Theory: Michael Myers Isn’t The Original Killer In ‘Halloween’

I know. There is no horror canon like Halloween cannon. This little boogeyman movie John Carpenter and Debra Hill made for $300,000 is something horror fans are very protective about. I grew up with Michael Myers too! I mean no disrespect to the franchise, but I’ve been thinking about something lately that just doesn’t make sense. Hear me out.

In the original Halloween, we see 6-year-old Michael Myers in 1963 when he murders his older sister. Michael is sent to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and then we flash forward to 1978 when he escapes and returns to Haddonfield and starts killing people. We see nothing of Michael’s time in the Sanitarium until Rob Zombie’s remakes. We are just told that a 6-year-old child is “evil” could not be helped, and the only solution is to lock him up for life. That doesn’t add up for me and it makes me suspicious of the person pushing this narrative, Dr. Samuel Loomis.

Think about it. Why is Dr. Loomis so obsessed with Michael Myers? Shouldn’t an elderly psychiatrist have better things to do than chase a predator around town? Surely, the police should be the ones doing this while Dr. Loomis can help in some other way that is perhaps less physically demanding and more suited to a man of his age and skill. But what if there’s another reason Dr. Loomis freaks out whenever Michael gets out, what if he’s worried he might get exposed?

We know basically nothing about the Myers family. We’re never told when Michael and Dr. Loomis meet, we just assume it’s at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. It’s entirely possible they met before that. What if Michael had behavioral problems and his parents had him seeing the doctor prior to the events of Halloween? Or, what if Judith was seeing Dr. Loomis and he preyed on her? She was 15 when she died, meaning Dr. Loomis could have lost his whole career.

This is hinted at by the origin of the character’s name: “Sam Loomis” is the lover of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho.

Once we establish a motive for Dr. Loomis there’s all sorts of horror movie ways he could have manipulated Michael to murder his sister. It’s a trained psychiatrist vs. a 6-year-old, it’s really not that far-fetched. If Dr. Loomis was seeing both Myers children, he could have groomed Michael into murdering for him and then covered up their previous sessions. The Myers parents would want to grieve quietly in private. They wouldn’t be processing missing dates on medical records or Dr. Loomis speaking in a vague way to the police and media.

Or perhaps Dr. Loomis was only seeing Michael and he decided he’d like to have 24/7 access to his favorite victim so he orchestrated the events of “Halloween 1963”. If this is the way it happened, I wouldn’t hold a 6-year-old child to be responsible for actions he was manipulated into by a skilled adult. I would consider Dr. Loomis the “true killer” of Judith Myers.

Now, we’ve all seen Michael Myers go on a killing spree or two with our own eyes. We know that he becomes a murder machine. Eventually. You have to remember this is after Dr. Loomis had constant access to Michael Myers for 15 years. An adult can break down a child during 15 years. It’s entirely possible Michael’s hulking frame is a direct response to the abuse inflicted on him by Dr. Loomis. Tired of being victimized, he could have focused on bulking up in lockdown. When Michael breaks out he is older and bigger, free for the first time in his life. He hates what the world has made him become. Where does he go to take out that anger? Haddonfield. The home of the family that refused to protect him.

It seems perfectly reasonable to think that Michael snapped after the trauma Dr. Loomis inflicted on him and his family.

It’s either this theory or believing that a 6-year-old is “just evil” and his family never noticed until he “all of a sudden” murdered his sister with a butcher knife. I personally find this theory more believable than both the “6-year-old is evil” theory and other “canon” events like Michael faking his death at the end of Halloween H20. While researching this theory, I discovered I’m not even the first person to think there is more to Dr. Loomis than we’ve been led to believe.

It turns out, another horror fan also thought something was up with the “good” doctor. The blogger wrote:

Is it possible — just possible, mind you — that Dr. Sam Loomis is either flat-out lying or greatly oversimplifying the facts? There is a crucial scene in the film in which Loomis describes his relationship with Michael Myers to the very skeptical Sheriff Leigh Bracket (Charles Cyphers) — a man whose own daughter, Annie, will be among Michael’s victims. Here is what Dr. Loomis says while he and the sheriff are investigating Michael’s now-abandoned childhood home:

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no conscience, no reason, no understanding, in even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death or right or wrong. I met this six-year-old boy with a blank, cold emotionless face and the blackest of eyes, the Devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and another seven trying to keep him locked away when I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply…evil.

Michael was six when he committed the original murder of his sister. That means Loomis must have gotten to him very soon after the child became a ward of the state. We just saw for ourselves what Michael looked like when he was that age. Does that image match up with Loomis’ speech? At all? Personally, what I saw was a terrified, very confused little boy who was appalled at his own actions.

In Scream 3 noted horror movie scholar Randy Meeks tells us that as horror movie franchises go on, the movies become about going back to the original and rediscovering something that “wasn’t true from the getgo”. As the Halloween franchise continues, what are we going to discover about 1978’s original Halloween that we thought was true but actually isn’t? I think Michael’s origin story is more sinister than we have been led to believe.