Michael Myers appears in all of the
Halloween films excluding the standalone
Halloween III: Season of the Witch, although he is briefly seen on a television advertisement for the original film. Myers has also appeared in
expanded universe novels and comic books.
Films and canons Michael Myers’ story has gone through different timelines and canons, with some
retconning previously established plots.
The Thorn timeline Myers made his first appearance in the 1978 film
Halloween. At the beginning of
Halloween, a six-year-old Michael
murders his teenage sister Judith on Halloween night in 1963. Fifteen years later, he escapes Smith's Grove Sanitarium and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, where he stalks a teenage
babysitter named
Laurie Strode, while his
psychiatrist,
Dr. Sam Loomis, attempts to track him down. After murdering three of Laurie's friends, Michael attacks her as well. She fends him off long enough for Loomis to arrive and shoot Michael six times, knocking him off a balcony; when Loomis goes to check the body, he finds that Michael has disappeared.
Halloween II (1981) picks up directly where the original ended. Michael follows Laurie to the local hospital and kills the staff one by one. Loomis discovers that Laurie is Michael's younger sister and rushes to the hospital to find them. Laurie shoots Michael in the eyes, and Loomis blows up the
operating theater while Laurie escapes. Michael emerges from the explosion, engulfed in flames, before finally collapsing dead. Michael does not appear again until
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1988, which picks up ten years after the events of
Halloween II. In this canon, known as the "Thorn Timeline", Michael survived the explosion, leaving him in a coma. He awakens when he learns Laurie has died in a car accident but has a nine-year-old daughter,
Jamie Lloyd. Returning to Haddonfield, he causes a citywide
blackout and massacres the town's police force and some civilians before being shot by the
state police and falling down a
mine shaft.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers begins immediately after the fourth film ends, with Michael escaping the mine shaft and being nursed back to health by a local
hermit. One year later, he kills the hermit and returns to Haddonfield to find Jamie again, chasing her through his childhood home in a trap set by Loomis. He is eventually subdued by Loomis and taken to the local police station, but a mysterious "Man in Black" kills the officers and frees him.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers takes place six years after the events of the previous film. Jamie, now fifteen, has been kidnapped and impregnated by a druid cult led by the Man in Black, later revealed to be
Dr. Terence Wynn, Loomis' friend and colleague from Smith's Grove. After giving birth, Jamie escapes with her baby, only to be killed by Michael. The baby is found by Tommy Doyle, whom Laurie babysat in the original film. Upon returning to Haddonfield once more, Michael kills relatives of Laurie's adoptive family, who are living in his childhood home. He is revealed to be inflicted with the Curse of Thorn, which drives him to
kill his family. Wynn and his cult kidnap Jamie's baby, as well as Kara Strode and her son Danny. Loomis and Tommy follow them to Smith's Grove, where Michael ultimately turns against the cult and slaughters them all. Tommy injects Michael with chemicals and beats him unconscious. Loomis stays behind as the others escape. In the theatrical version, Michael's mask is shown on the ground as Loomis screams in the distance, leaving their fates unknown. In the longer "Producer’s Cut", however, Loomis unmasks whom he thinks is Michael, but instead is revealed to be the dying Dr. Wynn (the "Man in Black"), passing the Mark of Thorn on to Loomis as Michael, now donning the outfit of the "Man in Black", escapes.
The H20 timeline Halloween H20: 20 Years Later establishes a new timeline ignoring the events of the previous three "Thorn" films. In this particular film, Michael has been missing since the hospital explosion twenty years ago. Laurie Strode has faked her death and gone into hiding in California under an assumed name. She is the headmistress of a private boarding school and has a teenage son named
John. Michael tracks them down and murders John's friends. After getting her son to safety, Laurie decides to face Michael and ultimately decapitates him.
Halloween: Resurrection, which picks up three years after
H20,
retcons Michael's death, establishing that the man Laurie decapitated was a
paramedic whom Michael had attacked and swapped clothes with before escaping. Michael tracks down an institutionalized Laurie and kills her. He returns to Haddonfield, where one year later, he kills a group of college students filming an internet
reality show inside his childhood home. Contestant
Sara Moyer and show producer Freddie Harris escape after electrocuting Michael. Michael's body and the bodies of his victims are then taken to the morgue. As the medical examiner begins to inspect Michael's body, he awakens.
