Judith Myers And Her Gravestone
Podcasters Aaron and Dana are shown around a cemetery early on in the movie. Specifically, they go to visit the grave of Judith Myers. As fans will know, Judith is Michael’s first kill, as at the age of six, he murdered his teenage sister in her bedroom on Halloween night. This scene’s replayed during the movie, too, with the footage directly lifted from the opening scene of the original.
Fans might also remember that Judith’s gravestone went missing the night Michael escaped in 1978. It eventually turned up by the corpse of aforementioned Lynda in a sick tableau set up by the killer. Clearly, the stone was restored after this incident, as it’s there in its right place when Aaron and Dana visit. It’s also an exact match to the one from the earlier film.
Mirroring Michael
All these easter eggs are great, but there’s a running thread of callbacks to the 1978 movie that serves more of a purpose than simply paying homage. Notably, several scenes feature Curtis’ Laurie Strode replicating moments that included Michael Myers in the original.
First of all, the scene in which Allyson is in her classroom and is sitting at the back right of the room is a direct match for a moment which saw Laurie in the same spot in the first Halloween. Only Laurie looked outside the window and saw Myers. When Allyson looks outside, she sees her grandmother.
Fast forward to the big climax and Laurie’s searching for Michael, armed and ready to kill him, through her house. For one tense moment, she believes he’s hiding in the closet, which looks near identical to the one she hid in in the famous third art of the first film. Except now, the scene casts Laurie as the predator and Michael as her prey.
This switcheroo is most obvious in the shocking moment when Michael throws Laurie off the balcony. He looks at her prone form on the ground, looks away for a second and then looks back and she’s nowhere to be seen – complete with an ominous sting on the score. This bit of business is lifted wholesale from the memorable ending of Halloween ’78 where Michael’s the one to disappear.
The new Halloween‘s all about the long-term effects of trauma and one of the outcomes Dr. Sartain mentions is that the torment suffered by a victim can cause them to become just like their tormentor. While Laurie doesn’t go that far, the film certainly encourages us to think of her changing her dynamic with Michael.