Michael is driven by a twisted incestual lust for his sister. He uses a symbolic phallus, his knife, to penetrate women who remind him of his sister. Stabbing to Michael is a sex act perverted to mirror his own devious desires. He's forced to enact on others the frustration caused by his latent femininity and homosexuality. Fact.
shareInteresting imagination you have there!
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shareYeah this would (mostly) be the clear Freudian outlook on the movie, and there is some evidence to support it in the movie itself. It's also been a common understanding that transmutation of sexual repressions into sexual and violent aggression likely underpins the acts of some well known serial killers. (In this case I don't see evidence for repressed homosexuality though that was considered to be the case with Dahmer, but incest sure.) It's definitely crossed my mind before that the symbolism of a stabbing murder resonates strongly with sexual violence, and it seems to go down to a pretty primal level in nature when you look at the rape-like mating habits of certain animal/insect species. The penetration connection is obvious. The slasher genre is fueled in part by a fairly heavy dose of frustrated pubescent testosterone, and it's pretty clear that on at least one level, pervasively depicting pretty girls being stabbed to death is wrapped up in that, which is disturbing, and also something you could look at these movies as meta-commenting on.
I've heard Jamie Lee Curtis talking a lot about this new movie being a reaction to the current culture shift where women (and the historically systemically oppressed and traumatized in general) are taking the power back and standing up to systems of abuse, so it actually makes a lot of sense to me that they might have thought about using the iconography of Halloween, with it's sublimated sexual violent implications, to make a timely social comment.
Waste of space.
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