The Remake timeline The series was rebooted in 2007 with
Rob Zombie's
Halloween remake. The film establishes from the beginning that Michael and Laurie are siblings, and has an increased focus on Michael's childhood: a ten-year-old Michael is shown
killing animals and suffering
emotional abuse at home. After killing his sister Judith and three others, he is committed to Smith's Grove where he takes up the hobby of creating
papier-mâché masks and receives unsuccessful therapy from Dr. Sam Loomis. His mother
Deborah commits suicide after witnessing him killing a nurse. As an adult, Michael returns to Haddonfield to reunite with Laurie. However, Laurie has no memory of Michael and is terrified of him, ultimately shooting him in the head in self-defense after he kills her friends and adoptive parents. In an unused alternate ending, Michael is shown listening to reason as Loomis convinces him to release Laurie and drop his weapon. He then begins to approach them, intentions unclear, before being shot down by Sheriff Brackett's overzealous men. Zombie's story is continued in the 2009 sequel,
Halloween II. The subsequent events and Michael's fate differ between the theatrical cut and extended Director's Cut of the film; in the former, the events of the film take place one year later, whereas in the latter, it is two years later. In both versions, Michael is presumed dead but resurfaces after a vision of Deborah informs him that he must track Laurie down so that they can "come home". In the film, Michael and Laurie are implied to have a mental link, with the two sharing visions of their mother. During the climax of the theatrical cut, after Michael has murdered Loomis, Laurie kills Michael by stabbing him repeatedly in the chest and face with his knife, with the final scene suggesting that she has taken on her brother's psychosis as she dons his mask. In the Director's Cut ending, Michael speaks a single word, 'die', before killing Loomis. He is then gunned down by the Haddonfield police. Laurie approaches Loomis' body whilst holding Michael's knife, and appears to raise the knife before she too is shot dead by police.
The Blumhouse timeline Michael's appearance in the 2018 film
Halloween establishes the "
Blumhouse timeline". This version is a direct sequel to the original film in which Michael and Laurie are not siblings. It is established that after being shot by Loomis, Michael fled to his childhood home and was arrested by the Haddonfield police. After forty years at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, he escapes again and returns to Haddonfield for another killing spree. He again encounters Laurie, who has been living in fear of his return. She shoots off two of his fingers and, with the help of her daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson, traps him in the basement of her house, which they then set on fire. Michael is heard breathing at the end of the credits, indicating that he survived.
Halloween Kills is a direct sequel to the 2018 film in which Michael escapes the burning house when the fire department arrive to stop the blaze before it becomes too intense. As Michael resumes his killing spree, the enraged townspeople form a mob to hunt him down. While the mob proves to be unnecessarily destructive, they do eventually swarm him and seemingly kill him. As they attempt to confirm he's really dead, Michael rises again and massacres them all. He returns to his childhood home, where he kills Karen as well.
Halloween Ends (2022) picks up four years after its predecessor, revealing that after Karen's death, the town was unable to locate Michael and demolished his childhood home. Now in a badly weakened condition, Michael inhabits a sewer cavern where a troubled young man named Corey Cunningham, who is dating Allyson, encounters him. Corey brings Michael a victim to kill and starts to manifest the same evil. Corey dons his own mask and kills a doctor who passed Allyson over for a promotion. When Corey is having difficulty murdering the doctor's girlfriend, Michael appears and finishes the job. Corey eventually steals Michael's mask and murders several people who wronged him. He also goes after Laurie but is shot down a stairwell in her home. Michael arrives to retrieve his mask and kills Corey. Laurie pins Michael to a table and slits his throat, but he chokes her with the last of his strength. Allyson intervenes and breaks Michael's arm, allowing Laurie to fatally slice his wrist. A town-wide
procession takes place, where everyone watches Laurie dispose of Michael's corpse in an industrial shredder, ending his rampage once and for all.
