Common Sense in Slashers and How that Relates to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

A couple of weeks ago, I published a post for the Sunday “Bad” Movies that was related to the movie Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning.  In that post, I wrote about how the big three slasher franchises had evolved through the addition of humour or a deepened mythology.  This week’s post was prompted by a movie in one of the other big three franchises that also tried to evolve its respective series.  This movie is Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth movie in the Halloween franchise.

In relation to that post, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is part of the mythology deepening era of the Halloween franchise.  All of the movies, outside of the unrelated third installment, have some sort of historical importance to the sixth movie.  Whether it be the relationship between Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis (introduced in the first film and present through all of the others), Jamie Lloyd (introduced in the fourth and present since then), the man in black (introduced in the fifth film), Tommy Doyle (a character from the first film), or the recycled setting of a hospital (the setting of the second film), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers builds on everything that came before it.  But that’s not what I want to write about this week.  What I want to discuss is how a lot of horror movies tend to have characters, both on and off screen, that act in ways that people wouldn’t normally act, in order to cause scares and have action occur.

Quick note before I move forward.  Of course I know that there are horror movies that don’t do this kind of stupidity.  I know that.  There are lots of them out there.  But for the sake of this post, I’m looking at the ones that do pull this kind of buffoonery.  That’s all.  Moving on.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is filled with moments that I don’t understand because the characters and/or assumed characters would have done other things in the real world.  This is not to say that the Halloween series presents an entirely real world, but they try to make everything as true to our reality as possible.  Many of the situations throughout the runtime of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers should have never happened.  A lack of sincerity is all that I felt while watching the movie.  I want to quickly outline some of the stuff I witnessed.  There will be some spoilers up ahead.  Consider yourself warned.

The first scene that I want to bring up is the scene in which the matriarch of the Strode household is slain.  If you’ve seen Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, you should know what I’m writing about.  Michael Myers chases Mrs. Strode through her house and into the backyard.  In typical slasher film fashion, there is lots of laundry hanging out to dry in the yard.  Most of it is white sheets.  Mother Strode pushes her way through the sheets only to be trapped because of the fence that is enclosing the yard.  There is a look that crosses her face that makes it seem as though she had never seen the fence before.  This boggles my mind.  She lives in the house but does not know that there is a fence on the other side of the laundry that she has hung out to dry.  How did the fence slip her mind?  Maybe the adrenaline caused that memory to disappear.  I don’t know.  It seems strange to me that she wouldn’t remember the fence being there.

That scene was just a little bit of observational confusion.  What I’m about to describe is the scene that involves the most suspension of disbelief, in my opinion.  No, it doesn’t involve the runes and cult stuff that other parts of the movie do, but there’s some common sense lacking from this part.  It involves a bus station.  Jamie Lloyd is being chased by Michael Myers and hides in a bus station.  She goes to a phone and calls a radio station.  Her blood leaves a puddle on the floor.  Then Jamie goes to the bathroom, hides the baby, and runs away, leading Michael away from the baby.  The next day, Tommy Doyle finds out about the bus terminal, and goes to investigate.  When he arrives at the station, he sees the blood on the floor near the phones, and then discovers the baby crying in the bathroom.  My questions here are fairly simple.  Why is there still blood on the floor?  Shouldn’t someone have mopped it up?  Isn’t there a janitor to do that?  It seems unsafe and unsanitary to leave a puddle of blood on the floor overnight.  Someone should have noticed it during the day when there were hundreds of people going through the station.  Also, shouldn’t someone have noticed the crying baby in the washroom?  Maybe not the janitor because the janitor clearly doesn’t exist.  But anybody who used the washroom should have been able to hear the baby crying in there.  Someone should have noticed.  There is no reason for the baby to still be in the bathroom, or for the blood to still be on the floor.  Tommy Doyle should not have been able to find these things because somebody should have cleaned up the blood and somebody should have noticed the baby.

I know that neither of these things are quite as egregious as someone running up the stairs instead of out the open front door while being chased by a killer, but they are both things that happen due to a lack of thought put into the writing.  The characters are either absent-minded for no reason or they are absent altogether.  I guess that saying “for no reason” is wrong.  There is a reason.  The reason is to get to more kills and more action.  All it does for me is snowball into one giant removal of any possible suspension of disbelief that I had.  I can deal with the spiritual aspects of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.  I can deal with the fact that both Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis have survived situations that would kill most people.  I can even deal with an inept police force who don’t do anything.  But when you build a fantastical world on top of a real world, then remove all traces of common sense, the movie falls apart for me.  It takes me right out of the movie and I’m left in a state of bewilderment.

This is not to say that I dislike slasher flicks.  Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is still an entertaining movie.  The difficulty comes in the form of the investment that a viewer can have for the characters.  The killer is the character that is most fleshed out.  The rest of the characters are meant to be meat for the killer to carve.  Everything in a slasher flick is meant to serve the sole purpose of leading to a murder.  It becomes less about making sense and more about watching people die in exceedingly violent ways.  It’s fun to see how many different situations that a filmmaker can think of for a person to die, but it comes at the expense of realistic characterization.

It’s a shame that Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers succumbs to this sort of laziness.  The mythology building that is being done in the movie is interesting.  It seems that in slasher movies, you can’t have both a deep mythology and rational characters.  When the writers focus on one thing, they forget that they need the basics in order to create a fully immersive story.  It really is a shame that so many slasher flicks forget that.

There are a few notes that I would like to make right now:

• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me on Twitter.  Or leave a comment.  Either way works.  I’ll see the suggestions if you suggest.
• Mitch Ryan was in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.  He was also in Ed.
• I talked about the growth of slasher franchises in the post for Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning.
• Two other slashers that I wrote about were Backwoods Bloodbath: Curse of the Black Hodag and April Fools.
• The one year anniversary of the Sunday “Bad” Movie is coming up.  That’s going to be the 53^rd post.  What I want to do is this.  I want to rewatch one of the movies featured in the first 50 posts of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  That means that there are 57 movies to choose from.  Any movie from Starcrash up until the upcoming Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 can be chosen.  I will be polling after the 50^th post goes up.  Figure out what movie you want me to rewatch and be ready to vote.