Halloween: Everything You Need To Know About Michael Myers

In the Zombie remake continuity, Michael is given a very different backstory.

Whereas Carpenter (correctly) felt it was scarier to have Michael be an average suburban kid who just suddenly committed an act of terrible violence, Zombie opted to tack on a thirty-minute prologue in which audiences got a long look at just how intensely awful of a childhood Michael had.

Here, Michael's family home is a wreck, his step-father is abusive, and his mother is a stripper. Michael routinely gets bullied at school for his mother's day job, and this affected Michael on a deeply personal level.

As Zombie spells out pretty hamfistedly in this opening sequence, Michael comes to relate nudity and sexuality with the violent anger he feels towards those bullies.

As a result, when he later snaps, he murders his older sister Judith and her boyfriend for having sex. Yet he never even considers doing anything to his mother, because he sees her as a nurturing, loving mother. This is played up even more in Zombie's sequel, in which Michael continuously sees visions of his mother and a white horse, representing the innocence that Michael saw in her. This, it turns out, is what leads him to kill and track down his sister in this timeline.