I’m sure if you were to ask David Gordon Green, he would insist that he has a great deal of affection for the entire Halloween series, from hospital showdowns to Stonehenge, from Thorn cult to Busta Rhymes. And to be fair, Green’s latest entry, titled only Halloween (the third film in the series with that title, after John Carpenter’s inimitable original and Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake) is stuffed with Easter eggs both blatant (hi Silver Shamrocks masks!) and extremely subtle to virtually every entry that has come between Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece and today.
Still, it’s hard to watch the opening credits play out over the image of a rotted, flattened pumpkin slowly rising back to its leering glory and not feel like Green and his collaborators (including regular partner Danny “Kenny Fucking Powers” McBride as co-writer) have called their shot. There have been many, many attempts by many, many people to lay a hand on the lightning that John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and their motley crew of up-and-comers and slumming character actors captured in a bottle over 40 years ago, but this, those credits seem to promise, is the true successor to the Halloween legacy.
Does the movie live up to that promise?
Mostly!
Halloween ’18, now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD, erases all previous sequel from continuity and starts from scratch. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis returning for a final battle with Michael Myers for the [checks notes] fourth time) is no longer deathless killing machine Michael Myers’ long lost sister, as she has been ever since Halloween II retconned that familial bond into existence. Instead, Laurie was just some regular teenage girl whose world was shattered one horrible night 40 years ago, and she has spent the intervening decades trapped in that moment of fear, convinced that one day Michael Myers will once again escape from the asylum and return to Haddonfield to finish his dark work.
Laurie’s obsession (and intensive survivalist training and prepping) ruined her relationship with her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), getting so bad that Karen has taken steps to keep her daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) as far away from Laurie as possible.
But terror begins to rise when a pair of true crime podcast hosts (Jefferson Hall, Rhian Rees) come to town hoping to re-open the case and learn the ‘truth’ about the so-called Boogeyman. Their arrival seems to wake something up in Michael (this time played by James Jude Courtney with an assist from Nick “I co-wrote Hook” Castle, the first ever Michael) and it’s not long before he is on the loose once again and quickly re-equipped with his trusty knife and deformed Shatner-mask (Sidenote: One of the weirdest things about the Halloween franchise is that even though the mask is one of the signature pieces of iconography in American horror, they have never once been able to make it look half-decent after that first movie. Look at H20 [the other time Jamie Lee Curtis came back to play a traumatized, paranoid Laurie Strode having a final showdown with Michael Myers], a perfectly functional and well-crafted slasher weighed down by a mask that legit looks worse than something you would buy off the shelf).
Soon it’s all-out chaos in Haddonfield with Laurie, Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), and Michael’s new psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) racing to end Michael’s bloody rampage.
And it sure does get bloody. Carpenter’s original Halloween is notorious for being virtually blood-free, relying instead on suspense and atmosphere to keep audiences wired with fright. While Halloween ’18 has a lot of fun recreating and tweaking elements of the first film, that’s one element they discarded. Skulls are caved in like rotten pumpkins, necks are snapped into pieces, decapitated heads are used as home-made Halloween props. Michael’s practically a performance artist out of Hannibal this time, turning his various murders into arts and crafts projects like you’d see on HGTV.
Of course, Green isn’t the first person to up the carnage (though Halloween ’18 does apparently feature the highest body count of the franchise), with Rob Zombie in particular seeming to take repulsive pride in seeing just how brutal he could make a Michael Myers kill. Here, Green walks a delicate line of making sure the deaths are shocking and upsetting while maintaining an overall fun tone. You want to be shaken up by a horror movie, but no one goes to see a Halloween movie because they want to stare into the abyss of humanity’s insignificance against the certainty of death (Rob didn’t get that memo). There are boundaries crossed in this movie that genuinely surprised me, but they are all shot through with a showman’s gleeful audacity.
