Michael Myers: Who He Is, Who Played Him and Every Timeline

The original series follows Michael across five films, from Halloween (1978) to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), directed by Joe Chappelle. In the first film a six year old Michael stabs his older sister on Halloween night in 1963, and fifteen years later he steals a car during a transfer and drives home to Haddonfield. He takes a mask, trails the high schooler Laurie Strode, and kills her friends Annie and Lynda along with Lynda's boyfriend Bob. Laurie fights him off, Dr. Samuel Loomis shoots him off a balcony, and the body is gone when Loomis looks down.

Halloween II 1981, directed by Rick Rosenthal, starts on the same night. Michael follows Laurie to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital and kills the small night staff, and Loomis learns from Marion that Laurie is Michael's younger sister. Laurie shoots Michael in both eyes, and Loomis ignites leaking gas in an explosion that engulfs both men. Halloween 4, directed by Dwight H. Little in 1988, brings him back from a coma after he overhears that he has a niece, Jamie Lloyd. He ends that film in an abandoned mine shaft, while Jamie is found holding bloody scissors.

Halloween 5, directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard in 1989, has him nursed back to health by a hermit before he goes after the mute Jamie, who shares a mental link with him. A mysterious Man in Black then frees him from a police cell. In Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, a cult tied to an ancient curse called Thorn holds Michael and Jamie, and Tommy Doyle, played by Paul Rudd, finds Jamie's baby son Steven. A separate workprint known as the Producer's Cut ends differently, with Jamie surviving the opening and Loomis taking on the cult's curse.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002) jump straight from the second film's story and leave out Halloween 4, 5 and The Curse of Michael Myers, so Laurie Strode is his sister and nothing about Jamie Lloyd or Thorn applies. Halloween H20, directed by Steve Miner, is the one built around Laurie. She now runs Hillcrest Academy in California under the name Keri Tate, drinks too much and dreads the day her brother finds her. He gets there by breaking into the home of Marion Chambers, an old colleague of Dr. Loomis, and stealing Laurie's files. When her son John and his friends are alone on the empty campus, the killer works his way through them and Laurie decides to stop running. She takes an axe back to the fight and ends it by cutting off his head. Jamie Lee Curtis agreed to return only if the film did not hint at a sequel.

Halloween Resurrection, directed by Rick Rosenthal, undoes that sense of closure within minutes. Laurie sits in a psychiatric facility, sure the man she beheaded was not her brother, and he proves her right by turning up there. The rest is a live internet show run by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston, who send six students into the Myers house wearing body cameras. Viewers think the scares are staged, and the real killer is already inside. Freddie sets him on fire, the body goes to a morgue, and it stirs. A home release ending has Sara kill him with an axe instead.

Rob Zombie's two films rebuild Michael as a child from a troubled home, and Halloween (2007) casts Daeg Faerch as Michael at age ten. Halloween 2007 Rob Zombie gives him that home in Haddonfield, a school bully, and a mother's boyfriend who mistreats him. Faerch's Michael makes masks and kills four people on Halloween before sparing his baby sister. At Smith's Grove Sanitarium Dr. Loomis, played by Malcolm McDowell, tries to treat him, and Michael withdraws and stops speaking. Tyler Mane plays the adult Michael, who escapes, walks home in a truck driver's coveralls and recovers his old mask and knife from the empty family house.

Halloween 2 2009 follows Laurie, who now lives with Sheriff Brackett and his daughter Annie while Loomis profits from a book about the case. Michael returns and kills people around her, and Laurie learns she is his sister. In an abandoned shack Michael stabs Loomis, Brackett shoots Michael, and Laurie finishes him with his own knife. The last scene shows her in a psychiatric ward, smiling as the ghost of her mother arrives with the white horse.

The 2018 to 2022 trilogy is a direct sequel to the 1978 film, directed by David Gordon Green, and it treats every other sequel as if it never happened. In halloween 2018 Michael has been held for forty years when a prison transfer bus crashes and he escapes, kills two podcasters who confronted him with his mask, and heads for Haddonfield. Laurie, her daughter Karen and her granddaughter Allyson trap him in a hidden basement room and burn the house, but the end credits carry the sound of his breathing.

Halloween Kills opens as he frees himself from the fire and kills the firefighters sent to stop it. Tommy Doyle, played by Anthony Michael Hall, rallies survivors of the 1978 rampage into a mob, and Michael wipes out most of them at his childhood home. Karen is killed there as well. Halloween Ends jumps ahead three years and introduces Corey Cunningham, a shunned young man who crosses paths with a wounded Michael in the sewers and takes on his mask. Michael reclaims it and fights Laurie, and Allyson returns to help finish him.

Laurie Strode is the one who finally kills him in most timelines, though who lands the last blow depends on the films you count. In the original series, the 1981 sequel ends with a gas explosion that kills Dr. Loomis and apparently Michael, though Halloween 4 brings him back. In Halloween H20, Laurie beheads him, and Resurrection opens with Laurie convinced the man she killed was not her brother, before he finds her in the facility where she is held.

In the Rob Zombie timeline, Laurie stabs him with his own knife after Sheriff Brackett shoots him. In the 2018 trilogy, Laurie and Allyson overpower him in Halloween Ends and he bleeds out. His body is paraded through Haddonfield and destroyed in an industrial shredder at the salvage yard, and the final shot lingers on the mask, which Laurie keeps.

How many kills he has depends on the timeline and on whether deaths off screen count, so any single total is a fan tally and not a studio figure.

The films never agree on why he kills, and each timeline offers its own reason. Halloween II (1981) reveals that Laurie Strode is his sister, which explains why he hunts her but not why he kills. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers ties him to a cult and an ancient curse called Thorn. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) goes the other way and shows a bullied boy in a troubled home, and in that film he withdraws in the sanitarium, makes masks and stops speaking.

In my opinion the silence works best when the film does not explain it. Halloween (1978) gives him little beyond the stabbing of his sister and the escape fifteen years later, and in my view it is that absence of motive that makes the scenes in Haddonfield feel so cold. When a film hands him a reason, such as Thorn, the character gets smaller. In my reading, the 2018 trilogy spends its time on Laurie and Haddonfield rather than on where he came from. It could be argued that Zombie's version trades dread for sympathy, and that is a fair trade only if you want a character study.

In my opinion the scariest Michael Myers is the one in Halloween (1978), because the film keeps him at a distance, a silent figure who watches Laurie through her day before he strikes. When Loomis looks over the balcony at the end the body is gone, which is the moment the character becomes a monster and not a patient. Perhaps that is why later films keep trying to explain him, and why none of them fully succeeds.

My second pick is Halloween (2018), directed by David Gordon Green, because it returns to the 1978 version and adds forty years of consequence. Laurie has spent decades preparing, and her fortified home and the basement trap give his return a physical weight. Third is Halloween II (1981), where the hospital with its small night staff is a better setting than most of the franchise manages, and the sister reveal gives him a reason to hunt her. Rob Zombie's version is the most sympathetic, and the trilogy's later films shift attention toward Laurie and the town.

The studios have not announced a dated new Halloween film. TheWrap reported in 2023 that Miramax won the Halloween TV rights and plans a series with Trancas, with no film title or date given. For news, see the new halloween movie page, and if you are new to the series, start with the halloween movies in order guide.