Tag Archives: Michael Myers

Devotional, Previous Post

REVISITED: The Face of Evil, part 4

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Read Exodus 34:1-7

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.” (Romans 12:21 NLT)

Finally, we come to the last era…well, probably not…but we finally come to the latest era in the Halloween franchise. For this iteration, David Gordon Green took the helm at co-writing and directing Halloween, released in 2018 (aka Halloween 2018). It was written for and released on the 40th anniversary of the release of the original film directed by John Carpenter. In it, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode, a woman who is faced with the reality that Michael is on the loose again.

This film was envisioned to be a direct sequel to the original film. John Carpenter signed on to be an executive producer and also cowrote the soundtrack with his son. The truth is that Carpenter wasn’t happy with the direction the Halloween films had taken following his exit from the films back in 1982. He signed on to contribute to making the scariest sequel of them all and to recalibrate the series, putting it back on track with the oritinal intent.

You guessed it, that means that this iteration of Michael Myers was much more like the original. He was the walking embodiment of evil that has no reason, let alone moral justification, for what he’s doing. People fear what they don’t understand or know, and Carpenter (as well as David Gordon Green) understood that. To make Michael horrifying again, he had to be brought back to that realm of the mysterious. Why is Michael doing what he’s doing? Simple…he’s evil. There need not be any other reason but that.

With that said, this particular film also delves into the horrific impact that evil can have on its victims. Forty years aater the original film, Laurie strode is living alone in the woods, estranged from her family. Following the events of 1978, Laurie never fully recovered. She had a daughter, but ended up having the daughter taken away by Child Services. Why? Because she turned her entire house into an armed compound and trained her daughter to shoot to kill. The fear of one night forty years ago, had clearly overtaken her life.

To make matters worse, her daughter hates her and thinks she is completely insane, to the point where she is avoiding inviting her mom to dinner to celebrate. The relationship with her granddaughter is also strained, because of the the granddaughter’s mother has on her. She wants a relationship with her grandmom and does not understand why grandma cannot just let Michael go.

Of course, we all know that Michael escapes…AGAIN…and comes to where Laurie and her family are living. On Halloween night, her family realizes that Laurie’s fears were quite real and, those who survive, are quite thankful for her readiness, without spoiling anything. What I love about this film is that it totally takes a look at victims of horrific trauma. It shows us what being a survivor is all about and the horror that unfolds in their life well beyond the actual events that triggered it.

Plenty of people suffer from PTSD and other trauma related illnesses. When we commonly think of PTSD, we think of veterans who served in the military; however, that is one of many groups of people who suffer PTSD. Rape victims, bully victims, car accident victims, police officers, first responders, pastors, and plenty of others can experience PTSD from their own trauma or from experiencing the trauma of others.

Sadly, the church has caused PTSD in others, and I don’t mean just in the sexual abuse cases. I mean that there are a whole host of people who no longer attend church because they no longer view it as a safe place. Perhaps they were burned by people who saw themselves as better or were too selfish to consider another’s feelings. Perhaps they were rejected or treated differently because of how they dressed or whatnot. As Christians, we are being challenged by God to pay attention how we treat people and to avoid being a PTSD inducing people. Let us test ourselves, continually, to make sure we are bringing people to Christ…NOT crisis.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
As much as we can spot evil in others, we had better be doubly quick to spot it in ourselves.

PRAY
Lord, use Scripture and other means to show me how I need to change for the glory of the Kingdom. With your help, all things are possible. Amen.

Devotional, Previous Post

REVISITED: The Face of Evil, part 3

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Read Romans 12:19-21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8 NLT).”

Continuing on with the Halloween Franchise, we come up to a whole knew era of the Michael Myers Saga, where he gets a fresh new look from an metal icon turned film director, Rob Zombie. As was mentioned previously, Halloween was based on the film Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, based off of the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. In that film, we follow Norman Bates, a deranged, mentally ill man who murdered his mother and assumed her identity. It was scary, and Norman did monstrous things; however, you can’t help but pity him because he cannot help himself.

