12 Ways the Halloween Reboot Pays Tribute to the Original Slasher

Early on in the film, Laurie's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is seen sitting in the back of a classroom in the exact same high school desk Laurie does in a scene from the first Halloween. The movie even mimics the shot when Laurie gazes out the window and sees Michael standing across the street, only this time Allyson looks out and sees Laurie.

In the original, we're introduced to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) as he's driving with a colleague, Marion Chambers, on the way to Smith's Grove Sanitarium so they can escort Michael to court the night before Halloween. They arrive and find that multiple patients are wandering around outside the gate in their scrubs, suggesting that Michael was able to engineer a break. He attacks Marion and steals her car, zooming off to return to Haddonfield for another crime spree.

The scene of the patients milling about is reminiscent of a scene in the new film, in which Michael is able to crash the school bus he's on during a ride to a new psychiatric hospital with his doctor, Dr. Sartain. An unsuspecting father and son come upon the accident, where they see the ghostly figures of Michael's fellow patients wandering through the mist. Just as he does in the first movie, Michael uses the distraction to steal their car (and, uh, brutally snap their necks) to drive to Haddonfield.

Toward the end of the film, Laurie's daughter Karen (Judy Greer) is seen sitting in a bedroom inside her mother's compound. In the corner of the room is a small, light blue dollhouse that certainly seems like it's a replica of the original Myers home.

Technically, the character of Michael Myers is, and always has been, listed in the credits as "The Shape." When Laurie goes to watch Michael get loaded onto the bus in the new film to presumably ensure the trip goes smoothly, she ends up having a panic attack and drives off to meet her daughter, Karen, and granddaughter for dinner. She tells them that the reason for her erratic behaviour is because she "saw him," specifically noting that she "saw The Shape."

This isn't necessarily an Easter egg, per se, since Loomis is mentioned explicitly a few times by the podcasters eager to speak with Michael and by his new doctor, Dr. Sartain. But one mention of the OG doctor earned a big laugh at my screening of the film: Laurie is introduced to Sartain by the police after the doctor survives Michael's bus crash, which is when he takes the opportunity to mansplain her trauma and convince her Michael deserves a second chance. "You must be the new Loomis," she says, rolling her eyes and barely hiding her disdain.

There are other ties to Loomis's experiences with Michael, especially the way he preferred to describe the killer — "pure evil." There's even a recording of the old doctor's voice giving a statement in court that Michael should be given the death penalty rather than be allowed to live in a psychiatric hospital.

The opening credits of the 2018 film are a direct homage to the original, featuring rotted pumpkins reanimating and rising from the dead à la a certain serial killer we know. The text is also the same, with bright orange font on a black background. Accompanying the familiar visuals is an updated score of the original courtesy of Cody Carpenter, John Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies that will immediately take you back to your first viewing of the 1978 flick.

Remember in the original when Laurie fends off Michael from the bottom of a closet with nothing more than a wire hanger? Obviously David Gordon Green and Danny McBride couldn't resist giving a subtle shout-out to such an iconic horror movie moment.

The climax of the film happens when Michael finally reaches, and is able to penetrate, Laurie's booby-trapped compound. In one of the tensest horror sequences in recent memory, Laurie hunts through her home in the dark, room by room, in search of Michael, who is hiding somewhere. Finally she reaches a room full of old target practice mannequins and spots blood all over the closet door, seemingly giving the killer's location away. When she opens it, however, her son-in-law's dead body falls out instead, and Michael leaps from behind the curtain on the other side of the room.

Although she doesn't get to poke his eyes out with a hanger like she did decades earlier, the prolonged focus on the closet is unquestionably a reminder of what she endured the first go around. Also, the way her son-in-law's body flops out of the closet is reminiscent of the way Michael shoves Bob's corpse into a cabinet in the original.

Previously in the horror film franchise's sequels, it's revealed that Laurie is actually Michael's little sister. Since he also kills her in Resurrection, the new version of the film had to decide how to deal with those twists, and ultimately they chose to ignore the sequels altogether.

"It's kind of a . . . I don't know how to describe it. It's almost an alternative reality," John Carpenter, who's on board as an executive producer and creative consultant, explained to Stereo Gum. "It picks up after the first one and it pretends that none of the others were made. It's gonna be fun."

The 2018 film pokes fun at the continuity errors by featuring a quick scene of Laurie's granddaughter Allyson telling her nosy friends that rumours of Laurie being related to Michael were just that — rumours.

At the very end of the first film, Loomis arrives just in time to stop Michael from killing Laurie in the upstairs bedroom of the home. The doctor shoots him a number of times and Michael stumbles backwards through the room's glass doors and right over the balcony outside, falling to his "death." Of course, when Loomis peers over the edge to get a look at Michael's body, the killer has miraculously disappeared. The same thing happens in the new film, only in reverse — Michael attacks Laurie in the second floor of her home and sends her flying out the window, crashing into the yard below. But in a great wink to Carpenter's film, Laurie's body disappears a few seconds later.

OK, no, this connection isn't technically to the 1978 original; instead, this seems like a pretty strong nod to 1998's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. In it, a mother stops at an isolated rest area with her daughter, and they go into the men's room since the women's room is locked. Michael happens to be in the area, so he goes inside and creepily leers at the mother through the gap in her stall before stealing her purse. He digs the car keys out and takes off in their car, as well.

The mother in that scenario escapes with her life, as well as her daughter's, but the podcast host (Rhian Rees) who Michael confronts in a gas station bathroom in the new film, is not as lucky. He does the same thing, peering at her through the stall, then starts to violently shake the door and throw bloody teeth onto the floor in front of her. You can imagine what happens next.