Psychology & Cinema Series: Halloween (2018)

It’s October, which means two things: pumpkin spice is everywhere, and I get to justify rewatching horror movies in the name of “research.” Also, this is my 13th post!! So, for this installment of Psychology& Cinema Series, it felt right to go festive and turn our attention to one of my all-time favorite series: Halloween.

Now, I could easily write a love letter to John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece, which I think is the perfect horror film. It’s sparse, restrained, haunting, and iconic. (It’s also responsible for teaching me what the antipsychotic medication Thorazine was, long before graduate school did.) But for today, I want to focus on a later entry: Halloween (2018).

This film, directed by David Gordon Green, acts as a direct sequel to the original, erasing decades of convoluted lore, secret siblings, and mystical cults. Instead, it brings the story back to its creepier basics, while increasing the violence to befit modern jaded audiences. Beneath all its slashing (and there’s a lot of it) and suspense, Halloween (2018) quietly delivers a sharp and surprisingly accurate portrait of trauma, post-traumatic stress, and the ethics of how we treat both victims and the mentally ill.

And yes, we’ll even talk about true crime podcasters before we’re done.

The Final Girl and the Forty-Year Fallout

In slasher films, the “final girl” is the lone survivor who outsmarts or outlasts the killer, a trope famously identified by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992). Usually, she’s the one we root for: virtuous, resilient, maybe traumatized but ultimately triumphant. The credits roll, she’s still alive, and we assume she’ll go on to live a normal life.

But what happens after the credits?

That’s where Halloween (2018) does something brilliant. We find Laurie Strode (played by transcendental Jamie Lee Curtis) forty years after surviving her encounter with Michael Myers. And, she’s not “healed.” She’s not giving motivational talks or running a self-defense studio. She’s broken, in every sense that word implies. Laurie exhibits textbook symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, sleep disturbances, social isolation, strained relationships, and an obsessive need to control her environment. She lives in a fortified home filled with security systems, weapons, and contingency plans …. a rural bunker disguised as a farmhouse. She has been divorced twice, has become an alcoholic, is estranged from her daughter, and largely cut off from the world.

In short, her entire life has become organized around her trauma.

This portrayal stands out precisely because it’s so rare. Horror cinema is filled with survivors who seem magically immune to psychological aftermath. For example, Sidney Prescott from Scream handles years of stalking and repeated murder sprees with enviable poise. Alice from Friday the 13th Part 2 seems perfectly fine a few months after her ordeal in Part 1 (though it doesn’t end well for Alice in the opening …. and to be fair, Chris in Part 3 is clearly traumatized at the end of the film). But Laurie Strode’s story forces us to sit with the uncomfortable truth that survival isn’t the same as recovery.

Psychological research supports this distinction. Survivors of violent crime often struggle with persistent anxiety, hyperarousal, and emotional numbing (Forbes et al., 2020). Trauma reshapes the brain’s threat-detection system, keeping it on high alert even when the danger is long gone. In Laurie’s case, her hypervigilance has become her personality. Her world revolves around one fear: that Michael Myers will return.

And of course, because this is a horror movie, he does.

Haunted Houses and Survivalist Minds

Laurie’s home is a fascinating metaphor for trauma itself. It’s a fortress, but also a prison. Every reinforced door and hidden panic room is designed to keep her safe, and yet, it’s also what keeps her trapped. In many ways, she’s still living inside the mental version of that closet she hid in back in 1978.

This speaks to what trauma specialists like Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describe as “the body keeping the score.” Survivors don’t just remember trauma; they relive it. Their minds and bodies remain locked in survival mode. Laurie’s booby-trapped compound is the externalization of her internal state: vigilant, paranoid, ready to fight. Ironically, those same survival skills make her the hero again. When Michael inevitably escapes (because of course he does), Laurie’s hyper-preparedness saves her family. The film walks a fine line between celebrating and mourning that fact: her trauma has both destroyed her and made her capable of saving others. That duality feels honest. Trauma isn’t just damage; it’s adaptation. People can find meaning, resilience, and even empowerment in the aftermath of trauma, what psychologists call post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). Laurie may be broken, but she’s also ready. 

Monstrosity, and the Mental Institution

Michael Myers remains one of the most enduring villains of horror cinema.

He’s the silent, blank-faced killer whose inhuman calm terrified audiences in 1978 and still does today. The 2018 film brings him back as a 61-year-old man, still mute, still maskless (for most of the runtime), and still institutionalized. We first meet him in a stark outdoor yard of a psychiatric hospital, tethered to the ground like an exhibit. Around him, other patients shout and shuffle — a sea of “madness” rendered in exaggerated, almost grotesque form. It’s a deeply uncomfortable scene, and not just because of Michael’s presence. It’s uncomfortable because it mirrors a long, harmful cinematic tradition: the dehumanization of the mentally ill.

