History Headscratchers / Halloween

** IVs, most likely. That or they're just being dramatic, and he was only like that when not eating, or going to the bathroom, or other biological necessities.

* Alright, this is a question about that deleted scene in H20 that was going to bridge the "Cult of Thorn" timeline with the H20 timeline. That scene was going to show that this all took place in the same continuity, with Laurie as the headmistress apparently hearing about her daughter's fate for the first time given she goes to throw up after hearing the report on "The Haddonfield Murders." My question is Why. The. HELL. did Laurie basically abandon her daughter Jamie to the wolves so she could go into the witness protection program?! Under what circumstances did she think it a good idea to leave Jamie within a thousand miles of where her still-living (if comatose) brother was at, knowing he targets family members? This creates a huge plot hole! It feels like this scene was deleted not just to keep it a separate continuity but also because it would make Laurie [[UnintentionallyUnsympathetic wildly unsympathetic]] to the audience knowing she abandoned one child but then kept the other one around for seemingly no reason at all, given Jamie and John were born a year apart.

* How did Michael find out where Laurie lived? When Laurie's mom killed herself, the sheriff erased Laurie from the records and dropped her off at a hospital in the next town, AND Michael has been secluded from the world for the last 17 years! Moreover, how did Michael even know what Laurie looked like? It's been 17 friggin' years!
** Probably the same reason as to why he seems to have immortality... a complete and utter mystery (this is ignoring the 6th film, of course).
** If you ''don't'' ignore the sixth film, however, then there's your answer: the Cult of Thorn would have seen to it that he knew. They informed him where she was and probably showed him a picture so that he could get the job done. Just like they were the ones who secretly taught him to drive and orchestrated the asylum break-out. Remember that they had a man on the inside. And he could have obtained files on Michael's family himself easily for ostensible job-related research reasons.
** Even if you do ignore the sixth film, Dr. Loomis points out right in the first one that somebody at the sanitarium must have taught Michael how to drive. It's only logical this mystery person - revealed to be Dr. Wynn, the very person he's talking to, in the sixth film and reasonably assumed to be even you ignore that movie - also told him how and where to find Laurie.
** I think this one is regarding Remake Michael, not the original. In the Zombieverse, there is no Curse of Thorn nor a cult for that matter. Also, in the original timeline, Michael's parents both died in a car accident. How Michael figured out that Laurie was Angel "Boo" Myers is anybody's guess.
** If you note when Laurie posted that letter through the letterbox, Michael sniffed it, while not a foolproof explanation, smells can bring up powerful memories. Perhaps inside of his own mind one thing keeping him going was things like the smell of his sister and stuff, remember he was very fond of her.
** And now in our THIRD continuity, the simple answer is he didn't. He picked Laurie, a girl he never met, out at random, just cuz he could.

** If you ''don't'' ignore the sixth film, however, then there's your answer: the Cult of Thorn would have seen to it that he knew. They informed him where she was and probably showed him a picture so that he could get the job done. Just like they were the ones who secretly taught him to drive and orchestrated the asylum break-out. Remember that [[spoiler: they had a man on the inside. And he could have obtained files on Michael's family himself easily for ostensible job-related research reasons.]]

%% ToDo project: let's try and separate out the questions about the original film (and its sequels), the remakes, and those which pertain to both.

** Even if you do ignore the sixth film, Dr. Loomis points out right in the first one that somebody at the sanitarium must have taught Michael how to drive. It's only logical this mystery person - [[spoiler: revealed to be Dr. Wynn, the very person he's talking to, in the sixth film and reasonably assumed to be even you ignore that movie]] - also told him how and where to find Laurie.
** I think this one is regarding Remake Michael, not the original. In the Zombieverse, there is no Curse of Thorn nor a cult for that matter. Also, in the original timeline, Michael's parents both died in a car accident. How Michael figured out that Laurie was [[spoiler: Angel "Boo" Myers]] is anybody's guess.

* Why didn't they follow up the ending of ''Halloween 4''?
** They did. Jamie was sent to a hospital shorter after attacking her mom and it turns out she gained a mental connection with Michael Myers. The mother lives from this ordeal and [[PutOnABus takes a vacation with her husband.]]
** They also showed you how Michael escaped that pit. Still a cop-out if you ask me. I think the ending of Part IV was [[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome the ideal ending for the whole series and franchise]].
* Here's one: In the first ''Halloween'' how did Michael Myers, a man confined in an asylum since childhood learn how to drive a car?
** If you count ''Curse'', one of the cult members could have taught him, for whatever reason. The novelisation of the original mentions he just watched Loomis and other people charged with transporting him do it from the back of the vehicle, and when the time finally came, he winged it.
** Even if you ignore the later films, the strangeness of this is brought up in dialogue... Loomis scratches his own head over it. "Maybe someone around here's been giving him lessons!"
** The novelisation gives a clearer answer: Michael is actually really smart, and he observed how the drivers handled the car when he was driven back and forth to the asylum over the years. Plus, not included in the novelisation, kids do pick up on some traffic knowledge at an early age (such as red means stop, green means go, as well as what a speed limit sign is and what it means).

