Sometimes They Come Back: 5 Horror Movies Where The Villain Returns

Halloween (1978)

Director and co-writer John Carpenter – creating the screenplay here with Debra Hill – delivered Halloween as an independent horror film starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, P.J Soles and Nancy Loomis. The end product became legendary in the genre and launched one of the most iconic horror film franchises ever made – not least because of the use of horror film clichés. While Halloween did not invent these already familiar tropes, it served to cement them in the cinematic firmament, including the resurrection of the killer.

As a six-year-old child, Michael Myers brutally murders his older sister on Halloween night in 1963, and is committed to a psychiatric facility as a result. As a grown man, in 1978, he escapes and returns to his home in Haddonfield – wearing a mask and a mechanic’s uniform. His psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), is hot on his trail, but Michael is able to begin stalking local teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends. As he begins killing teens, he becomes embroiled in chasing Laurie through a house and she repeatedly evades and wounds him.

This is the aspect that sets Halloween apart from lesser entries into the genre. Where most horror films resurrect the killer once, for the purpose of a jump-scare, Halloween does it repeatedly, for the purpose of displaying both the persistence of ‘The Final Girl’ and the idea that evil cannot be destroyed.

Laurie Strode causes Michael to collapse twice – once with a knitting needle to the neck, and once by stabbing him with his own knife – and both times he is resurrected. At the end, Michael is shot six times at relatively close range by Dr. Loomis, which causes him to fall from a balcony. When Strode and Loomis look for him below, he’s gone – resurrected once more.