“I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding, even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong… I met this six year old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes… the Devil’s eyes.”
That quote is pure horror genre. Donald Pleasence delivers it like a confession and a warning rolled into one. Every time I rewatch Halloween (1978), it hits just as hard. Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael Myers’ psychiatrist, sounds less like a medical professional and more like a man who’s looked into the abyss and saw it looking right back.
And that’s what I want to talk about: how Loomis might actually be the craziest character in the entire franchise.
A Doctor With a Hand Cannon
Think about the first time we see him heading to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium to pick up Michael for his transfer. He’s not calm or clinical, he’s armed. Not just with a sidearm either, but what looks like a .45 caliber hand cannon. That’s not a “maybe I’ll need this” kind of weapon. That’s a “if I see him, I’m putting him down” gun.
He’s ready to kill his own patient. Let that sink in.
His patient of fifteen years. Again… let that sink in.
Loomis isn’t walking in like a man of science. He’s walking in like a man on a mission, the kind of guy who’s been haunted for fifteen years by something he can’t explain. Whatever he saw in that six year old boy broke him, and now his entire existence revolves around keeping that evil locked away, or destroying it entirely.
He says, “I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply.. evil“
It really makes you wonder… what kind of look could a fourteen year old give you to take that notion straight to the heart. At the very least, it makes you think.
Carpenter and the ‘Dude With a Problem’ Blueprint
John Carpenter came from that ’70s tradition often summed up as “dudes with a problem.” It’s a holdover from old Westerns: your lone man against impossible odds. You can see that DNA in almost everything Carpenter ever made… Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, The Thing, even They Live.
But Halloween flips the formula. The “dude with a problem” isn’t the protagonist this time. Loomis isn’t the hero… Laurie Strode is. He’s the obsessed supporting character orbiting her story, a man so consumed by evil that he’s become almost unhinged himself.
Carpenter wrote Loomis like the ghost of the Western hero, grizzled, doomed, obsessed, but dropped him into a suburban slasher.
Loomis: The Man Who Hates Evil Itself
Loomis spends eight years trying to reach Michael, and another seven making sure no one else ever does. That’s fifteen years of a man losing faith in his own profession. At some point, he stops being a psychiatrist and becomes something closer to an exorcist.
When he finally confronts Michael again, he doesn’t hesitate. He empties his gun… six shots, maybe seven… right into him. There’s no moral wrestling, no “we can help him.” Just conviction that this thing in front of him isn’t human anymore.
And that’s where the lines blur. Because if you think about it, Loomis is just as unrelenting, just as possessed by purpose, as the killer he’s chasing. By the time he’s hunting Michael through the streets, yelling about “Evil on two legs,” you start to wonder if Loomis is even capable of stopping.
On a side tangent, this is also something the new trilogy of sequels wants to take away from us. Loomis missing his shots. It changes everything. Let me reiterate, beacuse that may have come across mildly for all the blind 2018 and sequels lovers out there. IT CHANGES EVERYTHING.
The Doctor and the Boogeyman
That’s why Halloween still works after all these years. It isn’t just the mask, the score, or the atmosphere it’s the collision of two kinds of evil: Michael’s silent, unstoppable force and Loomis’s manic obsession to destroy it.
Michael is the boogeyman. Loomis is the man who made hunting the boogeyman his religion.
And maybe that’s why Donald Pleasence’s performance still feels electric. He’s not playing a hero, he’s playing a man who’s become part of the same nightmare he’s trying to end.
The Bedroom Moment
He’s spent fifteen years staring into the abyss, and when he finally faces it again, he doesn’t hesitate. No words, no warning, just the sound of his footsteps pounding up the stairs. He bursts into the bedroom after seeing Tommy and Lindsey running into the street, sees Michael, raises that hand cannon, and fires.
That’s not a doctor anymore. That’s a man who’s become part of his own diagnosis.
Maybe next time, we’ll dive deeper into how Loomis changes through the sequels, how his obsession evolves, hardens, and finally burns out by The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). But for now, think about that moment: the doctor who once wanted to help a boy is now hunting a ghost he created himself.
And somewhere, you have to wonder when he looked down that barrel, did he see Michael? Or did he see himself?