* Why so much hate for the Rob Zombie movies? Especially ''2''?? I can understand the complaints about it being BloodierAndGorier, but deep down, Zombie really was trying to make the characters complex human beings.
** While the frequent "pounding the blade into people" got old in quickly in Halloween 2, I'd have to say that overall the Zombie films were so different than the original films that they could actually be considered different films. They certainly have more story structure than the original ones did.
** The original Michael Myers was terrifying because there was no reason for his behaviour: he was a child from a normal family who murdered his sister on Halloween. Rob Zombie's Michael, on the other hand, came from an absolute shithole of a family: stripper mom, drunk dad, etc. It would have been more strange if Michael ''hadn't'' gone crazy and became a serial killer. Plus, nothing Rob Zombie added really made the characters more complex, only more cliche.
** There's something equally terrifying about the notion that ''anyone'' can become a psychopath under the right circumstances, or that murderous psychopaths really do exist in real life, as real people. A supernatural force of evil could even be considered ''more'' hackneyed than a real psychopathic boy who grows up to be a real psychopathic man. One isn't necessarily better or worse than the other, it just depends on what ''you personally'' find scarier.
** Your mom's drunk boyfriend can't make you have psychopathic delusions and hallucinations. Also, Rob Zombie said he wasn't a maniac because he came from a bad family-- he was a maniac because he's just a fucking maniac. Which may be worse depending on your point of view, since if it's true, the relentless vulgarity from the family is shown to be just one of Zombie's random indulgences with no bearing on anything. In any case, the characters aren't limited to ''just'' Michael. The Bracketts are arguably more complex than they ever were in Carpenter's films.
** You misunderstood the films. Michael was born a psychopath, but his hideous personal life and home environment just helped push him over the edge and move on from taking out his psychotic aggressions on animals to humans. Michael's personal life isn't what made him psychotic, and the horrible people in his life aren't there for no reason. They were the catalyst that took him from unstable to straight-up dangerous. If you mess with a psychotic individual long enough and badly enough, they will absolutely snap on you one day. He was already fragile and they pushed him too far.
** Laurie is so immensely unlikeable in the new films. Plus, besides simply being Bloodier and Gorier (and maybe even because of it, as if that alone makes a film "scary"), he eliminated any real tension or scares - the unfortunate trend in horror these days.
*** Laurie is incredibly likeable in the first film, and she's only incredibly unlikeable in the second film because of the insane trauma she's been through and continues to go through, on top of WordOfGod's assurance that Laurie is already genetically prepped for psychosis due to being related to Michael. She's a victim of incredibly horrific trauma who is genetically predisposed to mental illness. It's entirely justified and serves the story well by showing how badly the first film's events have affected her life.
** I was alright with the first one (I actually liked the re-tooling of Dr Loomis's motivation for stopping Michael), but I can see why most die-hard Halloween fans wouldn't like it. It throws out the original's subtle horror in favour of full-on gorn (though I can't really be surprised, this being a Rob Zombie flick), and the first half hour was bogged down by a completely unnecessary and, honestly, badly done origin story. If Rob Zombie wanted to assure the audience that Michael was only crazy because he was simply born that way, then he failed miserably. I, however, utterly ''detested'' the sequel. Michael just became some murderous hobo with mommy issues, their decision to have Michael's mother appear to tell him to kill people was bizarre and served as a NightmareRetardant to say the very, very least. And to top it all off, they completely derailed Dr. Loomis into being a money grubbing egomaniac who's riding on the corpses of the first film's victims to success.
** Personal taste aside (gorn, your opinion of the origin story, thinking of Michael as a "murderous hobo"), Michael's mother wasn't literally appearing to him; that was his own psychosis, hallucinations, nothing more. We've always known that Michael was a complete psychotic, and this was the first time we were ever made privy to how his psychosis works, what he sees and thinks, why he does what he does. Of course he has "mommy issues," as you so condescendingly put it; his mother was the only person in his life who treated him with love and care. Anyone would have an obsession with his/her mother if his/her life was like Michael's. Whether you appreciate this representation of his psychosis or not is irrelevant to its validity in the film and its story. As for Loomis, McDowell was already on record before the second film stating that he saw Loomis as having a large ego and thinking himself an important celebrity. The first film even hinted at Loomis's self-centeredness with Brackett's immense dislike of him for exploiting the story of Michael's childhood murders for a book, and thus money and fame. He doesn't ''become'' a moneygrubbing prick in the second film, he just finishes his development into being a less restrained one.
** My main issue with Zombie's remakes was how horribly unlikeable ''every single character'' was. Nobody felt like a real person - they were all just annoying redneck stereotypes or awful caricatures. The rapist orderlies, the necrophiliac ambulance driver, Michael's mother's abusive boyfriend, the stereotypical stripper mom, etc. Even the teens were unlikeable... Rob Zombie seems to have it in his head that female teens only talk about fucking, fucking and more fucking... oh, and apparently they can't speak a single sentence without swearing like sailors. (I miss the days when I ''didn't'' want to see every teen in a horror movie be killed).
** Just because you didn't personally know teenage girls like the ones in the films doesn't mean they don't exist literally everywhere. It's a lot more common than you think. Furthermore, you're exaggerating the cast's detestability. There were positive characters, you're just too distracted by the bad ones to notice. You've got Laurie and virtually all of her friends, family, and acquaintances. You've got Ismael. You've got Michael's mom. You've got Buddy. You've got the lady with the two rednecks who beat Michael down in the field in the second film. You've got Coroner Hooks who is profoundly disgusted with the necrophiliac orderly and only makes an offhand, off-colour joke to lighten the mood after creating awkward tension by shutting down the other guy's gross attempt at humour. There are plenty of positive characters. Don't let the exaggerated grotesqueness of the bad characters blind you to all the good ones.
** I always figured Zombie was trying to play on the correlation/causality assumption people make when they talk about child abuse and bad upbringings leading to Michael's kind of behaviour. If there's no reason for Michael to go batshit, then it could happen regardless of whether his life was normal or horribly abusive. I figured Zombie was trying to subvert both the blaming it on the upbringing and the common subversion of that (giving the monster an ideal upbringing) at the same time. As for the unlikeable characters, Zombie tends to write people as over the top parodies. You have to look at them from a black comedy slant.
** It's not intended as black comedy, it's just a slight exaggeration of reality, similar to a fantasy story or a parable. Compare these characters to Cinderella's step-mother and step-sisters, for example.