Much of that tone comes from the sense that Green, McBride, and co-writer Jeff Fradley possess a canny understanding of slasher movie structure which they can twist and tweak. There are characters who seem like they have to be marked for death that pull through untouched, and there are characters who seem like they will be major players that the movie disposes of quickly with little ceremony.
I enjoy a well-done slasher as much as the next horror fan, providing the next horror fan can also sing all the words to “The Ballad of Harry Warden” right now, a capella, as I am doing while writing this, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there is something just a little disappointing about Halloween ’18 settling for being ‘just’ a really, really well-executed version of a slasher movie. In its best moments (aka anytime Jamie Lee Curtis is onscreen), Halloween ’18 flirts with true greatness, examining trauma, both physical and psychic, in a way that still feels revelatory even as other slasher films (including other films in this same series) have mined similar territory. Curtis was so remarkably vulnerable and empathetic in that original film, and it is heartbreaking to see echoes of that same lovely girl hiding behind the angry, terrified ruin stalking the perimeter of this tale.
Yet the film continuously abandons Laurie on that perimeter so it can instead build extended sequences around Michael Myers sneaking up on people so he can kill them in creative ways. And I have nothing against watching Michael Myers sneak up on people and kill them in creative ways, but the material with Curtis, Greer, and Matichak grappling with Laurie’s trauma and how it has impacted all the lives around her is so much more compelling than that. Greer in particular feels short-changed in a movie in which she is second-billed, suggesting a richer and more complex horror film than the stalk-and-slash that takes up the majority of the runtime.
You can feel that greatness really shining through in the film’s climax, which I will not spoil here. I will say this: In this, and the other best stretches of the film, Halloween ’18 feels as skillful and in its remixing/reimagining/reworking of its forebearer as Creed, and as riotously satisfying as any horror movie I’ve seen since It: Chapter 1. If Halloween ’18 is satisfied to be ‘just’ a fun rollercoaster ride of a movie, it’s wise enough to end on the strongest possible note and send you out the door satisfied beyond belief.
Technically, Halloween ’18 is one gorgeous movie. Green has always had a fantastic eye, even in his shaggy comedy stuff like Pineapple Express. He and cinematographer Michael Simmonds make a four-course meal out of the Halloween season, celebrating the look and feel in a way that Carpenter’s budget forbid. I wish Green opened his frame up more and utilized that incredible wideWideWIDE screen that Carpenter milked for all it was worth, but he has a lot of fun painting in shades of shadow and blood as Michael’s killing spree continues.
But the absolute best part of the film is the new score composed by Carpenter, his son Cody, and his godson/bandmate Daniel Davies. Carpenter came back to supervise Halloween ’18 after sitting out the franchise completely after the underrated Season of the Witch, and this is his first credited score since 2001’s Ghost of Mars. Re-tooling his own iconic Halloween theme, Carpenter and his boys give the film a throbbing, electric pulse that will send you both jolting with surprise and alarm, and cheering with exhilaration. Again, it reminds me almost of Creed, inasmuch as these filmmakers understand the almost Pavlovian hold this music holds on the culture, and they deploy it surgically.
While the film holds up strong on disc, the disc itself is something of a letdown. I was hoping for a commentary track from Green and Carpenter, if only to find out how Kurt Russell’s son’s hockey team is doing these days (this joke is for five people, if that) but no dice. There are a couple of featurettes, but they’re short and don’t contain anything especially revelatory (if you want that, go listen to Amy Nicholson’s masterful Halloween: Unmasked, a fantastic podcast series hosted by Ringer that examines the history and legacy of the original Halloween in exhaustive detail).
John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of those definitive classics that will never be bettered, much less equaled. But in the long history of messy, bizarre, head-scratching attempts to relive The Night He Came Home, Halloween ’18 stands out as a handsome, exciting, and wildly satisfying follow-up. I fully expect this to enter my comfort food rotation of horror, and really that’s the highest recommendation I know to give.