I think I may have found a visual clue into Michael’s nature that I haven’t seen many discuss. In Bob’s death scene Michael holds him up to the closet door before he kills him by jamming the knife into his abdomen. While it is possible that could cause a quick death (I have info on the realistic ways Bob could instantly die), many are quick to point out that there’s no way a standard kitchen knife could hold Bob pinned to the door. How could it all the way through him, into the door, and support his weight? A “grounded logic” explanation for this is that there’s a hook on the door hidden in the shadows (there actually isn’t one), or that Michael’s superhuman strength jammed it in so hard and deep that it worked (but there’s still a good deal of the knife sticking out).
But maybe there’s something else. What if Michael stabs him and Bob is just suspended in mid-air with his back against the door? By the finale its established that Michael is not a “man”, he is no longer a complete person inside (if he ever was, which is a whole other topic), but rather a supernatural being with abilities beyond those of the mere mortals around him. When Michael does his famous head tilt, one “new” interpretation of the meaning of it in this supernatural context is that he’s trying to figure out what he just did. He has yet to truly grasp what he’s capable of doing with his evil. He’s confused as to how his touch has made a grown man basically freeze against a door and the laws of physics magically don’t apply. Note, too, that Bob’s head doesn’t hang down in the final shot like it would if he were stuck “realistically”, because the whole back of his body is held by a mystical force. This is a clearly supernaturally powered man who survives bodily violence within a short span of time that would have a normal man down for the count or dead, has the unnatural strength to lift Bob (and tombstones) singlehandedly, and literally teleports/dematerializes at least three times. I can’t imagine why something like this would be a ridiculous possibility.
Some might (and some staunchly have) resist this reading and say that this is just a flub that Carpenter and company didn’t fully realize because they were crunched for time, but I can’t totally see that. Carpenter is no dope, and though his screenplays are meticulous, his actual filmmaking seems to be more instinctual. Carpenter has crafted his film as a fable - a mythic tale of good vs evil - a story about a tainted world that’s simple on the surface but loaded with subtextual depth. Laurie, like Michael, is both complex and elemental. Both are conveyed under the idea of existing as shape-shifting beings - Laurie in the figurative sense (her constantly evolving inner and outer lives) and Michael both figuratively and literally (a convergence of the two is shown when he pretends to be a ghost in front of Lynda).
Something else to consider is that at no time is Michael, in the first film, ever referred to as Michael Myers. Only by his first name. The origin of the name translates as a question: “who is like God?” I don’t think Halloween was intended as a religious allegory and doesn’t read as such, but in this world Michael is the one being with god-like powers and abilities that man (remember he isn’t a “man”) simply doesn’t possess. When he holds up Bob and he stays on the wall somehow Michael doesn’t yet understand what this means. Halloween is about his own sense of growth as well as Laurie’s.
Whether or not he precisely intended my theory of Bob’s death honestly doesn’t factor in much. Authorial intent is not always needed for an idea or theory to be valid, and with Halloween’s deliberate open-ended imaginative blanks it it fits well. As early as the 80s Carpenter stated that he hoped people would find layers of meaning and interpretation to his work that even he wasn’t consciously aware of at the time it was made. This was from a show called “Take One”, with a panel discussion titled “Fear on Film” with John Landis and David Cronenberg and later the episode was transcribed in an issue of Fangoria magazine.
Bob’s suspension in the air mirrors Michael’s arrested development; they are both frozen in time and space. It’s as Michael has inflicted on Bob what has been inflicted on him. Perhaps Michael intuitively recognizes this occurrence but can’t tease out the details. When he comes to the bedroom with the sheet over his head he’s also wearing Bob’s glasses, this to me indicates again that the two are melded together now. Michael is trying on a new “identity” as “Bob” because he lacks his own as a man. Bob is dead and Michael is trying on his spirit. It’s as if Bob has been reborn because that’s what Michael is able to do when he continually “dies” in the last act of the movie. (An additional reason why Michael can not be called a figurative man is because maybe his mind in some ways is still that of a child. A fascinating part of his character is that I believe there’s a mix of evil and human psychology and it’s not defined for us where either begins or ends). He almost playfully dresses up as ghost as he makes his way towards a door, like an overgrown trick or treater. Ghosts are apparitions that float in the air which is exactly what Michael does to Bob before he attempts to temporally take his place among the living.