* In the original, why didn't Michael kill Laurie when she was a helpless baby? I'm sure he had some time to kill her. I mean, at least the remake explained that he just wanted to be with her.

* Why did no paramedics notice a man with burnt scarring and wielding a ''kitchen knife'' after Michael had switched "bodies" in Halloween Resurrection? It just boggles the mind.
** Yeah, this bugged me too. The only explanation I have is that Michael may have healed enough to pass for normal over the last twenty or so years.
** I always assumed it has something to do with the supernatural-esque aspects Michael seems to have. He walks straight past a bunch of paramedics holding a bloodied knife and (presumably) covered in burn scars...then just seems to ''fade'' into the bushes. As if he was never there.
** I assumed the reason why no one noticed him at that moment was because everyone was focused on Laurie stealing the van, after stealing the gun from an officer and holding them up to steal the van. After driving off, they were more concerned about the woman who is acting a bit crazy than the other people in the area.
* In Halloween: H20, Michael drove from Illinois to California. He would have had to refill the car a few times on the way to California. Would he have taken off his mask and just refilled at a gas station like any regular person, or was he leaving a trail of bloodied gas attendant corpses behind him? If the latter is correct, then you'd think the police would have found the trail and followed it back to Haddonfield, especially since they were already on the look-out for Michael after he killed the nurse in California.
** It is shown in Halloween H20 that Michael has no problem stealing cars from people, without causing them any injury. Any time he runs out of gas, he can simply steal a car. If he doesn't murder people, he doesn't leave a bloody trail, and since he is known as a murderer and not a car thief, the police probably don't suspect it is Michael Myers when the reports say a masked man stole a car.
** I wouldn't put it past him. I think something like that happened in ''Film/SilentNightDeadlyNightIIIBetterWatchOut''.
** Maybe he left the mask on the whole time and since it was coming up to Halloween, people just assumed he was a weirdo in a costume. News wouldn't have travelled as fast in 1998 as it does today with internet coverage.
** They're also on the lookout for him in Haddonfield, which is where he usually strikes. No one thought that he would drive to California.
* How did Michael end up on the truck at the end of Halloween 4? When did he cling to it? We see the truck pull up, load the girls onto it, and leave. If Michael clung onto the bottom, he would have had to come out of the school before the girls did, at which point the people pulling up probably should have been able to notice him.
** OffscreenTeleportation. All slasher film villains have this power. It's how people like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers can suddenly appear in front of their intended victims despite said victims clearly being able to out run them.
** More mundanely: in the scene in question, all four rednecks disembark the truck to converse with Rachel at the entrance to the school. This gives Michael an opportunity to make an end-around from the other side of the school and hide himself on the truck while everyone's attention is elsewhere.
* If the Cult of Thorn wanted Michael to kill his entire family for the unexplained ritual, why did Dr. Wynn impregnate Jamie instead of allowing Michael to kill her? Why create a new member of a family that he should want completely destroyed?
** Seeing that Michael was getting old, and given all that he has suffered in the way of physical injuries, they probably used Jamie to create the next line of the Myers bloodline with the intention of making the baby the next Shape.
* In the first movie, high school students Bob and Lynda run happily into the house where Annie was supposed to be babysitting little Lindsey Wallace... where they have passionate sex in what is presumably the Wallaces' master bedroom, and Bob goes down to fetch beers out of the Wallaces' refrigerator (that's where he is ambushed). There's no indication they were planning to launder the sheets or air out the room, or too drunk to think out the consequences. So what ''were'' they thinking? They were old enough to have cars and bedrooms of their own, and this is a semi-rural small town with its share of outdoor spots. They could've found a safer place... safer from adult discovery, I mean.
** They're teenagers. First off, they brought their own beer (you can see them drinking it in Bob's van prior to heading inside). There's a good chance that they would have had sex on the bed and then left everything the way they found it (without washing the sheets. There are teenagers who have had sex in the beds of adults and not thought about doing it). Or, since it'd be the kind of thing they would have done if Michael hadn't turned up and killed everyone, they would have left Annie to actually do the laundering, where she would have griped about not being able to hook up with Paul that night and having to do the dirty work to clean up Lynda's mess.
** Perhaps they're adrenaline junkies and the fact that it's someone else's house - with their young daughter downstairs - is what makes it fun?

