Humanising Movie Monsters

 Being a lifelong horror fan as well as a lifelong story lover, both creating and experiencing, when it came to the icons like Jason, Freddy, and Michael, I always wondered about their past lives. Who were they before they donned their masks or were burned horribly.

Sometimes those questions are best left unanswered. Just look at Rob Zombie's Halloween reboots. Horrible films, good acting by Tyler Mane as Michael, but the illusion of the mosnter was taken away and all we were left with was a sad giant that wanted his mommy. Robert Englund's Freddy was a sadistic child-killer, but again, the reboot twisted him into a psychologically imbalanced child molestor; a different kind of monster, but both made a deal with demons to return for revenge through people's dreams. Jason was the only one left unexplained even though a consistently terrible reboot for him was completed for him too.

When I was around ten years old, I started coming up with my own theories about Jason's origins and why he never died. Why did he continue returning from the dead to Camp Crystal Lake? Back then I didn't know that I could potentially be ruining some of the things that I loved about these creatures; their mystery. With Jason, I theorized that Camp Crystal Lake was formerly Native American soil. Native Americans have special ties with the land and since Jason was a disfigured outcast, his only friend besides his mother was the camp grounds and the woods. When he died, the woods brought him back to life and would continue doing just that. His hatred and contempt for those people that wronged him and his mother was what made him kill. I surmised that the only way to kill Jason was to kill him outside Camp Crystal Lake's borders, but then Jason Takes Manhattan killed that idea.

When Halloween: H20 came out, I knew there was going to be another movie. Since this was the first reboot, there was room to play with the story and the family. I hoped that Michael's nephew would gather up the remaining Myers family and for the first time take the fight to Michael. Only members of the Myers family could kill Michael who, again, was powered by hatred.

I was young, I didn't know any better. They say you should never meet your heroes, and sometimes you shouldn't try to humanize the perfectly inhumane. Let them be monsters.