In Halloween, John Carpenter removes the sympathetic side of the killer out. The film starts with what we believe to be a human being…a six year old boy. We then find out that all humanity has left that little boy as he brutally murders his sister. When he finallyreturns to Haddonfield fifteen years later following an escape from a Mental Health facility, he is no longer a “human being.” Rather, he is a “shape”. The mask he wears is a ghostly shape of a face, and he lingers in the dark, awaiting for someone to pass by him in the shadows. In the original 1978 film, and subsequent sequels, Michael Myers is a rage-filled, unrelenting killing machine with no soul, no moral compass, and no awareness of self even. He is evil incarnate.

Rob Zombie, on the other hand, rebooted the original and took it into a different realm. Instead of dismissing the notion that evil is an evolution, Zombie challenges our understanding of what is evil and how it develops. In his film, we see a young Michael Myers, who is ten years old in this version. We see him at first playing with a rat and then we pan downstairs to see his mom ccoking dinner for her husband and kids. You can tell that they are a lower income, working class, and somewhat dysfunctional family.

When we see young Michael again, he’s washing blood off of his hands and a sharp instrument. He had killed the rat. Clearly, this young child is mentally ill. As we learn more about his home and school environment, it becomes clear that Michael’s behavior is a result of surviving abuse and neglect. His step father is abusive and his mother, who is also an exotic dancer, does her best, but that is not nearly enough for her children. Alcholism, sexual debauchery, and abuse exist in the Myers house.

At school, Michael is bullied and is constantly getting into trouble for writing and drawing distrubing things. The point is, the first third of the film were spent establishing Michael’s back story. The second third of the film is spent showing an adult Michael in the hospital as an adult, his eventual escape and his return to Haddonfield, the final third fo the film is spent the usual way, people running for their lives, blood, guts, mayhem and, eventually, Michael is defeated…but not really. There’s always a sequel, and there was a sequel for Zombie’s film.

In this, Rob Zombie is taking us beyond just sympathizing with a sick person and he is taking us beyond seeing evil as just this unpreventable, unstoppable force that we could never participate in or become; rather, Zombie is reminding us that, while evil does exist, human evil does not exist in a vacuum. Things aren’t always so black & white and, frankly, evil begets more evil. Had Michael grown up in a functional, loving, nurturing environment, his mental illness might not have taken the violent turn it did; what’s more, the household he lived in was so eroded by sin that evil was the natural result…and once evil is unleashed, it becomes a nearly unstoppable force that MUST be eradicated.

This should challenge us to not only avoid being so quick to make judgments, but it also should challenge us to really reflect on the ways we might be contributing to the sin and evil in the world. That is not to say that such mindfulness will result in nobody slipping through the cracks, but it would help us to ensure as few do as possible. Let us be a people who not only avoid being overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good!

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Let’s reverse EVIL and by turning to God and beginning to trust him to help us LIVE the lives we were created to live.

PRAYER
Lord, help me to avoid evil but also help me to confront and resist it when it presents itself. Give me the courage and the strength. Amen.

Devotional

REVISITED: The Face of Evil, part 2

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Read Romans 3:1-20

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.” (Romans 12:21 NLT)

Now that we’ve looked at Norman Bates in the movie Psycho, we move now to another person who is known as a face of evil. His name, of course, is Michael Myers and his movie franchise is the Halloween series, which was first written and directed by John Carpenter in 1978. For horror fans the world over, Michael Myers is one of the three most iconic slasher film villains of all time, along side Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger. For horror film fans, those three make up the unholy trinity of bloody mayhem and murder.