* People dislike the supernatural explanation for Michael's origins and abilities. Why? How else do you explain the fact that nothing can kill him? In the first two films alone he was shot multiple times, dropped from the second floor of a house, stabbed in the eye, ''shot'' in ''both'' eyes, and finally blown up. I'm calling the explanation a perfectly justified one.
** Not so much that the explanation is supernatural, but that there's an explanation at all. Any attempts to explain what Michael is or why tend to simply make him less mysterious, and thus, less scary.
** Why do people think Michael having any kind of a backstory that explains why he kills people or how he's able to sustain fatal injuries makes him less scary? Yes, there's something to be said about the "fear of the unknown", but then why even give him a name or show his face in the original movie? Personally, the idea of having no explanation for Michael doesn't scream fear, but instead screams "[[AssPull the writers were too lazy to think of anything good]]".
** The problem people have with the added backstory in later films is that it was not very well thought out. Carpenter infamously stated the thought of Michael being Laurie's sister came to him late at night drinking, after all. The other issue is that it becomes needlessly convoluted. Before Halloween 6, Michael just randomly killed people, but now it was because of a curse being carried out by a cult that has never appeared before this film. People tend to take issue with the backstories because of the on-the-fly nature of them combined with the "fear of the unknown" being sometimes more effective than knowing. Sometimes it's scarier for just any average Joe to be a depraved killer for no reason than for a convoluted explanation as to why they kill.
** For people who stuck with the series, there's plenty of divide about which sequel in which timeline took the story too far. But at the same time that risk is a part of the fun of any long running series to see what new adventures (twists and crossovers included) happen to the character next. But I'd imagine some of this also comes from people who aren't really in invested in the series. There's plenty of people who turn {{Sequelitis}} into an outright prejudice. They made more stories on the fly and didn't pre-plan the whole thing out like a nerd ala how Laurie Strode would have? It must suck by default. I think the easy way to filter those people out is often just to ask actually plot questions about the sequels and see if they even know the answer.
** The cult was in 5, too, it just wasn't fleshed out because of cut content. That's what the Thorn tattoo and the man in black were all about in that movie. 6 fleshed out what 5 introduced.
* I work at a modern hospital in a small town probably smaller than Haddenfield, and get that it may be by design by Carpenter and Hill this way, but why is the hospital in Halloween II (1981) so understaffed? With how big the town of Haddenfield is portrayed and with the notable size of the hospital, it seems rather odd that you have at least three nurses pulling double duty (including two nurses that appear to work Inpatient and Mrs. Alves who seems to run the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit portion of the hospital, all working in the ER as well) and, just as odd, one security guard on duty. Typically, there'd be more than the number of medical staff seen in the film not only during a night shift, but during a night shift ''and'' falling on a holiday no less. And each department being covered by individual teams of staff (meaning Mrs. Alves would be handling NICU while the staff in the ER are handling Laurie's injuries). Is this how hospitals typically worked in a town the size of Haddenfield circa 1978 or was this just dramatic license by Carpenter and Hill to keep not only the cost of hiring additional actors down, but to make the numbers easier for Michael to kill?
** From what I understand, the tiny staff size was more than likely dramatic license as patients alone typically have around four staff members dedicated to them, so the hospital is criminally understaffed.

