I was originally going to post my essay here. But, I deleted it because it felt too antagonistic for a forum I’ve never been on before. So, I’m going to try to condense my 7 page essay into a short post.
I think the reason so many fans dislike the sequels is because, as they word it, they don’t ‘capture the essence of Micheal Myers’ in the first movie.
That said, I am making this topic because I think that segment of the fans needs to get over this point and themselves because what they’re asking for is impossible.
The key to understanding this is to understand that Micheal is not a character. Micheal is a mannequin that Carpenter uses to recreate the fear he felt from a very specific experience that he had.
Carpenter explained the origin of Micheal as a class trip he made to visit a psyche ward where he saw a very young boy who had an ‘evil stare’ that scared the crap out of him.
Carpenter knew nothing at all about this boy as a person. All he knew was that he had this scary stare ‘the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes’ and that he must have done something really bad to be in the psyche ward. And that it was shocking to think that someone so young could have done something that bad and have such a ‘death stare.’
This right here is the dissociative lens. Because in this moment Carpenter scares himself. He allows himself to see this person as a not-person who he knows really nothing about and doesn’t understand. Then, from this fear of not understanding, he allows himself to project all of his worst fears onto this boy and scare himself with his own worst fears.
It’s the dissociative lens, that uncanny valley, of seeing ‘something’ in the shape of a person who did something bad that humans should never do… but have no idea why. Which, again, makes the person appear inhuman, alien, a non-person.
Micheal, then, is not a character. He’s the character stand in, the mannequin, that Carpenter uses to expertly recreate this exact experience that he had for the audience.
The reason that Carpenter can’t recreate this boy as a character is because Carpenter never knew this boy as a person. All Carpenter ever knew was his own lens, his own experience of how this boy’s ‘death stare’ made him feel afraid. So, all Carpenter could recreate was the experience itself. Rendering Micheal in the recreation to the same role as the boy in the experience; a blank mannequin that the audience could project their own fear on in the same way he projected his own fear onto this boy.
That’s the entire point of the movie, to invite the audience to do this and scare themselves in the same way with the movie that he scared himself with his experience.
The problem for sequels is that Micheal Myers is no more a character in the movie than that boy was a person to Carpenter.
This means that the writers don’t really have any meat on the bone left to build on with sequels to Micheal.
If they characterize Micheal, they ruin the blankness of the mannequin and audiences get upset about that.
If they don’t characterize Micheal, Micheal is… well… boring. He’s a one trick pony because while a blank mannequin is a really good trick to get audiences to scares themselves in a really well made, low budget, 1970’s art film. It doesn’t really work past just one movie because sense Micheal isn’t a character there is nothing of substance to build on.
This is not to say that the movie or the people working on it is nothing of substance. Just Micheal himself.
There is no back story. No motive. No emotions. No deep thoughts. No style. No personality. Nothing, nothing at all that makes a real character.
What worked so well about the first film is the audiences scared themselves with Micheal. The movie was made that way on purpose to have that effect. But, you can’t just do that again and again with the same character in the same franchise without expecting diminishing returns because that gets boring fast.
This leaves writers trapped between a rock and a hard place. Characterize Micheal and be complained at for ruining the effect the blank mannequin causes in the audience that the audience loved so much about the original. Or just do a paint by numbers of the original all over again, and get complained at for being nothing but a pale imitation of the original. There’s nowhere for the writers to take Micheal because he was never written as a character. All he was, was a mannequin vessel to expertly recreate for the audience the fearful experience of projecting your own fears onto a dangerous person you otherwise know nothing about as a person.