Michael, however, was the OG. He was the original. Both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street Series came after and were influenced by John Carpenter’s Halloween. Also, as was mentioned in the last devotion, Halloween was heavily influenced by Psycho. That makes Psycho the granddaddy of slasher films, and Halloween the daddy of the genre. Halloween, in fact, was so influenced by Hitchcock’s film that Carpenter even named one of his main protagonists, Dr. Samuel Loomis off of Marion Crane’s boyfriend, in Psycho.

Halloween was a fan’s ode to Psycho, but it did change the direction of Hitchcock’s antagonist in order to fit the time within which the film was being written. By the end of the 1970s, the wishful dreaming of the flower power generation was an after thought. We had been through the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations, Vietnam, Richard Nixon, the Civil Rights Movement, and a host of other huge, earth shattering events. The generation that was born in the early to mid 60s, the beginnings of Generation X, would by the late 70s be much more cynical than their baby boomer predecessors.

So, as great as it was to view the killer as a human being, John Carpenter was directing his film in a different time than Hitchcock and took it in a bit of a different direction. In this film, Carpenter starts off by introducing us to little Michael Myers, a 6 year old boy, who is left home with his older sister on Halloween. We don’t know this yet, though. At first we think that his older sister is home alone with her boyfriend. They obviously have sex and then the boyfriend leaves. Meanwhile, a hand is shown reaching into the knife drawer. From this point on we are seeing this from a masked person’s point of view.

We see his (our) hand reaching down and pulling out a large kitchen knife, much like the one in Psycho. This killer (us…as this is in the first person perspective) stalks through the house, goes upstairs, and finds the teenage girl sitting naked at her vanity  brushing her hair. That is when she notices him and screams, “Michael”, as he repeated stabs her to death.

He (we) then run(s) outside and a car pulls up. A mom and a dad get out, say the name, “Michael” as they pull off his/our mask.  At that point we leave the first-person perspective and can see that his parents have pulled a mask off of their 6 year old boy, who is bloodied and holding a bloody knife. The screen goes black, the killer has been revealed and the stage set.

So, we start off with a human being, but we quickly learn that this dude ain’t human. He’s super human. He is the walking embodiment of evil. He is evil incarnate and there is literally NOTHING you can do to stop him. Dr. Loomis shot him 6 times and he still got up and was able to kill several more people in the sequel.

This switch in the killer’s identity from human to MONSTER, fueled the rest of the series and, honestly, makes perfect sense in the light of the late 70s and the 1980s. There was much cynicism to be had. The “Moral Majority” was on the rise, as were so-called family values as the Christian response to the counter-cultural movement of the 60s. Of course, the Church is always at least a decade behind the world anymore, and so alongside this Moral Majority comes these horror films that both affirm the family values, but also question the morality of the majority and their ability to really stop evil. After all, had religion stopped evil? Did church stop Hitler during World War II? What evil was thwarted by good? And even if it looks like good won out in the end, did it really. Evil seems to just keep coming back, and back, and back.

The point of this is that while the 60s aimed to tone down focusing on evil…or even deny the existence of evil at all, the 70s and 80s began to embrace the fact that evil exists. The Halloween series showed the moral failings of the previous generation, but also the moral and societal failings of all generations. It reminded the world that the Bible is right in the fact that EVIL EXISTS and it doesn’t have a face. Michael Myers was the human being, but that part of him died. Al that remains is faceless mask over a skulking body; he’s a SHAPE consumed by relentless evil.

The fact of the matter is that EVIL does not need a face to exist. It can exist in any one of us and, truth be told, it can consume and destroy anyone of us. The FACE OF EVIL in this case is a denial of the evil that exists within us. The Bible reminds us of that, which is why today’s Scripture is exactly the same as the last devotion. Michael Myers is not the cause of evil, but a symptom of it. We, too, can become a symptom of evil, or we can choose to turn to Jesus Christ for the cure. Faith in Christ, and his redeeming sacrifice for us on the cross, will certainly deliver us from evil.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
EVIL is LIVE backwards. Learn to LIVE FOR JESUS and AVOID EVIL.

