Title:
Halloween
What Year?: 2018
Classification:
Weird Sequel
Rating:
That’s Good! (4/4)
As I write this, it’s the end of a week off, and I’ve been going through leftovers from Halloween. That happened to bring me back to something I had considered during my informal survey of the slasher genre. It’s one of the more recent entries in the long list of genre film remakes, which for once was both good and well-received at the time. It also happened to be quite possibly the one film that got me interested enough to look into slashers far enough to lay the groundwork for this feature. I present Halloween, 2018 edition, the horror reboot that people liked.
Our story begins with a couple reporters investigating the tale of Michael Myers and Laurie Stroud, 40 years after their fateful encounter. It turns out that Michael is back in the asylum (which really should have been closed around the time he was eclipsed by Jason and Freddy), still not saying a word, while Laurie has become a survivalist shut-in on the outs with her adult daughter. Right when she is trying to reach out to her only grandchild, Michael escapes during a transfer between facilities. His new doctor teams up with an old lawman who witnessed his first rampage for a manhunt as Michael ramps up his mayhem. But what he’s really after is a rematch with the woman who bested him, and Laurie has had 40 years to prepare. It all comes down to a showdown at her new place- if she can get her family together first!
Halloween was a 2018 film by Miramax, produced as both a direct sequel and franchise reboot to the 1978 film of the same name. It was at least the second remake/ reboot, following the 2007 film by Rob Zombie. The film was directed by David Gordon Green, from a script cowritten with Danny McBride and Jeff Bradley. Jamie Lee Curtis (see Terror Train, Everything Everywhere All At Once) returned as Laurie Strode, with Judy Greer and Andi Matchak as her daughter and granddaughter. The role of Michael Myers was given to James Jude Courtney. Nick Castle, the actor/ stuntman who played the villain in the original film, also briefly appeared in the role. John Carpenter (Dark Star, They Live, The Thing, etc) received credit for the film’s music. The movie was well-received by fans and critics. It received two sequels, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, in 2021 and 2022.
For my experiences, I already pretty well recounted my arc reviewing Halloween 3. (See also Sleepaway Camp while you're at it...) Up to 2018, I was aware of the franchise but had respectfully declined to look into it. When the reboot came out, I decided to watch it and the original film. The curious thing is, even with my usual world’s-worst-superpower memory, I can’t say for sure which I saw first. What I do remember with striking clarity is that there were several points where I recognized references to the original film (and for that matter the second one) while watching the reboot in the theater. That in itself is a striking testimony to the groundwork that those involved were building on. Whether or not you ever saw the first film, even whether or not you knew if you saw it, you knew of it. The foundation of the present film was that the filmmakers took that for granted and built it into a shared inside joke. The vaguely embarrassing part is that, as the quasi-parody of Twitch of the Death Nerve, the results compare startlingly well with its “straight” predecessors.
Moving forward, what is established from the opening scenes is a post-modern feel that was arguably there all along. The elemental strength of Carpenter’s original lay in a story that was theoretically cliched even then, in fact seemingly drawn from “urban legends” at least as it was from “proto-slasher” films up to that point. The present film builds on the secular implications with “meta” commentary on the media and the vastly changed “real-life” landscape; the horrors of Michael’s night out are now almost quaint, a point driven home early and explicitly in the kids’ dialogue. It’s debatable whether it is a matter of irony or merely conceding to trends that the body count is raised accordingly, resulting in more deaths by the time Michael gets his mask back than there were in the whole first film. Even then, there is an implicit contrast between his up-close methods and the randomized mayhem of more recent events. A good deal of further effort goes into making the slasher scenario relevant in the age of the internet and smart phones. There is indeed believability and tension in the many foul-ups and near-misses as Laurie and the authorities try to track both Michael and errant family members.
The real new ground is Laurie, simultaneously traumatized and hardened. It needs to be said that this isn’t that “unique”. Still, this is certainly a raw and believable take on the aftermath of trauma. Laurie was never a simple damsel in distress. By now, she has hardened herself to the point of becoming in some lights more of a cliché than she would have been if she had been written that way in the first place. The nuance lies in our glimpses of her everyday life. She jabs back at anyone who challenges the more obvious problems of her skewed worldview, and the story does not downplay that the doubters have a point. Yet, she still shows clear concern and moments of tenderness, especially with the granddaughter, and even a kind of maternal tone when addressing Michael. To me, it would have been more interesting to have her shown as a functional community activist, which is what I would consider the norm for the self-advocates I have met. As it is, there is a deeper mutual illogic. On one hand, barring certain lore that is downplayed if not quite rejected here, the idea that Michael would come after her again is just a wild guess. On the other, if it took almost 20 years for Michael to escape the first time, there’s no downside to living a normal life.
That brings me back around to Michael, and I have space to go a little longer. To me, slasher villains tend to be a weak link under ideal circumstances. As I have already repeatedly ranted, it was established with the giallo genre that the identity and motives of a killer were an interchangeable parts. In the Halloween series, I find that there is a tendency to acknowledge the conceit without quite freeing themselves from it. Michael is the perfect rejoinder to the fixation on the killer: He has no motive, no backstory that would change the story, and no perceptible human weaknesses, all because he is simply the vessel of a unspecified, potentially supernatural force of evil. The strange thing, which gets more frustrating when the franchise is considered as a whole, is that it has repeatedly been broadcast that he might be replaced, which would fit the implied philosophical and theological themes. In fact, of all the entries in the franchise (including the most recent), this is after Halloween 3 the one that comes closest to meaning it. When a certain character goes off the rails (someone recently pointed out to me I don’t do spoilers, but then I don’t really do much with movies that need them), we get a villain as intriguing as Michael. In the process, we get certain further questions about how Michael got loose in the first place. Ultimately, however, he’s only in the mix long enough to stop anyone from trying to dispatch the real star with some point-blank head trauma.
That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with the opening. It starts with the reporters entering the asylum, and the surprising part is that there is no effort to make it look gloomy or authoritarian. It’s just a well-lit, clean, clinical environment. They’re met by the doctor, who gives much of the exposition as he talks about Michael’s treatment. Most intriguingly, he insists that Michael can talk (though he “should” still be stuck around age 6), but “chooses not to”. They finally get to the central courtyard, which is possibly the most intriguing environment in the film, open, bright and even fairly colorful thanks to a red-and-white checkerboard. Michael is waiting in a delineated center square, which nobody is trying to keep him in and the doctor warns the visitors not to enter. The guy reporter approaches right to the edge and gets out the iconic mask, now grayed and grungy with age. There’s just a hint of a reaction as he calls out to the villain, finally saying fatefully, “Say something, Michael.” The only further response comes from the other inmates as they become agitated. Their reactions and sounds are mixed, as those with the right experience would expect, some unnerving, some just as disconcertingly incongruous, particularly one who sings “Figaro”. It’s a very effective sequence, and perhaps the perfect illustration of the seductive and almost always false attraction of madness.
In closing, I come back
to a question I have been working my way around: Is there a “best” slasher
movie? I would honestly say, by any technical measure, this one is the winner
hands down, if only because its budget and talent rise far above anything that
was being made in the timeframe of the original. With the field narrowed down
to “vintage” films, I would choose Halloween 2, which gets its own asterisk
for being effectively the second half of the same story as the first film. Again,
what lingers in my mind is what might have been if people had simply left well
enough alone and let things end with Michael emphatically and canonically dead.
As already noted, it wouldn’t have stopped the slasher juggernaut, but it would
have kept the present franchise different from the rest. With that, I can call my
project done and bid the genre a less-than-fond farewell for a while. Rest in pieces…
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