Halloween (film)/Nightmare Fuel

General

• The theme music. Quietly chilling and suspenseful, it really gives you the feeling that Michael's waiting around the corner, ready to jump out at you at any given moment.
• The fact that Michael Myers isn't just some psycho-killer wearing a mask. The mask shows his true side, a soulless shape who has forsaken his humanity, with zero qualms about killing anyone who gets in his way.
  • And unlike his fellow slasher villains who either became more Affably Evil or goofy as time went on, Michael stayed the same evil force from the first film to the last.
    • Well, until the Zombie films, anyway.
    • Hell it took the SECOND movie for Michael to become silly as the first one showed him as an almost even WORSE force of nature than the first one with a higher body count.
• The Soundtrack Dissonance, especially the way Halloween H20 uses it to call back to Halloween II. You will never hear "Mr. Sandman" the same way ever again...
• The fact that unlike other serial killers you might find in movies, Michael Myers doesn’t just go in for the kill from the get go. He plans ahead and stalks his victims before he starts killing. This is likely the reason why he’s so good at it.

Halloween (1978)

• The creepy floating jack-o-lantern in the opening credits. It actually gets more eerie with age, as pumpkin carving becomes more and more elaborate and cartoonish. By contrast, this jack-o-lantern's face looks crude and unsettling.
• The musical score is both delightful and absolutely bone-chilling.
• The moment when you can briefly see Michael standing outside in broad daylight, before he steps behind a hedge. It really sets up the predator/prey dynamic between him and Laurie...
  • Even scarier is that some real-life serial killers claim to operate in this way.
• The scene when Laurie finds the bodies of all of her friends throughout the house - and then you see Michael slowly materialize right behind Laurie in the closet.
  • Word of God makes it even scarier. It's not him walking into the light, but simulating your eyes adjusting to darkness. He was standing there the whole time.
• The scene just before the end credits is especially unnerving. After Loomis shoots Michael over the balcony and we see his motionless body resting below, he takes a second look and he's gone. The final scene of the film is nothing but a montage of all the places Michael has hidden throughout the movie, with Michael's breathing heard over the main theme, practically stating that he could be anywhere.

Laurie: "It was the Boogeyman..." Dr. Loomis: "As a matter of fact... it was."

• Michael himself qualifies. A man who kills for the sake of killing, plus that utterly expressionless Captain Kirk mask he wears. How Dr. Loomis describes him doesn't help. At all.

"I met him, 15 years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this... six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and... the blackest eyes - the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil."

• Loomis's look of resignation and completely unhappy acknowledgement that he was right at the end of the film; his speeches to the police chief weren't hyperbole, he was right, and now the monster he's tried his best to keep locked up is on the loose, ready to add more victims to his body count...
• That shot after Michael kills Bob. He just looks at Bob's corpse and studies it, tilting his head to one side. What the hell's going on inside Michael's head?
  • Something similar occurs right after this. Michael starts violently strangling Lynda as she tries to call Laurie. Laurie listens to Lynda crying out in pain, and initially assumes that Lynda's just playing a joke on her. Once Lynda's dead, Michael picks up the phone and just listens to Laurie as she starts panicking, having realized what's just happened.
• Laurie is able to grab the knife away from Michael and stab him, and he falls to one side. Laurie tells the kids to run out of the house and get help, and then just rests there in the doorway, thinking it's all over... and then Michael slowly sits up and turns his masked head at her. This is really sold by the score, which is nightmare fuel in itself in some ways. Just how perfectly timed the dun-dun-dun! fits the action is stunning, but then that is a Carpenter trademark.
  • Even the way Michael sits up is unnatural and creepy.
• The way Michael is integrated into so many shots. There's one scene where Annie's in the kitchen talking on the phone, and directly behind her is a pair of glass doors leading outside. Michael can be briefly seen watching her through the glass.
• An injured and terrified Laurie runs to a neighbor's house, bangs on the door, and screams for help. Someone inside turns on the lights, goes to the window... and then drops the blinds and turns the lights off, completely ignoring her.
  • Even worse is things like this have happened in real-life...
• Michael wearing the bedsheet. The image of Michael appearing in the doorway is bad enough, but then you factor in that he just killed Bob and put his glasses on top of the bedsheet in order to trick Lynda so he can kill her without her even realizing a killer is in the room. Probably the first genuinely frightening example of a Bedsheet Ghost.
  • Also, Lynda died believing that her boyfriend was strangling her.
• Every murder in the movie is filmed in a particularly unnerving way. Whether it's the disturbing POV sequence as young Michael stalks and stabs his own sister to death, the incredibly creepy manners in which he kills both Annie and Lynda, or the way he easily overpowers Bob, lifts him off the ground and nails him to the wall with a knife.
• Michael's escape after the film's opening is a brief scene, but no less nightmarish. The mental patients wandering aimlessly outside in the dark, looking eerily like ghosts. Loomis immediately realizing something is wrong and exiting the vehicle to find out what's happening, only for Michael to leap on top of the car and attack Marion when she rolls down the window, causing her to spin her car out of control. The way Michael smashes the car window with his bare hand. And it's pitch black and raining hard during all of this.

