48 Years Later, The Greatest Closing Line In Horror History Is Still Undefeated

While horror movies live or die based on how solid their endings are, only one title in the slasher subgenre can lay claim to the genre’s greatest closing quote of all time. There are a lot of great horror anthology shows dotted throughout TV history, from early classics like The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling’s underrated Lovecraftian follow-up Night Gallery to ‘90s hits like Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Dark Side.

Even more recently, shows like American Horror Story, Creepshow, and Shudder’s brutal anthology series Slasher kept this genre tradition alive, while non-anthology horror shows like The Haunting of Hill House, Stranger Things, The Walking Dead franchise, and Mike Flanagan’s modern classic Midnight Mass brought the genre more mainstream acclaim than ever before. That being said, it is still fair to say that horror’s home is on the movie screen, rather than TV and streaming, for numerous reasons.

For one thing, despite how much gory violence and explicit content viewers might see in Game of Thrones or The Boys, horror remains the most boundary-pushing genre when it comes to censorship norms. For this reason alone, movies, which are subject to looser censorship norms than TV shows, are a natural home for the genre. Horror is also home to many great self-contained, one-shot narratives where other genres rely on extensive world building, something that is perfectly encapsulated in the genre’s greatest quote ever, the closing line of 1978’s Halloween.

Halloween Has The Greatest Closing Line In Horror Movie History

Where fantasy and sci-fi tend to benefit from the expansive, open-ended structure of long-form TV narratives, horror’s intensity means the genre is at home in the shorter runtime of movies. This is never truer than in the slasher subgenre.

Although there are a handful of slasher TV shows that worked fine, like Harper’s Island and the aforementioned Slasher, most small-screen experiments in the genre fall flat. Scream Queens, MTV’s Scream: The Series, Dead of Summer, 2021’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin all exemplify this consistent critical struggle.

The reason that slashers are mostly better suited to movies than TV shows is something captured by the legendary closing line of director John Carpenter’s seminal genre classic, Halloween. After the masked maniac Michael Myers has stalked Jamie Lee Curtis’s resilient, resourceful babysitter Laurie Strode through the suburban home of her young charges, Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis arrives just in time to shoot the villain repeatedly, sending him falling from a second-story balcony to his presumable death.

Naturally, when the pair look for his body, Michael is nowhere to be found. In a moment later borrowed by the nostalgic horror series Stranger Things during season 4’s showdown with the monstrous Vecna, Michael lands on the ground seemingly dead, only to then vanish the moment the heroes look away. This prompts an exchange that lives on in the annals of horror history:

Halloween’s Sequels Inevitably Undid The Original Movie’s Greatest Quote

What makes this quote so iconic, and so unique to the self-contained format of the slasher movie, is its ambiguity. To Pleasance and Laurie, who have just seen this faceless figure massacre numerous people without displaying any emotion before blithely shaking off injuries that would kill any ordinary person, Micheal Myers truly does seem to be an immortal, supernatural boogeyman.

This would certainly explain how a man who had been institutionalized since he was six years old knew how to drive a car, and how Michael seemingly teleports from one place to another throughout the movie. Of course, it’s also not an entirely satisfying explanation in terms of plot. If Halloween were an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, like the author’s iconic slasher-inspiring novel And Then There Were None, the movie would need to eventually explain Michael’s real identity, his motives, and how he pulled off his murders.

Similarly, if Halloween were an unabashedly supernatural horror movie, wherein paranormal phenomena exist in-universe, the movie would still need to offer some explanation for this malevolent force of nature. The question of whether Michael is a revenant, a ghost, a zombie, or an apparition powered by the fear of his teen victims would need a definitive answer.

Indeed, the Halloween sequels realized this, much to their infamous detriment. Halloween II tacked on a corny connection between Michael and Laurie, revealing he was her long-lost brother, while later outings of the franchise conjured up a corny cult worthy of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn to explain how he became a supernatural, unstoppable killer. It was these goofy retcons that led 1998’s Halloween: H20 to reboot the entire franchise’s continuity, only for 2018’s legacy sequel Halloween to do the same again 20 years later.

Halloween’s Iconic Line Highlights The Biggest Slasher Movie Debate

The later sequels in the series unavoidably had to explain whether Michael Myers was, in fact, supernatural or not, something that has remained a thorny debate among fans of the slasher sub genre in the decades since. The question of whether the killers in slasher movies should be ordinary people or supernatural monsters remains an open one, since there are valid arguments on both sides, and plenty of iconic slashers that use both opposing approaches.

The Candyman, Child’s Play, and Nightmare On Elm Street franchises all portray their villains as explicitly supernatural entities, while the Scream movies offer a mortal, human antagonist at the end of each outing. This means that Scream sometimes feels as indebted to the aforementioned Agatha Christie as Bram Stoker or Edgar Allan Poe, but plenty of other slasher movies prefer these recognizable human villains.

In the last ten years alone, the X trilogy, the Happy Death Day movies, There’s Someone Inside Your House, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Scream 2022—Scream 7, It’s A Wonderful Knife, Heart Eyes, Thanksgiving, and Totally Killer have all focused on non-supernatural human killers. Meanwhile, the Terrifier movies, In A Violent Nature, Whistle, Freaky, Candyman’s reboot, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma all took the opposite approach.

While both slasher formulae can work, sequels and reboots are forced to pick a lane, whereas original movies in the genre can leave the killer’s nature ambiguous. Halloween’s closing line is iconic precisely because the movie didn’t need to decide whether Michael truly was the boogeyman or not, leaving viewers to ruminate on his true nature as the credits rolled.

Release Date

October 27, 1978

Runtime

91 minutes

Director

John Carpenter