Summary
A welcome return to form – and to Jamie Lee Curtis! Filled with references to past entries and the faithful fan community, this is both a fitting conclusion and a new beginning for a franchise that’s now middle-aged.
In the forty years since the original Halloween, the tropes and tricks of the horror classic have become staples of the genre. So writers Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and director David Gordon Green’s reverential take doesn’t feel like a sequel so much as a natural continuation of John Carpenter’s work. This, as it turns out, is a double-edged kitchen knife.
Tapping into the zeitgeist of the true crime podcast fad, an intrepid duo of journalists travel to Haddonfield, Illinois to interview Michael Myers on the 40th anniversary of ‘The Babysitter Murders.’ It sets the scene with an incredibly tense, if somewhat nonsensical, sequence set in a stylish and (almost otherworldly) prison yard. Meanwhile, a traumatised Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) now lives in an isolated and secure bunker, transformed into the horror film equivalent of Terminator 2‘s Sarah Connor.
The slickly contemporary setup only works by fudging the end of the 1978 original, and ignores the often contradictory chronology of the 11 films to date. In fact, it’s worthwhile looking at this as at least the third branch of the Halloween Multiverse. Gone is Jamie Lloyd, Laurie’s daughter from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. Indeed, Laurie being Michael’s sister is written off as an urban ‘myth’ in a cheeky bit of meta-commentary. Instead, Laurie’s estranged daughter Karen (the wonderful Judy Greer) suffers her own PTSD from growing up with a survivalist mother. Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is more sympathetic.
Unsurprisingly, a series of events leads Michael Myers/The Shape back to Haddonfield, and we are back on more familiar territory. The 2018 version of The Shape is less discriminating than his 1978 counterpart, just murdering folks who happen to be in his path. In one scene, Michael slays a random Haddonfieldian seemingly for no other reason than to exchange his whacking hammer for a kitchen knife. This reckless abandon when it comes to violence on screen is par for the course in modern horror, although constant escalation still manages to make the murders in the back half of the film comparatively gruesome.
So it’s with some relief that the vast majority of these slayings avoid the violence against women that genre has become known for, whether rightly or wrongly. David Gordon Green carefully hands out the deaths with at least some justification based on a character’s jerkiness, although boneheaded decisions still seem to be the leading cause of injury in Haddonfield.
Having said that, Will Patton as an aging cop (known to some as the voice of Stephen King’s Bill Hodges) is a star player here. Haluk Bilginer as Dr. Ranbir “The New Loomis” Sartain is a bit one-note, although it’s unlikely anybody would ever match up to Donald Pleasance, who made a heroic effort by appearing in no less than four series sequels.
Filled with visual and audio cues to the original – including a phenomenal soundtrack by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies – what HALLOWEEN does more than anything is take the ‘final girl’ tropes that Halloween helped create and flip them on their head. While spoiling the ending would be a crime, it’s safe to say it is one of the most appropriate and satisfying conclusions to the series so far. But does anyone believe that Blumhouse will leave this alone? How about a Loomis prequel? The Purge V: Michael vs Glass! This stuff sells itself.