Dr. Loomis: "He's gone! He's gone from here! The evil is gone!"

• Laurie stabbing Michael in the eye with a wire coat-hanger hook during their final confrontation. Yeesh.
• We just expect that Michael will look all horrific and/or grotesque, except he looks like a normal person. Serious Paranoia Fuel right there...
• Annie's death. She heads out to the car, realizes the door is locked, heads back in for her keys, then gets in the car... and you can see the split second where it occurs to her that A) she never actually unlocked the car door, and B) the windshield is fogged up. You know, the way it might be from the breath of someone inside the car. Before she even knows what's happened, Michael springs out of the backseat and strangles her for a good 20 seconds before slitting her throat (the fact that he just let her squirm around for that long shows how sadistic Michael really is).
  • The little boy Laurie is babysitting looks out his living room window a few moments later and sees Michael carrying Annie's body back inside. Poor kid must've been scarred for life...

Halloween II (1981)

• Remember that jack-o-lantern in the last film's opening? Well, they topped that...
  • The pumpkin that was used for most of the promotional material also qualifies, with that disturbingly realistic skull for a face...
• The theme song is unsettling enough on the piano alone, but played on an organ with a synthesizer bass...
• Michael's utter relentlessness in pursuing Laurie. It perhaps doesn't top the Nothing Is Scarier nature of him possibly targeting anyone, like in the first film, but the fact that Michael simply won't stop is utterly terrifying, and prompts Laurie to ask why he won't die at one point.
  • Going along with this, the shot of Michael walking towards Laurie whilst coated from head-to-toe in flames. It's just so creepy to watch Michael be so determined to fulfill his objective that the fact that he's burning to death doesn't even faze him.
• If you have a fear of hospitals, then this is not a movie you should be watching.
• Ben Tramer being hit by an out-of-control police car and getting pinned between it and a van... which suddenly explodes in a massive fireball - and all because he just so happened to be wearing the same Captain Kirk mask and blue boiler suit that Michael had on.
• Laurie and Dr. Loomis being trapped in an operating theatre with a blinded Michael swiping erratically at them with a scalpel. This also applies to the shot of him bleeding from the eyes in the same scene.
  • Also? The reason he's blind is because Laurie shot both his eyes out with a revolver... and all it did was blind him. Nothing spells out that Michael is something less than human more than the fact that something that should be instantly fatal only moderately handicaps him.
• The kills in which Michael uses needles, especially if you're Afraid of Needles.
• The young boy with a razor blade stuck between his teeth.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

• Silver Shamrock's robotic employees. Throughout the film, they gruesomely murder whoever threatens to expose Conal Cochran to the world... or simply hates the company. Teddy gets a power drill stuck directly into his brain just for discovering that they're not human.
  • They are absolutely silent — at many times of the movie, a character turns, and boom, there they are, with that piercing synthesizer chord blaring...
• The practice run on the Magic Pumpkin commercial. The spell in the seal triggers and messily rots away Buddy Jr.'s head as he holds it in silent agony. As the poor schmuck falls over dead, a huge swarm of snakes and insects is released from what used to be his mouth, which eventually kill Buddy Sr. and his wife.
• Conal Cochran himself manages to be more horrifying than his own robots. The amused way he talks about murdering millions upon millions of children as the best kind of joke on them...
  • His lecture on Halloween and what he feels it actually is is equally chilling. It makes you think that, beyond it being a great joke on the children, he's taking out his bitterness over what Halloween has become.
• The "misfire". Marge discovers a chip hidden inside of a Silver Shamrock trademark on one of the masks and removes it, prompting a laser beam to fire out out and strike her in the face, tearing her lips off and exposing her teeth.
  • She's also still alive and struggling to breathe as (foreshadowing the later practice run) bugs begin to emerge from her mouth.
• The death of Grimbridge at the hospital. The robot thug pinches his nose bridge hard enough to crush it, then pulls it outward, causing his entire face to become convex, bulging outward at a weird angle.
• The ending. Oh dear god, THE ENDING.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

