Is Laurie Strode The Sister Of Michael Myers?

Looking back, 1978’s “Halloween” was always destined 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 of a supernatural maniac, Michael Myers, terrorizing his hometown on Halloween night: “You can’t kill the bogeyman.” Thanks to the film’s massive critical, commercial and cultural success, “Halloween II” was practically a no-brainer.

While “Halloween” ends with the assertion that Myers has indeed not been killed yet, a trickier question for Carpenter and Hill concerned what to do with the other surviving supporting characters. Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) was created as Van Helsing from Myers’ Dracula, so his return was quite natural. A bigger issue involved the return of star Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, the babysitter who unfortunately crosses paths with Myers and becomes the center of his All Hallows’ Eve rampage. Not wanting to kill off the character and lose Curtis as his Hollywood star was rising, but also not wanting to use a post-coincidence contrivance to explain why Myers kept pursuing a particular girl, Carpenter decided to retroactively make the secret sister by Laurie Michael.

This (allegedly drunken) decision led to much of the rest of the history of the “Halloween” franchiseleaving the other 12 sequel/remake/reboot films that followed having to choose whether or not Laurie and Michael were blood related as well as what that connection meant. So 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 “eh, it depends”. The following is your handy guide to the Myers family tree, at least so you know where Evil is tonight!

For the majority of the “Halloween” franchise, Laurie Strode is indeed the sister of Michael Myers, as the two are considered related by blood from the second installment, 1981’s “Halloween II”, until the eighth, “Halloween Resurrection” from 2002. (it should now be clarified that “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” from 1982 is a standalone sequel in continuity with the Michael Myers films). However, during this film series, Laurie only appears in three installments. “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers,” “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers” and “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers” feature Michael pursuing Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris in “4” and “5”; JC Brandy in “Curse”), who is Laurie’s daughter whom the Carruthers family adopted after Laurie’s presumed death in a car accident.

Jamie served a dual purpose in “Halloween 4,” giving the resurrected Michael a new family target 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 in favor of the repeated return of Michael himself, Jamie remained in the role of a moving target for the slasher and was herself replaced in the style of musical chairs “Curse” by having her own baby (who may or may not have been conceived by Michael – don’t ask) who is adopted by the Strode family’s youngest biological daughter, Kara (Marianne Hagan), Laurie’s cousin.

With “Halloween: H20”, either the series breaks continuity for the first time (well, secondly, counting “Halloween III”) by directly following “Halloween II”, or, if you squint, Michael literally pivots from the following. to pursue the now deceased Dr. Loomis and the Lloyd lineage with the discovery that Laurie faked her death and was living in hiding in California with her now teenage son. After the fateful revenge between an estranged brother and sister ends tragically for Laurie, the woman loses the years-long struggle against the evil to which she is bound. Michael reclaims his life, then returns to his abandoned house in Haddonfield to cut to college kids filming a live broadcast (the less said about “Resurrection,” the better).

When Rob Zombie was tapped to write and direct a remake of the original “Halloween” in 2007he could have gone in several directions with the franchise and its characters. If some say that he went too far and others that he did not stray far enough from Carpenter’s film, Zombie chose to remain very faithful to the letter of the myth of the series by including not only Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton, the only other actress besides Curtis to play the character) but making her relationship with Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) deeper than just being his biological sister. While the original “Halloween” timeline showed Michael pursuing Laurie because of an evil impulse Shape had to destroy his family, Zombie’s “Halloween” shows Michael searching for Laurie as part of his own twisted desire to bring his family together idealized. Zombie attempts to chronicle Michael’s madness in “Halloween” and “Halloween II”, describing his psychosis as something that allows him to perceive the world in a surreal way completely different from others.

In Zombie’s “Halloween II,” this madness proves to be hereditary, as Laurie finds herself succumbing to the same psychosis her brother suffers from, thanks to her traumatic experiences in the first film that triggered it. On paper, this may seem like Zombie is making Carpenter and Hill’s ambiguous concept of Evil too literal. It also feels like Zombie is reviving that abandoned storyline involving Jamie’s evil legacy from “Halloween 4.” Yet Michael and Laurie’s rage seduction in the Zombie films is portrayed here as something more supernatural, a force they have tapped into, as both Michael and Laurie suffer from visions involving a white horse (which can or not be the pale horse of biblical fame). Regardless, the bond between Laurie and Michael is the strongest in both Zombie films. Where Laurie-as-sister in the original continuity is someone Good in metaphysical opposition to Michael’s Evil, Laurie and Michael in the Zombie films are part of a whole, people doomed by their blood to a dark fate.

As I said earlier, John Carpenter wasn’t a fan of Laurie and Michael being literally related to each other, so when David Gordon Green was given the reins of the franchise in 2018, he decided to follow Carpenter’s suggestion and uncouple Laurie and Michael. resetting the continuity back to the original film. While this means the rest of the series is no longer canon for 2018’s “Halloween,” “Halloween Kills,” and “Halloween Ends,” it doesn’t necessarily mean Laurie and Michael aren’t related. One of the main themes of 2018’s “Halloween” involves a group of characters who insist — either from the universe or from Michael (James Jude Courtney) himself — for an explanation for Myers’ actions. The most demented of these people, Myers’ new doctor Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), arranges Michael’s escape in order to prove his theory that Michael and Laurie (Curtis, back in the role one last time) actually share a certain type of primal, hunter-prey relationship.

When it comes to “Halloween,” Sartain’s hypothesis is inconclusive; one could still explain Michael’s pursuit of Laurie as a coincidence. Still, Green and his collaborators make their “Halloween” trilogy a thematic summary of the franchise to date, exploring the potential origins of good and evil, their recurrence, and their relationships to each other via the people living on the scene. Battle of Haddonfield. So Laurie and Michael share a relationship, even if it’s not literal in their blood. There is a sense that just as Michael represents all that is evil, Laurie and her family represent good, and the two elemental forces are destined to fight for dominance of the soul, whether it is the soul of a city or a person. Getting rid of Laurie’s brotherhood with Michael only makes that allusion clearer and stronger, and for that reason it’s best left out of Green’s trilogy.

More interestingly, all these changing relationships between Michael and his prey make the original 1978 “Halloween” more ambiguous, not less. While the majority of horror sequels retroactively explain too much about the monster’s origins and motivations, “Halloween” continues to be shrouded in mystery thanks to the “Choose your own adventure” nature of sequels’ changing continuity. Thus, one can watch “Halloween” with the belief that Michael escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium once his secret sister Laurie is the same age as his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) when he killed her when she was child. This mindset makes Michael’s harassment of Laurie and her friends much more pointed, with Shape following his mortal fate with his brother.

Yet you can also see “Halloween” as the story of a maniac who meets Laurie by chance when she hands him the key to the abandoned house he was living in, thus marking her as prey in the manner of a tiger or lion clinging to its prey. in their natural habitats. This relationship could be a coincidence or bad luck, or it could indicate some sort of strange elemental destiny that neither person knew they were heading towards. Regardless, just as there is no definitive continuity for “Halloween,” just as there is no way to definitively kill off the bogeyman, there is no clear answer as to to find out if Laurie and Michael are brother and sister. So when it comes to “Halloween,” just like the question of “trick or treat,” the answer is up to you.