From One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Arkham Asylum in the Batman franchise, popular culture has repeatedly portrayed psychiatric institutions as gothic nightmares — places of cruelty, chaos, and horror. This “asylum aesthetic” reinforces the idea that mental illness equals danger, and these institutions are places of confinement rather than care (Foucault, 1965; Wahl, 1995). To be fair, the issue with warehousing is that these places became prisons, but largely because medical knowledge and funding was so poor that people couldn’t be treated effectively, rather than them being uncurable monsters. Halloween (2018) isn’t as exploitative as some films (the Rob Zombie reboot is far worse in that respect), but it still participates in the trope. The other patients are depicted as barely human, as shuffling caricatures of “insanity.” Michael himself is presented less as a human being and more as a supernatural embodiment of evil.

There’s a paradox here: the film uses the language of psychiatry to contain evil (“he’s been locked away for forty years”) but simultaneously portrays psychiatry as powerless to understand it. That’s both narratively effective and ethically tricky. Because when we conflate mental illness with evil, we perpetuate stigma that has real-world consequences for people living with psychiatric conditions.

The Ethics of True Crime and the Spectacle of Suffering

While Laurie and Michael represent trauma and monstrosity, Halloween (2018) adds a third element to the mix: us the viewers. Or, more specifically, our cultural fascination with violence.

Two self-styled “investigative journalists” (true crime podcasters) arrive at the hospital to interview Michael Myers. They’re smug, performative, and British (which in horror shorthand means “pretentious authority”). They carry microphones and recording gear, but their motives are less about journalism and more about exploitation. They’re not seeking truth; they’re seeking content. In one of the film’s opening, they gain access to the hospital and try to provoke Michael by waving his old mask at him, a blatant violation of every ethical guideline in both psychology and journalism. The American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists (2017) explicitly begin with “Do no harm”, something the staff seem to not care about. Journalists are bound by similar ethical standards: don’t retraumatize victims, don’t manipulate sources, don’t exploit suffering for profit.

Our podcasters do all three within the first ten minutes.

Later, they visit Laurie Strode, waving cash as an incentive to get her to talk, which is another ethical breach. Paying for interviews, especially from victims, compromises integrity and risks coercion. But in the podcasting world, where content drives clicks, that kind of transactional relationship has become disturbingly normalized.

I’ve seen this firsthand in the true crime ecosystem. There are podcasts that pay for “exclusive” interviews with survivors, families, or experts, blurring the line between journalism and entertainment. Some hosts will only appear on other shows if compensated, and others use payment to secure sensational testimony. It’s exploitative, and it’s the dark mirror of our cultural obsession with “true crime.”

The film turns this back at us. Many viewers see the podcaster characters as slimy or at least disrespectful to Laurie (and Michael ?!), and feel a sense of poetic justice when both of them are brutally killed. Even in death, they remain symbols of our voyeurism. We consume other people’s pain, and are sometimes cheering for violence, and then move on to the next episode. It’s easy to blame individuals (“those unethical podcasters”) but they reflect a larger phenomenon. Our media landscape rewards sensationalism, not sensitivity. The same impulse that would drive people to wave a mask in front of a killer (or similar “murderobila”), also leads to “investigators” hounding victims and “suspects” for answers, and it ultimately drives audiences to binge true crime stories that commodify suffering. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exploring criminal psychology; I teach it for a living. But there’s a difference between understanding evil and profiting from it.

Monsters, Metaphors, and Meaning

So, what do we learn from Halloween (2018)?

First, it reminds us that horror can be deeply psychological, not just in the sense of fear, but in its exploration of trauma, ethics, and identity. Laurie’s PTSD feels grounded and tragic, a realistic portrait of what survival can look like. Michael’s portrayal invites us to examine our own tendency to dehumanize what we fear or don’t understand. And the podcasters? They’re the moral reflection of our society’s appetite for spectacle. It’s the way we dress up violence as “storytelling.”

Second, the film gives us an opportunity to talk about empathy. When we reduce people to archetypes (the “final girl,” the “madman,” the “victim”) we stop seeing them as people. We flatten their complexity into roles that serve our narratives. But real life is messier. Trauma is messy. Recovery is messy. Humanity is messy.

Finally, there’s something almost therapeutic about returning to these stories each Halloween. Horror, at its best, doesn’t just scare us, it helps us confront fear itself. It allows us to externalize the things that haunt us, to give them form and name and, occasionally, to fight back. Maybe that’s why Halloween endures. It’s not just about a man in a mask. It’s about what happens when fear doesn’t end, when it settles in, uninvited, and shapes an entire community.

Laurie Strode reminds us that surviving the monster is only the beginning sometimes.

Happy Halloween!

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Washington, DC.

Clover, C. J. (1992). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press.

Forbes, D., Bisson, J. I., Monson, C. M., Berliner, L. (2020). Effective Treatments for PTSD: Practice Guidelines from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Guilford Press.

Foucault, M. (1965). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

Wahl, O. F. (1995). Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness. Rutgers University Press.