I wasn’t going to post anything tonight, but I was searching through Netflix to find a good horror film and suddenly I noticed the title The Evolution of Us in the recently added section.

Since I love documentaries about evolution, I decided to click on it and the synopsis of the first two episodes came up.  Beside the description of episode two was the image of someone who looked exactly like Steve Hsu.  I clicked on episode two and started fast forwarding until the person appeared, and sure enough it was Steve Hsu being interviewed for this series.

I find it interesting how on Steve Hsu’s blog, he describes himself as “Physicist, Startup Founder, Blogger, Dad”.  So many people act like becoming a parent is their greatest accomplishment that it’s refreshing to see a parent who dares to mention that last.  Indeed it’s almost as if Steve’s listing his identities in order of intelligence.  Since being a physicist requires the most IQ, that’s listed first, but to quote Barack Obama, any fool can make a baby, so dad is listed last.

I’ve long argued that the original Michael Myers character (as conceived by John Carpenter, not to be confused with the Michael Myers of the Rob Zombie films) had an IQ around 90.

My logic is simple.  The average IQ of white Americans with zero years of completed education is likely 72 (borderline intelligence),  yet the average IQ of white siblings of the National merit finalists is 119 (Bright Normal intelligence).  Someone who belongs to both these groups has a statistically expected IQ of 91 (white norms).

Carpenter’s Myers arguably belongs to both groups.  He has zero years of completed education because he’s confined to a mental hospital at age six, where he spends the next 15 years just sitting in a room, staring at a wall, never speaking or moving.

And yet in Halloween II (1981) we learn that he’s the brother of heroine Laurie Strode.  We’re never told that Strode is a national merit finalist, but it’s likely she is.  She studies chemistry, is able to correctly answer her teacher’s question about fate despite not paying attention, and is always babysitting because guys think she’s too smart to date.  Add to that the fact that she’s played by Jamie Lee Curtis who is half Ashkenazi Jewish (a high IQ group), though it’s unlikely Strode is genetically Jewish since she’s supposed to be a Midwestern girl next door type, and these tend to be WASPs.

However David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) is a direct sequel to the original Halloween (1978) and ignores Halloween II (1981) and all the other sequels, which means Myers is no longer related Strode, and thus no longer shares her IQ DNA.  Thus he goes from being a zero education sibling of a National merit finalist, to just a guy with zero education, and as stated above, these average IQ 72.

Even though the film writers likely gave no thought to Myer’s IQ or what his relationship to Strode implies for it, it’s interesting how ignoring all the sequels not only lowers Myers’s likely IQ, but also causes his body count to drop precipitously (which is exactly what you’d expect since low IQ people are less competent at achieving all goals, even evil ones).

In Halloween II (1981), Myers was able to continue and more than double his killing spree after escaping from the mental hospital at age 21, but now that Halloween II (1981) is no longer canon,  Myers’s night of terror ended early, and he was returned to the mental hospital after killing only four people, and killed no one since until he was 61.  It seems like without Strode’s high IQ DNA, Myers is a far less prolific killer who shows none of the technical savvy he showed in the now defunct sequels such as inserting an I.V. drip into a nurse’s vein and draining of her blood.

Not only does this new timeline rob Myers of 19 IQ points, it also robs him of his autism.  When Myers had the bizarre sister obsession, I argued he showed classic autism, but with the sister plot removed from the story, he’s a more run-of-the-mill serial killer, but with an extremely low IQ.  Indeed you can tell from the grunting, whaling, and inefficient behavior in the classic closet scene in the original Halloween, that Myers was mentally disabled, while high IQ Strode was adaptable enough to turn the situation to her advantage (the ultimate measure of intelligence).

Nothing better than falling asleep to a good podcast.  Indeed I’ve reached the point where I almost can’t fall asleep without having a really good discussion to listen to.  If you’re a hardcore fan of the Halloween franchise, I can’t speak highly enough about the Halloweenies  podcasts at consequenceofsound.net.

These guys talk for three hours and 18 minutes about David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) (which they call Hallogreen, get it?) and it never gets dull, especially since they have the intelligence to realize it’s not a good movie.

You feel like you’re in the room with them, just hanging out with friends you’ve known your whole life (it helps that at least some of the hosts have been friends since childhood, where their Halloween obsession began) .   They have a whole series of three hour discussions devoted to different Halloween films which I can’t wait to listen to.

Many fans of the Halloween franchise would love to forget Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake (and its 2009 sequel) because it gave the mysterious slasher Michael Myers a backstory and turned him into white trash.  However I see Zombie’s versions as an interesting alternative and there’s something very creepy about a white trash family so consumed with their own dysfunction that a budding serial killer just gets lost in the chaos.  And from an HBD perspective, it’s only logical that someone as messed up as Michael Myers would be born in a low class home: the genetic garbage of society.

In the above scence, William Forsythe does a great job as Ronnie White, the boyfriend of Michael Myer’s mother.  It’s hilarious watching him mock the crying baby and the way young Michael says good morning to it.

While Myers’s mother is in denial, Ronnie has the social intelligence to realize young Michael is one messed up kid who will grow up to be some kind of freak, though not even he can see imagine the brutal monster Michael would one day become.

Mostly he just makes fun of young Michael for seeming gay.

If young Michael had been administered the WISC-R intelligence test, I think he would have scored around 80.  Obviously an IQ test can’t tell you a kid will grow up to be a serial killer, but it can roughly predict whether you will rise or fall in social class.

Since Michael had a low IQ in my opinion, even compared to other children of “white trash”, one would have predicted that he would fall even further in social class, which is exactly what happens.  Michael’s violent rage leads him to a life of mental hospitalization and in Zombie’s vastly underrated sequel, homelessness.  And low scores on certain Wechsler subtests, especially one involving verbal abstraction, might reveal young Michael’s detachment from reality.  Indeed Wechsler saw his scale as a psychiatric tool, in addition to an IQ test.