Is Laurie Strode Michael Myers’ sister?

Looking back, 1978’s Halloween was always going to have a sequel. Co-writer/director John Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill even included a particularly prophetic line of dialogue in their story about a supernaturally charged madman, Michael Myers, who terrorizes his hometown on Halloween night: “You can Don’t kill that.” Boogeyman.” Thanks to the film’s huge critical, commercial and cultural success, “Halloween II” was practically a given.

While “Halloween” ends with the assertion that Myers has not actually been killed yet, what to do with the other surviving supporting characters was a more difficult question for Carpenter and Hill. Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) was established as Van Helsing to Myers’ Dracula, so his return was pretty natural. A bigger issue revolved around the return of star Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, the babysitter who unfortunately crosses Myers’ path and becomes the focus of his All Saints’ Day killing spree. Carpenter didn’t want to kill off the character and lose Curtis while her star was rising in Hollywood, but also didn’t want to randomly explain why Myers continued to pursue a particular girl, and famously decided to retroactively make Laurie Michael the secret sister.

That one (allegedly drunken) decision led to much of the rest the lore of the “Halloween” franchiseso that the other 12 sequels/remakes/reboot films that followed had to decide whether Laurie and Michael had a blood connection and what that connection meant. Therefore, the answer to the question of whether or not Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ sister is not a simple “yes” or “no” but an ambiguous “yes, it depends.” What follows is your handy guide to Myers family tree so at least tonight you know where the evil lies!

For most of the Halloween series, Laurie Strode is actually the sister of Michael Myers, as the two are considered blood related from the second installment, 1981’s Halloween II, through the eighth installment, 2002’s Halloween Resurrection. (It should now be made clear that, for continuity reasons, 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a standalone sequel to the Michael Myers films). However, in this film series, Laurie only appears in three parts. In “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers,” “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers” and “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,” Michael chases after Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris in “4” and “5”; JC Brandy in “Curse”), Laurie’s daughter who the Carruthers family adopts after Laurie supposedly dies in a car accident.

Jamie served a dual purpose in Halloween 4: giving the revived Michael a new familial purpose to return to Haddonfield for, and potentially taking the series in a new direction, with young Jamie seemingly inheriting her uncle’s evil ( more on that in a moment). . When this new direction was abandoned and Michael himself kept coming back, Jamie was left in the role of a moving target for the slasher and was herself replaced, “Curse”-style, by her own baby (who may or may not have been Michael’s). conceived – don’t ask), who is adopted by the Strode family’s youngest biological daughter, Kara (Marianne Hagan), Laurie’s cousin.

With “Halloween: H20,” the series either splits continuity for the first time (well, secondly, if you count “Halloween III”) by picking up directly from “Halloween II,” or, if you squint, brings in Michael to literally deviate from the sequel to depict the now deceased Dr. To trace Loomis and the Lloyd bloodline, discovering that Laurie faked her death and was living in hiding in California with her now teenage son. After the fateful rematch between estranged siblings ends tragically for Laurie, the woman loses her years-long battle with the evil to which she is related. Michael claims their lives, then returns to his abandoned house in Haddonfield to cut up some college students filming a livestream show (the less said about Resurrection, the better).

When Rob Zombie was hired to write the screenplay and direct a remake of the 2007 original “Halloween.”he could have gone in any direction with the franchise and its characters. While some say he went too far and others say he didn’t stray far enough from Carpenter’s film, Zombie chose to stay true to the letter of the series’ mythos by not just using Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton , the only other actress alongside Curtis to play the character), but her relationship with Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) becomes deeper than just being his biological sister. While in the original “Halloween” timeline Michael pursued Laurie out of an evil impulse that took the form of destroying his family, in Zombie’s “Halloween” Michael seeks Laurie because he represents his own twisted desire, his idealized family to bring back together. Zombie attempts to chronicle Michael’s madness in “Halloween” and “Halloween II,” portraying his psychosis as something that allows him to perceive the world in a completely different, surreal way than others.

In Zombie’s Halloween II, this madness turns out to be hereditary, as Laurie succumbs to the same psychosis as her brother due to her traumatic experiences in the first film that triggered it. On paper, this might sound like Zombie is taking the ambiguous evil of Carpenter and Hill’s concept too literally. It also feels like Zombie is picking up on the deleted storyline about Jamie’s legacy of evil from Halloween 4. But Michael and Laurie’s seduction by rage in the zombie films is portrayed here as something more supernatural, a power they have harnessed, as both Michael and Laurie suffer from visions involving a white horse (in which may or may not be the pale horse). Biblical call). In any case, the connection between Laurie and Michael is strongest in the two Zombie films. While Laurie as a sister in the original continuity is someone good who stands in metaphysical opposition to Michael’s evil, in Zombie’s films Laurie and Michael are parts of a whole, people condemned to a dark fate by their blood.

As I said before, John Carpenter wasn’t a fan of literally relating Laurie and Michael to each other. When David Gordon Green took over the helm of the franchise in 2018, he decided to follow Carpenter’s suggestion and decouple Laurie and Michael by resetting the continuity back to the original film. While this means that the rest of the series is no longer part of the canon of 2018’s Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Laurie and Michael have no connection at all. A major theme of 2018’s “Halloween” concerns a group of characters who – either from the universe or from Michael (James Jude Courtney) himself – insist on an explanation for Myers’ actions. The craziest of these people, Myers’ new doctor Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), arranges Michael’s escape from prison to prove his theory that Michael and Laurie (Curtis, back in the role for the last time) actually have a kind of primal, hunter and prey relationship.

Since this is “Halloween,” Sartain’s hypothesis is inconclusive; One could still explain Michael’s pursuit of Laurie as a coincidence. But Green and his collaborators make their “Halloween” trilogy a thematic summary of the previous franchise, exploring the possible origins of good and evil, their return and their relationship to one another through the people who live on the Haddonfield battlefield. Laurie and Michael therefore share a relationship, even if it is not made concrete by their blood relationship. One gets the feeling that Laurie and her family represent good, just as Michael represents all evil, and that the two elemental forces are destined to fight for supremacy over the soul. whether it is the soul of a city or a person. The removal of Laurie’s sisterhood with Michael only makes this allusion clearer and stronger, and for this reason it is best left out of Green’s trilogy.

What’s most interesting is that all of these changing relationships between Michael and his prey make the original 1978 “Halloween” more ambiguous, not less. While most horror sequels later reveal too much about the monster’s origins and motivations, “Halloween” continues to be full of secrets “Choose your own adventure” character of the changing continuity of the sequels. So you can watch “Halloween” with the belief that Michael escapes Smith’s Grove Sanitarium once his secret sister Laurie is the same age his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) was when he killed her as a boy. This mindset makes Michael’s pursuit of Laurie and her friends much clearer, as the figure follows his fatal fate with his sibling.

But you can also think of “Halloween” as the story of a madman who meets Laurie by chance when she gives him the key to the abandoned house where he once lived, marking her as prey, like a tiger or a Lion engages with its prey in their natural habitats. This relationship could all be coincidence or bad luck, or it could indicate a strange elemental fate that neither of them knew was in store for them. In any case, there’s no clear answer as to whether Laurie and Michael are brother and sister, just as there’s no definitive “Halloween” continuity, just as there’s no way to permanently kill the Bogeyman. So when it comes to Halloween, just like trick-or-treating, the answer is yours.