this film subtly plays on it more. Disturbingly throughout the film, he still never utters a word no matter how many people try to ask or force him, and aside from a few grunts and his breathing, never makes a sound. Even before he kills his doctor, the man practically begs Michael to say something, only to be rewarded with a crushed skull. If words were a window to the soul, Michael proves that he has none.
- Or an even more horrifying thought. Michael communicates through his actions, which speaks volumes on how evil he truly is. Even though he refuses to talk, we the audience can almost "hear" him speaking through body language. Filling in the blanks with our imagination is the way good classic horror did back in the 70s and 80s. When he looms over the infant only to walk away? "Not worth the effort." Or right before he crushes Sartain’s head in as Sartain is trying to get him to speak? "Fuck you." It's perhaps summed up best by this YouTube comment:
- The reporter trying to get Michael to say something at the beginning by holding up his mask. The other convicts snicker and act weird for really no reason. Then they begin to freak out. So do the guard dogs. The authorities begin to panic and sound an alarm. We see glimpses of Michael's face, but not entirely. This doesn't really build up to anything.
- Michael getting two of his fingers blown off by a shotgun. He deserved it, but OUCH! The behind the scenes photos show how gnarly the wound is, revealing details like a strip of muscle and exposed skin ripped out from Michael's hand◊.
- The ending: Michael is trapped by the Strodes in the celler, which Laurie basically turned into a giant gas oven, and proceeds to immolate The Shape. However, multiple shots of the burning house coupled with Michael's breathing (which also appears in the credits), heavily imply he's somehow alive after this ordeal.
- Now confirmed, thanks to the sequel Halloween Kills, which depicts Michael brutally murdering the firefighters that saved him. He also emerges from a weapons cabinet to kill the first one, showing that he was calm enough to hide and ambush anyone that tried to help, or just wait out the blaze and carry on unhindered.
- In a deleted scene, Alyson is jogging around the neighborhood. She stops when she sees her neighbor talking to a police officer. Michael decided to kill the neighbor's dog and then hung it from a tree.
- Also, Michael is watching from the distance which is reminiscent of his behaviour from the original.