• Jamie's Nightmare Sequence at the beginning. Michael tries dragging Jamie under her bed and does his signature armless sit-up with a knife in hand. Jamie's having trouble opening the door, but when she does, Michael appears on the other side.
• While transporting Michael (who's been in a coma for 10 years) in the ambulance, two paramedics casually discuss Michael's living relatives - specifically his niece, Jamie Lloyd. Cue Michael clutching his limp hand into a fist before springing to life and attacking the medics. He smashes the male paramedic's head against the wall and uses his thumb to gouge a bloody hole into his forehead, while the female paramedic screams in horror and tries to frantically open the door.
  • What little we see of the remains of the ambulance after Michael's escape.

Dr. Loomis: "How many bodies did you find?" Patrolman: "Hard to tell, they're pretty chewed up."

• Michael's burn scars look pretty nasty, and Dr. Loomis's don't look too good either...
• Michael's murders at the gas station.
  • Even worse is Loomis finding Michael soon after... and pleading with Michael to kill him instead of returning to Haddonfield. It's Michael's reaction that sells it.
• Brady's pathetic attempt at fighting Michael. Michael breaks Brady's nose with his own shotgun, crushes his hand, and slowly squeezes his neck until it snaps.
• The ending. Jamie has inherited Michael's bloodthirst, having stabbed her foster mother to death with a pair of scissors whilst wearing her clown costume, just like Michael did as a kid. Loomis' reaction to this is him yelling out a string of "No!"s and trying to shoot Jamie, only to get stopped by Sheriff Meeker; he doesn't even try to fight back after being disarmed. He just sinks into the corner crying and saying "no" over and over again as the film ends with Jamie clutching the bloody scissors.
  • For bonus points, if you listen closely, you can hear Jamie breathing similar to Michael's Vader Breath in the original film.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

• Michael killing Tina's boyfriend by stabbing him in the head with a garden rake. Afterwards, his body twitches as Michael drags his body away, making the scene more disturbing.
• Michael stabbing at Jamie in the laundry chute of the Myers House.
  • What's worse is that Danielle Harris actually was in danger in that scene. She was being stabbed at with a real knife.
• How violently Michael reacts when Jamie attempts to touch his unmasked face. It's the only time we see Michael genuinely lose his composure and become visibly enraged.
• The way the film harkens back to the original film by having Michael drifting silently in the background in some scenes is rather effective. Most notable is when Dr. Loomis is searching the Myers House near the end of the film and Michael just slowly slides into frame from a dark doorway right behind him.
  • Or when he's lurking in Rachel's closet and does the same thing, with her completely unaware.
• The way Michael just slowly advances on poor Jamie with his knife in the dark foggy forest as she crawls away crying in fear. The whole scene where Jamie can do nothing but just scream helplessly as her murderous uncle stalks towards her is absolutely bloodcurdling.
• Despite the crappiness of the mask, Michael still looks terrifying in it in some scenes.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

• Jamie's death in the Theatrical Cut. It's one thing to get impaled on farm equipment, but it's another thing when Jamie reaches out to her uncle as if she's trying to get through to him... only for Michael to shove her down harder.
• One of the first kills is Michael snapping a guy's neck so hard, he nearly rips it off.
• The operating room massacre towards the climax of the film and John Strode's excruciatingly painful death by electrocution.
• Dr. Loomis's screaming at the end, especially in the Producer's Cut. Donald Pleasence's screams are VERY unsettling.
• One poor bastard gets his head thrust and grated through a gate door as Michael tries to break through the barrier.

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later

• Jimmy's death. Marion Chambers comes into his room to make sure he's okay, only to find his corpse propped up in a chair with an ice skate lodged into his face.
• The rather unnerving scene early on in which a mother and her young daughter stop at a remote location to use a public restroom, and are forced to use the men's room. The mother hears someone else enter and peeks through the crack of the stall and sees Michael. The situation itself - being in a vulnerable position in the middle of nowhere with your child only to be confronted by an eerie stranger in a mask - is scary enough, especially when Michael looks in the mirror, clearly sees the mother watching him, and watches her for a moment. It's easy to see why the mom freaks out when her daughter starts screaming after she loses sight of Michael. Luckily, it was only spiders and all Michael does is steal their car.
• Charlie reaching into the garbage disposal to get the corkscrew while Michael lurks in the background. The scene milks the suspense, making the audience think he's about to lose his hand in a scene of spectacular gore... only for him to finally pull the corkscrew loose, Michael has vanished, and everything's okay - then he turns to leave and runs right into Michael. We're treated to a crazy shot of Charlie's startled reflection trapped in Michael's eye as he stares daggers into him.