PRAYER
Lord, lead me away from temptation and deliver me from evil. Amen.

Devotional

The Face of Evil, part 4

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Read Exodus 34:1-7

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.” (Romans 12:21 NLT)

Finally, we come to the last era…well, probably not…but we finally come to the latest era in the Halloween franchise. For this iteration, David Gordon Green took the helm at co-writing and directing Halloween, released in 2018 (aka Halloween 2018). It was written for and released on the 40th anniversary of the release of the original film directed by John Carpenter. In it, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode, a woman who is faced with the reality that Michael is on the loose again.

This film was envisioned to be a direct sequel to the original film. John Carpenter signed on to be an executive producer and also cowrote the soundtrack with his son. The truth is that Carpenter wasn’t happy with the direction the Halloween films had taken following his exit from the films back in 1982. He signed on to contribute to making the scariest sequel of them all and to recalibrate the series, putting it back on track with the oritinal intent.

You guessed it, that means that this iteration of Michael Myers was much more like the original. He was the walking embodiment of evil that has no reason, let alone moral justification, for what he’s doing. People fear what they don’t understand or know, and Carpenter (as well as David Gordon Green) understood that. To make Michael horrifying again, he had to be brought back to that realm of the mysterious. Why is Michael doing what he’s doing? Simple…he’s evil. There need not be any other reason but that.

With that said, this particular film also delves into the horrific impact that evil can have on its victims. Forty years aater the original film, Laurie strode is living alone in the woods, estranged from her family. Following the events of 1978, Laurie never fully recovered. She had a daughter, but ended up having the daughter taken away by Child Services. Why? Because she turned her entire house into an armed compound and trained her daughter to shoot to kill. The fear of one night forty years ago, had clearly overtaken her life.

To make matters worse, her daughter hates her and thinks she is completely insane, to the point where she is avoiding inviting her mom to dinner to celebrate. The relationship with her granddaughter is also strained, because of the the granddaughter’s mother has on her. She wants a relationship with her grandmom and does not understand why grandma cannot just let Michael go.

Of course, we all know that Michael escapes…AGAIN…and comes to where Laurie and her family are living. On Halloween night, her family realizes that Laurie’s fears were quite real and, those who survive, are quite thankful for her readiness, without spoiling anything. What I love about this film is that it totally takes a look at victims of horrific trauma. It shows us what being a survivor is all about and the horror that unfolds in their life well beyond the actual events that triggered it.

Plenty of people suffer from PTSD and other trauma related illnesses. When we commonly think of PTSD, we think of veterans who served in the military; however, that is one of many groups of people who suffer PTSD. Rape victims, bully victims, car accident victims, police officers, first responders, pastors, and plenty of others can experience PTSD from their own trauma or from experiencing the trauma of others.

Sadly, the church has caused PTSD in others, and I don’t mean just in the sexual abuse cases. I mean that there are a whole host of people who no longer attend church because they no longer view it as a safe place. Perhaps they were burned by people who saw themselves as better or were too selfish to consider another’s feelings. Perhaps they were rejected or treated differently because of how they dressed or whatnot. As Christians, we are being challenged by God to pay attention how we treat people and to avoid being a PTSD inducing people. Let us test ourselves, continually, to make sure we are bringing people to Christ…NOT crisis.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
As much as we can spot evil in others, we had better be doubly quick to spot it in ourselves.

PRAY
Lord, use Scripture and other means to show me how I need to change for the glory of the Kingdom. With your help, all things are possible. Amen.

Devotional

The Face of Evil, part 3

Leave a comment

Read Romans 12:19-21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8 NLT).”

Continuing on with the Halloween Franchise, we come up to a whole knew era of the Michael Myers Saga, where he gets a fresh new look from an metal icon turned film director, Rob Zombie. As was mentioned previously, Halloween was based on the film Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, based off of the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. In that film, we follow Norman Bates, a deranged, mentally ill man who murdered his mother and assumed her identity. It was scary, and Norman did monstrous things; however, you can’t help but pity him because he cannot help himself.