Literature Michael Myers made his literary debut in October 1979 when Curtis Richards released
a novelization of the film. The book follows the events of the film but includes references to the festival of
Samhain. A prologue provides a possible explanation for Michael's murderous impulses, telling the story of Enda, a disfigured
Celtic teenager who butchers the
Druid princess Deirdre and her lover as revenge for rejecting him; the king subsequently has his
shaman curse Enda's soul for walking the earth reliving his crime for eternity. It is later revealed that Michael Myers suffers nightmares about Enda and Deirdre, as did Michael's great-grandfather before shooting two people to death at a Halloween harvest dance in the 1890s. The novel shows Michael's childhood in more detail; his mother voices concern over her son's anti-social behavior shortly before he murders Judith. Dr. Loomis notices the boy's effortless control and manipulation of the staff and patients at Smith's Grove during his incarceration. Later in the story, Michael's stalking of Laurie and her friends is depicted as more explicitly sexual than was apparent in the film, with several references to him having an
erection. Michael returned to the world of literature with the 1981 adaptation of
Halloween II written by
Jack Martin; it was published alongside the first film sequel, with the novel following the film events, with an additional victim, a reporter, added to the novel. The final novelization to feature Michael was
Halloween IV, released October 1988. The novel was written by Nicholas Grabowsky, and like the previous adaptations, follows the events of
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Over a four-month period,
Berkley Books published three
young adult novels written by Kelly O'Rourke; the novels are original stories created by O'Rourke, with no direct continuity with the films. The first, released on October 1, 1997, titled
The Scream Factory, follows a group of friends who set up a haunted house attraction in the basement of Haddonfield City Hall, only to be stalked and killed by Michael Myers while they are there.
The Old Myers Place is the second novel, released December 1, 1997, and focuses on Mary White, who moves into the Myers house with her family and takes up residence in Judith Myers' former bedroom. Michael returns home and begins stalking and attacking Mary and her friends. O'Rourke's final novel,
The Mad House, was released on February 1, 1998.
The Mad House features a young girl, Christine Ray, who joins a documentary film crew that travels to haunted locations; they are currently headed to Smith Grove Mental Hospital. The crew is quickly confronted by Michael Myers. The character's first break into comics came with a series of comics published by
Brian Pulido's
Chaos! Comics. The first, simply titled
Halloween, was intended to be a one-issue special, but eventually two sequels spawned:
Halloween II: The Blackest Eyes and ''Halloween III: The Devil's Eyes
. All of the stories were written by Phil Nutman, with Daniel Farrands—writer for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers''—assisting on the first issue; David Brewer and Justiniano worked on the illustrations. Tommy Doyle is the main protagonist in each of the issues, focusing on his attempts to kill Michael Myers. The first issue includes backstory on Michael's childhood, while the third picks up after the events of the film
Halloween H20. In 2003, Michael appeared in the self-published comic
One Good Scare, written by Stefan Hutchinson and illustrated by Peter Fielding. The main character in the comic is Lindsey Wallace, the young girl who first saw Michael Myers alongside Tommy Doyle in the original 1978 film. Hutchinson wanted to bring the character back to his roots, and away from the "lumbering Jason-clone" the film sequels had made him. On 25 July 2006, as an insert inside the DVD release of
Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, the comic book
Halloween: Autopsis was released. Written by Stefan Hutchinson and artwork by Marcus Smith and Nick Dismas, the story is about a photographer assigned to take pictures of Michael Myers. As the photographer, Carter, follows Dr. Loomis; he begins to take on Loomis's obsession himself, until finally meeting Michael Myers in person, which results in his death. In 2008,
Devil's Due Publishing began releasing more
Halloween comic books, starting with a four issue mini series, titled
Halloween: Nightdance. Written by Stefan Hutchinson,
Nightdance takes place in Russellville, and follows Michael's obsession with Lisa Thomas, a girl who reminds him of his sister Judith. Lisa is afraid of the dark after Michael trapped her in a basement for days, and years later, he starts sending her disturbing, childlike drawings and murdering those around her on Halloween. Meanwhile, Ryan Nichols is hunting Michael down after seeing him attack and kidnap his wife. In the end, Michael frames Ryan for the murders and buries Lisa alive. Hutchinson explains that
Nightdance was an attempt to escape the dense continuity of the film series and recreate the tone of the 1978 film; Michael becomes inexplicably fixated on Lisa, just as he did with Laurie in the original
Halloween, before the sequels established that a sibling bond was actually his motivation for stalking her. Included in the
Nightdance trade paperback is the short prose story
Charlie, which features Charlie Bowles, a Russellville
serial killer who taps into the same evil force which motivates Michael Myers. ==Concept and creation==