* In H4, we learn that rather than die in the explosion from H2, Michael suffered third degree burns all over his body and was in a coma for 10 years. The only reason we see him coming out of it is because the paramedics talk about Jamie during the transfer. Why did nobody use this to just [[BoomHeadshot blow his brains out while he couldn’t do anything]]?! You’re telling me that Dr. Loomis (and this is ignoring the absurdity of how he survived being in the center of the explosion and coming out with only a limp and small facial/hand burns), Laurie, the police, hospital medics, anybody who knew or was related to one of his victims, or just anyone at all didn’t take advantage of the immobile mass murderer to just kill him? That the police, state or local, decided that it was probably a good idea to temporarily forget the law, and at least try to kill the psychopath who survived an explosion? I find that rather hard to believe.
** Most likely to both their consciences and the eyes of the general public, it would be a case of IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim. Sure, Laurie and Loomis have tried killing Michael before, but those instances were in self-defence. Killing someone, even a crazed serial killer, while they're in a coma would not only be morally questionable, but there would also be a lot of people angry over that person's constitutional rights being violated.
** Given how they were keeping Michael in the basement of the hospital, and the unawareness of him among the general public, it doesn’t seem like anyone would know if somebody killed him, and just put his corpse in a wood chipper.
** Frankly, at this point constitutional rights should have gone out the window when he survived an explosion. Also, how do you kill a guy who survived that?
** If you follow the Cult of Thorn timeline, they must have been protecting him.
* Just morbid curiosity, since the first film was one of the early (if not THE FIRST) instances of the now familiar slasher film genre: putting aside the fact that the next film begins and continues where the first one ends, why did John Carpenter decide to end it [[spoiler:so abruptly after having Loomis shoot Michael, and seemingly finally kill him after so many failed attempts, just to show Michael's body gone, therefore STILL alive]]?
** To show that evil never dies.
** Also, that Michael is still out there and could be anywhere. [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou Like inside your house while you're in the theater, waiting for you to come home...or maybe the back seat of your car...]]
** Indeed, a podcasting group from small-town Illinois said when they were younger, this was part of the potent menace the film suggested in their adolescent minds.
** Because that idea is terrifying. Laurie managed to put up a good fight and so did Loomis, and afterwards, Michael still isn't dead. There's no explanation for ''why'' this is happening and there's no resolution either.
** The original plan was to make the Halloween franchise as a series of individual stories, kind of like The Twilight Zone. This is why Halloween’s ending was so abrupt, to keep an unsolved mystery... until Michael Myers was so popular that they decided to make a Halloween II, before going ahead with their original plan when they made Halloween III: Season of the Witch. After that movie got a less than great reception, they decided to bring back Michael Myers in 1988.

** The original plan was to make the Halloween franchise as a series of individual stories, kind of like The Twilight Zone. This is why Halloween’s ending was so abrupt, to keep an unsolved mystery... until Michael Myers was so popular that they decided to make a Halloween II, before going ahead with their original plan when they made Halloween III: Season of the Witch. After that movie got a less than great reception, they decided to bring back Michael Myers in 1988.

* How did Michael find out where Laurie lived? When Laurie's mom killed herself, the sheriff erased Laurie from the record and dropped her off at a hospital in the next town, AND Michael has been secluded from the world for the last 17 years! Moreover, how did Michael even know what Laurie looked like? It's been 17 friggin' years!
** Probably the same reason on why he seems to have immortality...a complete and utter mystery. (This is ignoring the 6th film, of course.)
** If you ''don't'' ignore the sixth film, however, then there's your answer: the Cult of Thorn would have seen to it that he knew. They informed him where she was and probably showed him a picture so that he could get the job done. Just like they'd the ones who secretly taught him to drive and orchestrated the asylum break-out. Remember that [[spoiler: they had a man on the inside. And he could have obtained files on Michael's family himself easily for ostensible job-related research reasons.]]
*** Even if you do ignore the sixth film, Dr. Loomis points out right in the first one that somebody at the sanitarium must have taught Michael how to drive. It's only logical this mystery person - [[spoiler: revealed to be Dr. Wynn, the very person he's talking to, in the sixth film and reasonably assumed to be even you ignore that movie]] - also told him how and where to find Laurie.

*** If you note when Laurie posted that letter through the letterbox, michael sniffed it, while not a foolproof explanation, smells can bring up powerful memories, perhaps inside his own mind one thing keeping him going was things like the smell of his sister and stuff, remember he was very fond of her.

*** It's also stated in the original novelization that Michael is possessed by the ghost of a murderous and sexually frustrated Celtic hunchback who killed his tribe's most lovely maiden and most handsome young warrior at a Samhain feast, and that the ghost repeats his fell deed every few decades through that bloodline (remember the bit about Mike's great-grandfather murdering a dancing couple at a Harvest Dance?). So a few supernatural talents are probably par for the course.

** If you count ''Curse'', one of them cult members could have taught him, for whatever reason. The novelization of the original mentions he just watched Loomis and other people charged with transporting him do it from the back of the vehicle, and when the time finally came, he winged it.