Charlie: "Hi..."

• What Michael does to Sarah. He repeatedly stabs her in the back, and then strings her up for the others to find. To wit, when the lights are turned on, you can see directly through her body.
  • Sarah's attempt to escape Michael in a dumbwaiter... which contains her dead boyfriend, Charlie. As soon as she gets upstairs, Michael slashes the rope, bringing the dumbwaiter down on Sarah's leg as she gets out, horrifically twisting it. She tries to feebly crawl away, but only makes a few feet before Michael is already upstairs and advancing on her...
• As they're being chased by Michael, there's a very suspenseful scene where John and Molly are trapped in the very narrow space between a locked gate and a door that won't open. As soon as Michael gets to the gate, he reaches through with his knife and starts aggressively slashing at them, their faces just inches out of reach as they flatten themselves against the locked door - then he finds the ring of keys they dropped...
• The last 15-20 minutes of the movie, when it drops the Scream-like tone and becomes a true-blue horror movie.
  • The scene where Laurie hides under a table with Michael on top, ready to strike as soon as she emerges from underneath.
  • The scene where Michael begins to wake up while in the back of Laurie's van.

Halloween (2007)

• The death of Wesley Rhodes, the asshole who bullies Michael. Yes, he's a dick, but he's still just a kid. He's ambushed and beaten to death with a big branch, all while bleeding, crying and begging Michael to stop. Then you realize he probably has a parent waiting for him at home...
• Ronnie's death. Sure, no one feels bad for him, but imagine being taped up, unable to call for help or move, then your throat is slit and you're stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face.
• Judith's death. She berates her brother for being creepy and ends up receiving a knife in her stomach. It doesn't end there; she then goes out into the hallway, limping and screaming for help before Michael viciously stabs her several more times.
• On the last visit Deborah had with Michael, she and Dr. Loomis talk in private while Michael sits alone. A nurse passes by and proceeds to make a light joke about the photo Michael has of his little sister. Michael then proceeds to stab her with a fork. But that's not the part that is the reason it's added to this page: When Deborah tries to pull Michael off the woman, he turns to her snarling and then sporting a manic smirk on his face, with Deborah finally realizing her son was far from the most innocent kid that she thought it was. It's no wonder she commits suicide afterwards.
• When Michael attacks Annie. Thankfully, she doesn't die. However, what Michael does to her is really terrifying. She's getting freaky with Paul, until Michael stabs him, and, after she fails to escape him, is stabbed herself multiple times in the chest area and left bleeding and crying on the floor; and she's topless during all of this. What's worse is that this is Danielle Harris getting brutalized, who longtime Halloween fans know as the actress for Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5, making all this even more uncomfortable.
  • When Laurie finds Annie, she runs into the house to call 911. The minute she's out of the room, Michael emerges behind the open front door, having been standing there the whole time. He slowly follows Laurie while Annie tries to warn her, but because of her injuries, she can do nothing but tearfully scream Laurie's name.

Halloween II (2009)

• The absolutely-out-of-nowhere scene where Laurie has a seizure. Bound to throw you off if you're watching for the first time.
• Laurie during the ending. That dead look in her eyes... the creepy smile... seeing the same vision as Michael...
• Michael screaming "DIE!" right before he kills Dr. Loomis. Bare in mind, this is the only time EVER in the series when (adult) Michael speaks and, by god, it is terrifying.
• What? No mention of the nurse scene? For those curious, it starts with Laurie walking out of her room to seek help. After a nurse leaves a room, Laurie asks her if she needs some medication for her head. The nurse slowly turns around to reveal bleeding from her chest and then letting out an agonizing scream. Oh, and then Michael proceeds to mutilate her.
  • Laurie coming across the dead hospital worker in the staircase, consisting of her body stretched on the metal gate with her eyes gouged out and a full-blown blood bath. The worst part is that we don't know how Michael killed her.
• The deaths of the perverted morgue worker and the strip club patrons are especially brutal.