Headscratchers / Halloween (1978)

• There are several things about the opening POV sequence that don't really make sense:
  • Why was Michael across the street from his own house?
    • Michael was six years old at the time and it was obviously Halloween that night. Add the fact that he was already wearing a clown costume at the time and it's clear that he was most likely out trick or treating before returning home. Or if you wanna go by Curse's logic, he was being babysat by Mrs. Blankenship who lived across the street from the Myers House.
  • Why did Michael have to sneak around his own house? Yes, he had a knife with him, but no one seems to question hiding a weapon behind one's back in other movies, and no one at this point suspects Michael of being a killer.
    • Because he was trying to avoid detection from Judith and her boyfriend, Daniel, in order to get the drop on Judith better. With neither knowing he was in the house and too busy having sex upstairs, it allowed him the perfect opportunity to grab the butcher knife from the kitchen and sneak upstairs after waiting for Daniel to leave. If either teen happened to catch sight of Michael in the house, with or without the knife, the element of surprise would've been lost.
  • Judith might have been surprised and embarrassed about her younger brother barging into her room while she was topless, but she was still a teenager and he was still a little kid. She should have been able to recognize that he had a knife in his hands quickly enough and been able to push him away, disarm him, etc.
    • Michael didn't exactly give her much time to react any further, as the moment she noticed him in her room, he immediately started stabbing her. Her surprised reaction ("Michael!") is precisely what allowed him to attack her so easily. With her caught off guard by his sudden appearance, Michael used that to his advantage to start stabbing her before she could register what he was doing.
    • Not to mention, we didn't see Michael's hands outside of when they come into frame. For all we know, Michael kept the knife behind his back until she turned around and reacted to him. This would account for why she didn't react to the knife sooner from being able to spot it in the mirror: because he was holding it behind his back and waited until she turned around to stab her.
• How did Michael learn to drive? Even one of the characters lampshades this.
  • According to the novelization, Michael figured it out by carefully watching people drive from the back every time he was transported over the years. From the start, he was always portrayed as very intelligent, so it's at least somewhat plausible.
  • And in the '70s, standards of driving weren't actually as high as they are today. (Drunk driving, for instance, was not seen as that big a deal.) So Michael driving erratically on the road wouldn't arouse that much suspicion.
  • It's also part of what makes Michael so unnerving. We don't know his motivation. We don't know if he's wholly human. We don't know how he inexplicably knew how to drive several miles to a town he hasn't been to since childhood. That's what makes him scary.
  • Dr. Loomis suggests to Dr. Wynn that someone at the asylum has been giving him lessons. Halloween 6 expands on that theory.
• 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).
    • Another possibility: he watched his parents drive when he was little. Parents do drive kids around, and he may have figure out what does what at an early age just by watching them.
• Did Michael dye his hair while in Smith’s Grove? He has a blond mop of hair in 1963, and when we see him with his mask off, he has dark, curly hair.
  • His hair naturally darkened as he got older; it happens to a lot of people.
  • Having barely even glimpsed the sun for fifteen years probably helped, too. Sunlight bleaches hair.
• So, where are Tommy's parents, or Lindsey's parents during Halloween night?
  • We can assume they're out at parties - which would explain why they still aren't home when their children are asleep.
  • And in late October, it's already dark by 6 pm. So the last part of the film could be happening no later than 9 or 10 o'clock.
• How big is this neighborhood? Laurie seems to live next to the Myers house, which seems to be not far from Tommy's and Lindsey's house (that's why Loomis can intervene quickly.) But when Annie take Laurie in the car to babysit, she drives all the sunset long (it's daytime when she takes her, nighttime when they arrive.)
  • Laurie doesn't live directly next to the Myers house. It happens to be on her way as she walks to school. There could be a good twenty minute-half hour distance between her house and the Myers'. And the neighborhood seems to be small enough that the girls walk home from school. Annie might not have the car because of distance but simply because she and Laurie have a few things to bring for babysitting - Laurie has a pumpkin for one. And what with them being teenagers, they might just like the idea of getting to drive around even if they could walk to the houses.
  • Could be they had to drive very slowly because there were already trick-or-treating kids running around. Or they might've had a stop to make in the opposite direction, like getting pumpkin-carving supplies, that we didn't see.
  • And let's not forget sunsets tend to be shorter in Autumn.
• How did Michael find Haddonfield? We're told Smith's Grove is 150 miles from Haddonfield. Did the car have a map in it? Michael has been a mute since he murdered his sister, so he obviously didn't ask for directions.
  • He could have looked for a map while driving around. If you go with the idea that Michael is a genuinely supernatural being, he could have used a paranormal ability to lead him back to Haddonfield.
• Locked doors don't seem to make sense in this film. How does Annie manage to get locked in the laundry room? Lindsey says she locked herself in, but there's clearly a latch on the inside that Annie could've used to unlock the door. Then Annie tries to open the car door in the garage, but it's locked, so she has to go grab the keys to get in. When she comes back, somehow Michael has already made his way into the car without the keys Annie needed to go grab in order to get in. Furthermore, how does Laurie manage to get locked out of the Doyle house when we clearly see her open the door from the inside, go outside, close the door, and walk to the Wallace house, all without locking the door behind her? Suddenly when she runs back to the Doyle house, she's been locked out and needs Tommy to come down to let her in. We know Michael didn't sneak over to the house to lock it behind her because he's been in the Wallace house setting up the bedroom scene for Laurie and waiting for her.
  • The laundry room's lock could only be unlocked from the outside, which was how Michael was able to trap Annie inside. As for the car door, Annie's car was originally unlocked before Michael entered and secured the car, forcing Annie to look for the keys. In Laurie's case, Tommy could have locked the door out of fear since he mistook Michael for the boogeyman earlier that night.
  • Actually Lindsey doesn't say that Annie locked herself in, she just says "she got stuck in the window". And maybe Annie panicked when she heard the phone ring and thus didn't think clearly about ways she could have got out of the room beyond 'climb out the window'. The above with the car seems most likely - Annie might have left it unlocked since she ain't the most responsible type (and who else but Lindsey would be around to steal it?) and Michael crawled inside and locked it to surprise her. As for Laurie, maybe she locked the Doyle's door herself since she was leaving the two children alone in bed.
• 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?
• When Laurie tells Tommy and Lindsey to go to the MacKenzies' house and have them call the police, why didn't she just go with them? What was keeping her there, anyway?
  • She's exhausted, injured, and thinks that Michael's dead and no longer poses a threat to her. She probably figured that the best thing to do was stay put and rest until the police and ambulance got there.
  • Also, her "job" is being the babysitter. Her responsibility as a babysitter is to make sure that Tommy is not only happy, but safe from any possible harm while his parents are away. Since she was watching Lindsey for Annie, she took responsibility for her duties to keep Lindsey safe and happy too. It's the same reason why she told Tommy and Lindsey to get into the bathroom when she realized Michael was still alive after stabbing him in the neck. Her priority is the safety of the kids first before protecting herself. She more than likely sent them to go get help not just because she was in no condition to do so, but to make sure she knew they were safe. Seriously, whatever the Doyles are paying her, they should be paying her more for her dedication to the safety of those kids.
  • Perhaps Laurie also thought it best to stay there and keep an eye on Michael in case he turned out to be Not Quite Dead, and then escaped the house to attack more people. But in addition to having just had to fight for her life after finding her three friends murdered, she's a teenager, and running on pure adrenaline at that point.