In Halloween, John Carpenter removes the sympathetic side of the killer out. The film starts with what we believe to be a human being…a six year old boy. We then find out that all humanity has left that little boy as he brutally murders his sister. When he finallyreturns to Haddonfield fifteen years later following an escape from a Mental Health facility, he is no longer a “human being.” Rather, he is a “shape”. The mask he wears is a ghostly shape of a face, and he lingers in the dark, awaiting for someone to pass by him in the shadows. In the original 1978 film, and subsequent sequels, Michael Myers is a rage-filled, unrelenting killing machine with no soul, no moral compass, and no awareness of self even. He is evil incarnate.

Rob Zombie, on the other hand, rebooted the original and took it into a different realm. Instead of dismissing the notion that evil is an evolution, Zombie challenges our understanding of what is evil and how it develops. In his film, we see a young Michael Myers, who is ten years old in this version. We see him at first playing with a rat and then we pan downstairs to see his mom ccoking dinner for her husband and kids. You can tell that they are a lower income, working class, and somewhat dysfunctional family.

When we see young Michael again, he’s washing blood off of his hands and a sharp instrument. He had killed the rat. Clearly, this young child is mentally ill. As we learn more about his home and school environment, it becomes clear that Michael’s behavior is a result of surviving abuse and neglect. His step father is abusive and his mother, who is also an exotic dancer, does her best, but that is not nearly enough for her children. Alcholism, sexual debauchery, and abuse exist in the Myers house.

At school, Michael is bullied and is constantly getting into trouble for writing and drawing distrubing things. The point is, the first third of the film were spent establishing Michael’s back story. The second third of the film is spent showing an adult Michael in the hospital as an adult, his eventual escape and his return to Haddonfield, the final third fo the film is spent the usual way, people running for their lives, blood, guts, mayhem and, eventually, Michael is defeated…but not really. There’s always a sequel, and there was a sequel for Zombie’s film.

In this, Rob Zombie is taking us beyond just sympathizing with a sick person and he is taking us beyond seeing evil as just this unpreventable, unstoppable force that we could never participate in or become; rather, Zombie is reminding us that, while evil does exist, human evil does not exist in a vacuum. Things aren’t always so black & white and, frankly, evil begets more evil. Had Michael grown up in a functional, loving, nurturing environment, his mental illness might not have taken the violent turn it did; what’s more, the household he lived in was so eroded by sin that evil was the natural result…and once evil is unleashed, it becomes a nearly unstoppable force that MUST be eradicated.

This should challenge us to not only avoid being so quick to make judgments, but it also should challenge us to really reflect on the ways we might be contributing to the sin and evil in the world. That is not to say that such mindfulness will result in nobody slipping through the cracks, but it would help us to ensure as few do as possible. Let us be a people who not only avoid being overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good!

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Let’s reverse EVIL and by turning to God and beginning to trust him to help us LIVE the lives we were created to live.

PRAYER
Lord, help me to avoid evil but also help me to confront and resist it when it presents itself. Give me the courage and the strength. Amen.

Devotional

The Face of Evil, part 2

Leave a comment

Read Romans 3:1-20

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.” (Romans 12:21 NLT)

Now that we’ve looked at Norman Bates in the movie Psycho, we move now to another person who is known as a face of evil. His name, of course, is Michael Myers and his movie franchise is the Halloween series, which was first written and directed by John Carpenter in 1978. For horror fans the world over, Michael Myers is one of the three most iconic slasher film villains of all time, along side Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger. For horror film fans, those three make up the unholy trinity of bloody mayhem and murder.

Michael, however, was the OG. He was the original. Both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street Series came after and were influenced by John Carpenter’s Halloween. Also, as was mentioned in the last devotion, Halloween was heavily influenced by Psycho. That makes Psycho the granddaddy of slasher films, and Halloween the daddy of the genre. Halloween, in fact, was so influenced by Hitchcock’s film that Carpenter even named one of his main protagonists, Dr. Samuel Loomis off of Marion Crane’s boyfriend, in Psycho.