** The novelization gives a clearer answer: Michael is actually really smart, and he observed how the drivers handled the car when he was driven back and forth to the asylum over the years. Plus, not included in the novelization, kids do pick up on some traffic knowledge at an early age (such as red means stop, green means go, as well as what a speed limit sign is and what it means).
* Or this one: When he fell from the window near the end, shot, eye poked, and stabbed, how did he get his injuries taken care of? It wasn't as if he could just go to the hospital.

** The original Michael Myers was terrifying because there was no reason for his behavior: he was a child from a normal family who murdered his sister on Halloween. Rob Zombie's Michael, on the other hand, came from an absolute shithole of a family: stripper mom, drunk dad, etc. It would have been more strange if Michael ''hadn't'' gone crazy and became a serial killer. Plus, nothing Rob Zombie added really made the characters more complex, only more cliche.
*** There's something equally terrifying about the notion that ''anyone'' can become a psychopath under the right circumstances, or that murderous psychopaths really do exist in real life, as real people. A supernatural force of evil could even be considered ''more'' hackneyed than a real psychopathic boy who grows up to be a real psychopathic man. One isn't necessarily better or worse than the other, it just depends on what ''you personally'' find scarier.
** Your mom's drunk boyfriend can't make you have psychopathic delusions and hallucinations. Also, Rob Zombie said he wasn't a maniac because he came from a bad family--he was a maniac because he's just a fucking maniac. Which may be worse depending on your point of view, since if it's true, the relentless vulgarity from the family is shown to be just one of Zombie's random indulgences with no bearing on anything. In any case, the characters aren't limited to ''just'' Michael. The Bracketts are arguably more complex than they ever were in Carpenter's films.
*** You misunderstood the films. Michael was born a psychopath, but his hideous personal life and home environment just helped push him over the edge and move on from taking out his psychotic aggressions on animals to humans. Michael's personal life isn't what made him psychotic, and the horrible people in his life aren't there for no reason. They were the catalyst that took him from unstable to straight-up dangerous. If you mess with a psychotic individual long enough and badly enough, they will absolutely snap on you one day. He was already fragile and they pushed him too far.

** I was alright with the first one (I actually liked the re-tooling of Dr Loomis's motivation for stopping Michael), but I can see why most die-hard Halloween fans wouldn't like it. It throws the original's subtle horror in favor of full-on gorn (though I can't really be surprised, this being a Rob Zombie flick), and the first half hour was bogged down by a completely unnecessary and, honestly, badly done origin story. If Rob Zombie wanted to assure the audience that Michael was only crazy because he was simply born that way, then he failed miserably. I, however, utterly ''detested'' the sequel. Michael just became some murderous hobo with mommy issues, their decision to have Michael's mother appear to tell him to kill people was bizarre and served as a NightmareRetardant to say the very, very least. And to top it all off, they completely derailed Dr. Loomis to being a money grubbing egomaniac who's riding on the corpses of the first film's victims to success.
*** Personal taste aside (gorn, your opinion of the origin story, thinking of Michael as a "murderous hobo"), Michael's mother wasn't literally appearing to him; that was his own psychosis, hallucinations, nothing more. We've always known that Michael was a complete psychotic, and this was the first time we were ever made privy to how his psychosis works, what he sees and thinks, why he does what he does. Of course he has "mommy issues," as you so condescendingly put it; his mother was the only person in his life who treated him with love and care. Anyone would have an obsession with his/her mother if his/her life was like Michael's. Whether you appreciate this representation of his psychosis or not is irrelevant to its validity in the film and its story. As for Loomis, McDowell was already on record before the second film stating that he saw Loomis as having a large ego and thinking himself an important celebrity. The first film even hinted at Loomis's self-centeredness with Brackett's immense dislike of him for exploiting the story of Michael's childhood murders for a book, and thus money and fame. He doesn't ''become'' a moneygrubbing prick in the second film, he just finishes his development into being a less restrained one.
** My main issue with Zombie's remakes was how horribly unlikeable ''every single character'' was. Nobody felt like a real person - they were all just annoying redneck stereotypes or awful caricatures. The rapist orderlies, the necrophiliac ambulance driver, Michael's mother's abusive boyfriend, the stereotypical stripper mom, etc. Even the teens were unlikeable...Rob Zombie seems to have it in his head that female teens only talk about fucking, fucking and more fucking...oh, and apparently they can't speak a single sentence without swearing like sailors. (I miss the days when I ''didn't'' want to see every teen in a horror movie be killed.)
*** Just because you didn't personally know teenage girls like the ones in the films doesn't mean they don't exist literally everywhere. It's a lot more common than you think. Furthermore, you're exaggerating the cast's detestability. There were positive characters, you're just too distracted by the bad ones to notice. You've got Laurie and virtually all of her friends, family, and acquaintances. You've got Ismael. You've got Michael's mom. You've got Buddy. You've got the lady with the two rednecks who beat Michael down in the field in the second film. You've got Coroner Hooks who is profoundly disgusted with the necrophiliac orderly and only makes an offhand, off-color joke to lighten the mood after creating awkward tension by shutting down the other guy's gross attempt at humor. There are plenty of positive characters. Don't let the exaggerated grotesqueness of the bad characters blind you to all the good ones.
** I always figured Zombie was trying to play on the correlation/causality assumption people make when they talk about child abuse and bad upbringings leading to Michael's kind of behavior. If there's no reason for Michael to go batshit, then it could happen regardless of whether his life was normal or horribly abusive. I figured Zombie was trying to subvert both the blaming it on the upbringing and the common subversion of that (giving the monster an ideal upbringing) at the same time. As for the unlikable characters, Zombie tends to write people as over the top parodies. You have to look at them from a black comedy slant.
*** It's not intended as black comedy, it's just a slight exaggeration of reality, similar to a fantasy story or a parable. Compare these characters to Cinderella's step-mother and -sisters, for example.

