Tracing The Shape 13: Death Has Come to Your Little Town

So much has happened since the last time we saw Sam Loomis, and through it all he's been hiding in the bushes.

I love these small moments, when Loomis is just hanging out at the Myers House because he's not sure what else to do, hoping that Michael will swing back by and he can bring him in again. I love them not just because it's an amusing bit of passivity from the guy swinging a revolver around declaring that pure evil has descended on this Illinois town, but because this small scene creates a certain sense of parallel between Michael and Loomis in ways no other scene does.

The Myers House is the house everyone in Haddonfield believes to be haunted, the house kids dare each other to approach, because Michael killed his sister there 15 years earlier. Loomis, very aware of this, is haunting it too, even if it is for righteous reasons. Like Michael on the sidewalk with Laurie and Annie, he's camped out in the bushes, and when Tommy Doyle's bullies come by, he scares them away with a creepy voice. He's the ghost of the Myers House in this brief moments, and the look of self-satisfaction that crosses Donald Pleasence's face after he's scared off three literal children is arguably the funniest moment in the entire film.

(Side note: How weird would that be for these kids? Imagine a version of Halloween Kills where Lonnie Elam is just parked at the bar, going "And then this bush yelled at me" to anyone who'll listen.)

I don't think these are accidental parallels, because Carpenter and Hill clearly understand that Loomis is a man who's been pushed to some real psychological extremes over his years of caring for Michael. He notes that Sheriff Brackett must think he's a very strange doctor for carrying a gun, but does not apologize for it. He offers nothing beyond his own personal assurances that Michael is out to kill again, because there's nothing else he has to go on. He's so jumpy that Sheriff Brackett's hand on his shoulder almost knocks him flat. He's still the mad scientist, and this time Brackett calls him out on it.

We've already heard one lengthy monologue out of Loomis, and the one he offers Brackett – who's been all over town and is convinced there's no murderer out there, just kids getting high – this time is even more unhinged to someone who's never encountered Michael. He claims that Michael was always, in the 15 years he spent in Smith's Grove, looking to "this night," waiting for a "silent alarm" to tell him it was time. As we've already established, Michael would have likely been made aware that October 30, 1978 was the day he was being moved for a hearing, so I don't think it's all that metaphysical, but I don't think Loomis is wrong. He's just speaking in that lofty Loomis way, and it's getting on Brackett's nerves.

But just as Michael has his own power, so to does Loomis, and so Brackett does not reject the doctor's notions outright. He's a lawman with enough savvy to not turn away when someone is swearing absolutely mortal danger is heading his way, so he promises to stick it out with Loomis. There's a chance, after all, that the crazy man in a trench coat is right.

"And if you are right, God damn you for letting him go," Brackett adds before he walks away to keep patrolling, unaware that his daughter is already dead, her body stashed upstairs in the Wallace house.

Loomis reacts to this not with alarm or anger, but with somber resignation. It's clear that he had trouble proving to everyone that Michael could be this dangerous, that the establishment chafed at his warnings every time the safety of the boy came up. After all, what's to fear from a kid who barely moves and never speaks? It's also clear that, no matter how many obstacles he faced, Loomis still blames himself.

But the fascinating thing about Loomis is that I don't think this is just plain old guilt, or even duty. I think there is something, if not supernatural, then at least esoteric (in the occult sense of the word) in the way he thinks about his relationship to Michael. I don't know if it set in as he drove from Smith's Grove to Haddonfield or if it's something he's thought about for years, but Loomis absolutely believes he is locked in a neverending struggle with this other being, standing astride the gap between Michael and a murder spree. He kept watch for 15 years, and on the one night he thought he was most prepared, he failed.

So Loomis, exhausted and frustrated and so very frightened, keeps watch again, and ironically he is keeping watch in much the same way Michael did. The first place Michael went when he got back to Haddonfield was home, a place he'd no doubt visualized in his head over and over again. I wrote in our very first essay about my believe that the flashback opening the movie is Michael's dreamy memory of what happened that night in 1963, and it's easy to think of that memory beaming out, infecting the minds around him, just as his presence infects Haddonfield now. That infection could have easily hit Loomis's brain too, so while Michael stopped by the house to relive his crimes, Loomis stays to do penance.

Like Michael, he stares straight ahead. He speaks only when he must, maintaining a silent vigil more out of a sense of pure blind hope than restraint. But he's not looking ahead. He's looking back, at everything that went wrong, everything he could have done differently. He might even be thinking that he should have killed Michael when he had the chance, when the killer was just a boy and Loomis could have found a good wake to fake an accident.

This vigil, and Loomis's roiling mind as he claws for some solution to what he already knows is an unsolvable problem, mean that Brackett is corrected to damn the doctor. What he doesn't know, what he can't know, is that Loomis is already damned. The haunted shadows behind Pleasence's eyes betray a man who does not believe he'll ever be free of Michael, even if Michael could be killed and put in the ground. In his obsession over Michael, he has become not just lost, but transformed, stripped of any true sense of comfort in this life or the next. He is damned to chase Michael forever, to stand at the door of this haunted house and stand guard until the day he dies.

In his own way, Loomis is already a ghost.

Next Time: Totally!