Halloween was a fan’s ode to Psycho, but it did change the direction of Hitchcock’s antagonist in order to fit the time within which the film was being written. By the end of the 1970s, the wishful dreaming of the flower power generation was an after thought. We had been through the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations, Vietnam, Richard Nixon, the Civil Rights Movement, and a host of other huge, earth shattering events. The generation that was born in the early to mid 60s, the beginnings of Generation X, would by the late 70s be much more cynical than their baby boomer predecessors.

So, as great as it was to view the killer as a human being, John Carpenter was directing his film in a different time than Hitchcock and took it in a bit of a different direction. In this film, Carpenter starts off by introducing us to little Michael Myers, a 6 year old boy, who is left home with his older sister on Halloween. We don’t know this yet, though. At first we think that his older sister is home alone with her boyfriend. They obviously have sex and then the boyfriend leaves. Meanwhile, a hand is shown reaching into the knife drawer. From this point on we are seeing this from a masked person’s point of view.

We see his (our) hand reaching down and pulling out a large kitchen knife, much like the one in Psycho. This killer (us…as this is in the first person perspective) stalks through the house, goes upstairs, and finds the teenage girl sitting naked at her vanity  brushing her hair. That is when she notices him and screams, “Michael”, as he repeated stabs her to death.

He (we) then run(s) outside and a car pulls up. A mom and a dad get out, say the name, “Michael” as they pull off his/our mask.  At that point we leave the first-person perspective and can see that his parents have pulled a mask off of their 6 year old boy, who is bloodied and holding a bloody knife. The screen goes black, the killer has been revealed and the stage set.

So, we start off with a human being, but we quickly learn that this dude ain’t human. He’s super human. He is the walking embodiment of evil. He is evil incarnate and there is literally NOTHING you can do to stop him. Dr. Loomis shot him 6 times and he still got up and was able to kill several more people in the sequel.

This switch in the killer’s identity from human to MONSTER, fueled the rest of the series and, honestly, makes perfect sense in the light of the late 70s and the 1980s. There was much cynicism to be had. The “Moral Majority” was on the rise, as were so-called family values as the Christian response to the counter-cultural movement of the 60s. Of course, the Church is always at least a decade behind the world anymore, and so alongside this Moral Majority comes these horror films that both affirm the family values, but also question the morality of the majority and their ability to really stop evil. After all, had religion stopped evil? Did church stop Hitler during World War II? What evil was thwarted by good? And even if it looks like good won out in the end, did it really. Evil seems to just keep coming back, and back, and back.

The point of this is that while the 60s aimed to tone down focusing on evil…or even deny the existence of evil at all, the 70s and 80s began to embrace the fact that evil exists. The Halloween series showed the moral failings of the previous generation, but also the moral and societal failings of all generations. It reminded the world that the Bible is right in the fact that EVIL EXISTS and it doesn’t have a face. Michael Myers was the human being, but that part of him died. Al that remains is faceless mask over a skulking body; he’s a SHAPE consumed by relentless evil.

The fact of the matter is that EVIL does not need a face to exist. It can exist in any one of us and, truth be told, it can consume and destroy anyone of us. The FACE OF EVIL in this case is a denial of the evil that exists within us. The Bible reminds us of that, which is why today’s Scripture is exactly the same as the last devotion. Michael Myers is not the cause of evil, but a symptom of it. We, too, can become a symptom of evil, or we can choose to turn to Jesus Christ for the cure. Faith in Christ, and his redeeming sacrifice for us on the cross, will certainly deliver us from evil.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
EVIL is LIVE backwards. Learn to LIVE FOR JESUS and AVOID EVIL.

PRAYER
Lord, lead me away from temptation and deliver me from evil. Amen.