** Depends on the source. For just the original film alone, it may have been him just realizing there was no reaching Michael and came to the conclusion he was evil just by the look in his eyes (as Loomis has stated in the film). For the ''Halloween'' comic book by Chaos! Comics, it details Michael's time in the asylum. Michael killed a female patient during a blackout that occurs during a Halloween party (she was found in the barrel for apple bobbing, and people assumed that she slipped, hit her head and drowned by accident). But, Michael also targeted and killed Loomis's fiancée, who also worked with him as a nurse in the asylum. Again, people assumed it was an accident, but Loomis knew for sure it was Michael who did it and saw Michael as being unable to be redeemed.

** I'd chalk it up to Michael's unpredictability. There was never any reason as to why he killed his sister Judith, and there was never really any reason as to why he didn't kill Laurie as a baby (ignoring the fact that Carpenter didn't intend Laurie to be Michael's sister in the original film). He just...decided to kill one sister that night, and not the other. It can't be explained. It's just pure evil at work.
** Michael's behavior is often seemingly random. For instance, toward the beginning of Halloween 4, he probably could have killed Loomis at the garage, but let him live for whatever reason. In the seventh movie he followed that mother and daughter into the bathroom, but just took their keys without killing them, even though there's no reason why he couldn't have.
** Another explanation is that Laurie wasn't at the Myers house in the first film. The Myers were leaving their teenage daughter to keep an eye on their son, who is six years old. If you were a parent, would you trust your teenager to keep an eye on your six-year-old child and your infant at the same time? It'd make more sense to leave the baby with a next door neighbor who may have more experience with babies and let the teenager keep an eye on a more manageable six-year-old.

** I assumed the reason why no one noticed him at that moment was because everyone was focused on Laurie stealing the van, after stealing the gun from an officer and holding them up to steal the van. After driving off, they were more concerned about the woman who is acting a bit crazy than the people in the area.

** OffscreenTeleportation. All slasher film villains have this power. It's how people like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers can suddenly appear in front of their intended victims despite said victims clearly being able to out-run them.
** More mundanely: In the scene in question, all four rednecks disembark the truck to converse with Rachel at the entrance to the school. This gives Michael an opportunity to make an end-around from the other side of the school and hide himself on the truck while everyone's attention is elsewhere.
* If the Cult of Thorn wanted to Michael to kill his entire family for the unexplained ritual, why did Dr. Wynn impregnate Jamie instead of allowing Michael to kill her? Why create a new member of a family that he should want completely destroyed?

* In the first movie, high school students Bob and Lynda run happily into the house where Annie was supposed to be babysitting little Lindsey Wallace...where they have passionate sex in what is presumably the Wallaces' master bedroom, and Bob goes down to fetch beers out of the Wallaces' refrigerator (that's where he is ambushed). There's no indication they were planning to launder the sheets or air out the room, or too drunk to think out the consequences. So what ''were'' they thinking? They were old enough to have cars and bedrooms of their own, and this is a semi-rural small town with its share of outdoor spots. They could've found a safer place...safer from adult discovery, I mean.
** They're teenagers. First off, they brought their own beer (you can see them drinking it in Bob's van prior to heading inside). There's a good chance that they would have had sex on the bed and then left everything the way they found it (without washing the sheets. There are teenagers who have had sex on the beds of adults and not thought about doing it). Or, since it'd be the kind of thing they would have done if Michael hadn't turned up and killed everyone, they would have left Annie to actually do the laundering, where she would have griped about not being able to hook up with Paul that night and having to do the dirty work to clean up Lynda's mess.

