How Halloween Got Samhain So Wrong (and Weirdly Right)
Tsk, tsk, that painful reminder of the Curse of Thorn in Halloween 5 & 6. If you’ve been following along with these Halloween deep dives, from carved turnips to candy empires, you already know the modern holiday owes a lot to Celtic tradition, at least in spirit. But by the time Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers rolled around, Hollywood had turned that ancient folklore into full blown druid conspiracy fanfic.
The so-called Curse of Thorn tried to explain why Michael kills. Turns out, it wasn’t just pure evil, it was… a cult? A constellation? A rune carved on his wrist? Let’s break down what the films actually tell us, then see how much of it holds up against real Samhain lore.
What the Films Actually Say
In Halloween II (1981):
Before the Thorn mythology took root, Michael breaks into an elementary school and leaves the word SAMHAIN scrawled in blood across a chalkboard beside a child’s crayon drawing of a family with a knife through it. Loomis shows up and gives his infamous lecture:
“Samhain. It means ‘the Lord of the Dead. The end of summer. The festival of Samhain.’”
It’s a chilling scene, but Loomis was dead wrong. Samhain was never a god, never a “Lord of the Dead.” It was a time, not a deity.
In Halloween 5 (1989):
A mysterious Man in Black appears, long coat, steel tipped boots, and the same rune tattoo on his wrist as Michael. He frees Michael from a police station massacre with zero explanation.
In Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995):
We finally get the backstory: a secret Cult of Thorn that worships an ancient constellation tied to the rune. Each generation, one child bears the Curse of Thorn, compelled to kill their family as a sacrifice to protect the tribe from death and destruction.
Dr. Wynn (yep, the guy from the first film) reveals he’s part of the cult, explaining that Michael is a vessel for an ancient evil passed down since druid times, his killings are ritualistic, triggered when the constellation of Thorn appears each Samhain.
By this point, we’re knee-deep in robed cult territory.
What Samhain Actually Meant
In reality, Samhain (pronounced sow-in) wasn’t a person or a curse, it was the Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter, literally “summer’s end.”
It was about honoring ancestors, not slaughtering kin. People left offerings of food and drink to welcome beloved spirits and keep misfortune at bay. The “veil between worlds” was thin, yes, but it wasn’t a blood holiday, it was a night of remembrance, firelight, and divination.
So when Loomis calls Samhain “the Lord of the Dead,” that’s pure cinematic invention, but a brilliant one. Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to give Michael’s rampage an ancient echo, a sense of mythic inevitability. And even if the details were wrong, the feeling was right: that primal fear of darkness returning, of something unstoppable moving through the night.
How It Got Twisted
Almost none of what the movies say about Samhain holds up, but like most good horror myths, there’s a little truth buried under all that blood and rune dust.
The Thorn rune? It’s real, but not Celtic, it comes from the Norse Elder Futhark alphabet and represents chaos, danger, or giants. The filmmakers probably picked it because it looked ancient and ominous, not because it had any druidic meaning.
As for the Cult of Thorn itself, there’s no record of any Celtic sect sacrificing a “chosen child” to save a tribe. Samhain did involve animal offerings, but not ritualized murder. The “evil mark” and “constellation” were total inventions, Hollywood superstition stitched together from Norse runes, medieval witch panics, and a dash of Satanic Panic for good measure.
That said, the idea of a curse passed down through generations isn’t completely off base. In Celtic mythology, people could be bound by geasa, magical taboos that doomed them if broken. It’s more about fate than possession, but it’s probably where the writers got the seed of the idea.
So while the movies mashed up history like a druid smoothie, they did land on one emotional truth: Samhain was about inevitability. The end of the harvest, the death of the year, the sense that something old and cold was coming whether you liked it or not.
Closing Thoughts
The Curse of Thorn isn’t fascinating because it’s true, it’s fascinating because it shows how badly Hollywood wants every mystery to have an origin story. The real Samhain didn’t need one. Its power came from what it didn’t explain: the dark, the cold, and the idea that something might come for you and no one would ever know why.
So yeah, Halloween 6 gave us runes, constellations, and cult robes, but maybe Carpenter had it right the first time:
some evil just is.