Having recently gone to see the new Halloween and coming away massively impressed with what I saw, I couldn’t help but notice I had a few lingering questions after the credits rolled. Is Michael Myers going to survive the definitively final ending via some contrived circumstance? Will Laurie Strode make it out? And, perhaps most naggingly, why didn’t Michael kill a baby in a crib when he had the opportunity to do so?
It happens towards the mid-point of the film. In an homage to Halloween II, Myers wanders the neighborhood, kills a woman in her home who’d been making food and, before he leaves, ponders a baby in a crib. As far as I know, in the other movies he’d never killed anyone below their teens, but why?
Well, it turns out director David Gordon Green has an answer. In an interview with Collider, he said he believed Michael probably considered it, but opted not to out of courtesy.
“Why doesn’t he? Because that would be so rude,” Green said. “I think it was a consideration,” he explained.
Later in the piece, Green says that initially, the woman’s husband was supposed to be sleeping on the couch, but the man didn’t show up on the day of shooting. As a result, they opted to stick a baby in place instead and, in my view, it was the better choice.
And it was a last minute idea — I mean, why is there a baby crib in the living room? It was gonna be her husband sleeping on the couch, but then he didn’t show up and we scrambled and put a baby crib in there. And then, yeah, I thought it was interesting to see one ethical choice that he made in the movie. So that’s the one ethical choice he makes.”
Through just a few seconds, the director was able to show how a deranged killer operates mentally without the need for any clunky exposition. Other filmmakers with bigger names and half as much talent could learn a lot from this moment in Halloween, that’s for sure.