** It's William Shatner. Seriously. ("William Shatner mask" even redirects to "Halloween (1978 film)" on Wikipedia now.)

*** [[RealityisUnrealistic It's a hardware store in a small town.]] From how the store looks, it might have been there as far back before the start of the film and Michael himself may have been brought there to buy a costume before that Halloween night in 1963. I know that may sound out of place, but it's not uncommon in small towns in the past to expand their stock to include items for holiday items. Even small town Ace Hardware stores would sell toys during the Christmas season in addition to it's usual hardware stock.
* People dislike the supernatural explanation for Michael's origins and abilities? Why? How else do you explain the fact that nothing can kill him? In the first two films alone he was shot multiple times, dropped from the second floor of a house, stabbed in the eye, ''shot'' in ''both'' eyes, and finally blown up. I'm calling the explanation a perfectly justified one.

*** Why do people think Michael having any kind of a backstory that explains why he kills people or how he's able to sustain fatal injuries makes him less scary? Yes, there's something to be said about the "fear of the unknown", but then why even give him a name or show his face in the original movie? Personally, the idea of having no explanation for Michael doesn't scream fear, but instead screams "[[AssPull the writers were too lazy to think of anything good]]".
*** The problem people have with the added backstory in later films is that it was not very well thought out. Carpenter infamously stated he thought of him being Laurie's sister late at night drinking, after all. The other issue is that it becomes needlessly convoluted. Before Halloween 6, Michael just randomly killed people, but now it was because of a curse being carried out by a cult that has never appeared before this film. People tend to take issue with the backstories because of the on-the-fly nature of them combined with the "fear of the unknown" being sometimes more effective than knowing. Sometimes it's scarier for just any average Joe to be a depraved killer for no reason than for a convoluted explanation as to why they kill.
*** For people who stuck with the series, there's plenty of divide about which sequel in which timeline took the story too far. But at the same time that risk is a part of the fun of long running series to see what new adventures (twists and crossovers included) happen to the character next. But i'd imagine some of this also comes from people who aren't really in invested in the series. There's plenty of people who turn {{Sequelitis}} into an outright prejudice. They made more stories on the fly and didn't pre-plan the whole thing out like a nerd ala Laurie Strode would have? It must suck by default. I think the easy way to filter those people out is often just to ask actually plot questions about the sequels and see if they even know the answer.
*** The cult was in 5, too, it just wasn't fleshed out because of cut content. That's what the thorn tattoo and the man in black were all about in that movie. 6 fleshed out what 5 introduced.
* The troper asking this question works at a modern hospital in a small town probably smaller than Haddenfield, and gets that it may be by design by Carpenter and Hill this way, but why is the hospital in Halloween II (1981) so understaffed? With how big the town of Haddenfield is portrayed and with the notable size of the hospital, it seems rather odd that you have at least three nurses pulling double duty (including two nurses that appear to work Inpatient and Mrs. Alves who seems to run the NICU portion of the hospital, all working in the ER as well) and, just as odd, one security guard on duty. Typically, there'd be more than the number of medical staff seen in the film not only during a night shift, but during a night shift and a holiday no less. And each department being covered by individual teams of staff (meaning Mrs. Alves would be handling NICU while the staff in the ER handling Laurie's injuries). Is this how hospitals typically worked in a town the size of Haddenfield circa 1978 or was this just dramatic licensing by Carpenter and Hill to keep not only the cost of hiring additional actors down, but to make the numbers easier for Michael to kill?
** From what I understand, the tiny staff size was more than likely dramatic licensing as patients alone typically have around four staff members dedicated to them, so the hospital is criminally understaffed.

** Most likely to both their consciences and the eyes of the general public, it would be a case of IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim. Sure, Laurie and Loomis have tried killing Michael before, but those instances were in self-defense. Killing someone, even a crazed serial killer, while they're in a coma would not only be morally questionable, but there would also be a lot of people angry over that person's constitutional rights being violated.
*** Given how they were keeping Michael in the basement of the hospital, and the unawareness of him in the general public, it doesn’t seem like anyone would know if somebody killed him, and just put his corpse in a wood chipper.

* Just morbid curiosity, since the first film was one of the early (if not THE FIRST) installments of the now familiar slasher film genre: putting aside the fact that the next film begins and continues where the first one ends, why did John Carpenter decide to end it [[spoiler:so abruptly after having Loomis shoot Michael, and seemingly finally kill him after so many failed attempts, just to show Michael's body gone, therefore STILL alive]]?

*** Also, that Michael is still out there and could be anywhere. [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou Like inside your house while you're in the theater, waiting for you to come home...or maybe the back seat of your car...]]

** The original plan was to make the Halloween franchise as a series of individual stories, kind of like The Twilight Zone. This is why Halloween’s ending was so abrupt, to keep an unsolved mystery...until Michael Myers was so popular that they decided to make a Halloween II, before going ahead with their original plan when they made Halloween III: Season of the Witch. After that movie got a less than great reception, they decided to bring back Michael Myers in 1988.