Michael Myers Had A Psychic Connection With One Of His Victims In The Halloween Movies

The middle years of the Halloween movies were a weird period for the franchise. Though the original was a perfectly-pitched serial killer slasher and Blumhouse has recently restored the series to its factory settings to much success, Halloweens 4-6 took things in a surprisingly supernatural direction. For instance, H4 and H5 explore a psychic connection between Michael Myers and his niece, Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris).

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers reveals that Laurie Strode has died in a car crash and her young daughter, Jamie, is being raised by an adoptive family. As you’d expect, Michael returns and causes much murder and mayhem, but at the film’s climax, a strange event occurs: when he’s cornered by the police, Jamie runs over to the Shape and touches his hand. The distracted Michael is then caught in a hail of gunfire.

The chilling final twist of the movie then sees the distressed Jamie taken for a bath by adoptive mother Darlene when screams are heard downstairs. Dr. Sam Loomis arrives on the scene to discover Jamie dressed in a clown outfit standing over the unconscious Darlene with a pair of bloody scissors, eerily evoking Michael’s first disguise and murder when he was a child. We’re left to think that the evil that grips Myers has now passed into Jamie.

In Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, this plot thread is toned down, with Jamie in a children’s psychiatric hospital after her violent outburst (Darlene survived, by the way). She’s not depicted as being evil like Michael but she does have a psychic connection with him, able to receive visions of his whereabouts and actions. The connection seems to go both ways, too. In a curious moment, Jamie is able to stop Michael from killing her by calling him “uncle.” The killer takes off his mask and even sheds a tear. As Jamie goes to wipe it away, however, he lashes out in a fit of rage.

This psychic connection and sympathetic note to Michael’s character pave the way for the events of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, which reveals the true mystical reasons for his compulsion to kill. All of these films are now wiped from continuity, of course, given how much they complicated the mythos, but it’s interesting to look back at a time when the Halloween franchise flirted with the supernatural.