WARNING: SPOILERS FOR HALLOWEEN (1978 and 2018) ABOUND BELOW
While the Halloween franchise has its share of fans who deeply love every film in the series, there is no denying that the original 1978 movie is the best of the lot. Even non-fanatics point to Halloween as a well-made film, not only within the horror genre, but where the general tenets of good filmmaking are concerned. Its pacing, its emphasis on mood, atmosphere, suspense, the brilliant simplicity of its boogeyman Michael Myers, its gorgeous cinematography, its characters, solid performances, and menacing score all combine to make it a classic. It also features one of the best stinger endings of all psychological horrors/thrillers—that this masked killer is no mere man, but something much more dangerous, much more primal, much more evil.
It’s incredibly hard to follow up a film of this caliber, but numerous filmmakers have tried over the last 40 years, including the original creators of Halloween, John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who, three years after the original’s release, infused their direct sequel with the gore and nudity already prevalent in the slasher subgenre Halloween helped create. This made Halloween II an imitation of its predecessor’s imitators, and as such, it failed to recapture the spirit of the first film. This was the case with every successive installment in the series: however hard they tried to make a good film (and many of them succeeded, while many of them did not), nothing ever really came close to the magic and artistry of the original Halloween.
All of that changed with the release of Halloween in 2018. Prior to the film hitting theaters, it had a ton of hype surrounding it: John Carpenter was back as Executive Producer and planned to score the film; Jamie Lee Curtis, too, returned to the role that made her famous, Laurie Strode. But there were other aspects that gave fans pause, especially the decision to produce a script written by Danny McBride and David Gordon Green and have the latter direct. Perhaps best known for their series of stoner comedies (Pineapple Express, Your Highness, etc.) as well as the HBO series East Bound and Down and Vice Principles, this pair seemed like the least capable of delivering the sequel Halloween fans had always wanted, a film that at least equaled its predecessor.
And yet, Gordon Green and McBride were perhaps exactly what this franchise needed. After all, Carpenter and Hill had not made a straight horror film prior to writing and producing Halloween. It was their first proper foray into the genre, and it made them rock stars, Carpenter especially. Gordon Green, moreover, helmed several straight dramas (Manglehorn, Stronger, and others) before coming onboard for Halloween. His penchant for creating character-driven, well-paced films, combined with McBride’s dark sense of humor and both men’s love of the original film, resulted in a new Halloween that not only beautifully resurrected the spirit of Carpenter and Hill’s breakout movie, but also fully delivers a perfect modern-day horror picture.
Despite being tonally and symbolically in sync with the original, McBride and Gordon Green’s film is not a remake of Halloween, nor is it a reimagining, a retooling, a recalibration, a reboot, etc. It is instead a direct sequel to the 1978 picture, ret-conning all other films in the franchise. And while there are numerous scenes and plot points taken directly from its predecessor (Michael escaping from Smith Grove, teenagers babysitting, teenagers partying, Michael reigning terror throughout Haddonfield, etc.), the film’s story is wholly its own. In fact, it borrows more heavily from the other sequels, excising and reworking the best elements from Halloween II through Halloween: Resurrection into a single, solid script. The distressed look of The Shape’s mask even harkens back to Rob Zombie’s remake of the original film, plus his wildly contentious sequel.
So what makes this new Halloween the perfect companion to its 1978 predecessor? Quite simply, it is the handling of Michael Myers himself. Gone are any motivations, any reasoning behind the monster’s mayhem. He is no longer Laurie Strode’s brother, nor is there a secret cult behind his killings. McBride and Gordon Green even seem to go so far as to say that any attempts to understand Michael’s insanity guarantees insanity in the investigator. The filmmakers present this idea in the form of Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), whom Laurie calls “the new Loomis” in the film. But Sartain is, in fact, Loomis’s exact opposite: the old doctor, played by Donald Pleasence, studied Michael for years and determined, finally, that he was not human, but an incarnation of pure evil; Sartain, on the other hand, believes so firmly there is some method to Michael’s madness, he willingly lets The Shape loose on Haddonfield just to see his patient “in the wild.” Sartain even commits murder himself in order to reunite Laurie and Michael, believing they somehow empower each other. His ultimate desire is to hear Michael speak, to “say something” about why he must kill; he uses his final words to once again plead with his patient to shed light on his motivations.
But Michael does not speak, and instead crushes Sartain’s poisoned mind with his boot. This is likely a reference to Zombie’s Halloween II, in which a similar kill occurs, but also a decided reversal of that film, the last time Michael Myers appeared on screen, in which the adult Shape utters a single word for the first time in the franchise’s history. Michael does not speak because, as Loomis always insisted, he isn’t human, and there is no reason he commits murder, other than, simply, to spread horror, to make people afraid. And that is the key here, the element that ties this film directly back to Carpenter and Hill’s original story. Michael is The Shape once again, a true, faceless, emotionless, dead-inside boogeyman. While people like Sartain believe there is something motivating him, Laurie—the true “new Loomis” here—knows that Michael cannot be understood, that he is adverse to reason, that he has no empathy. And while he loves to toy with his prey, he has no other thoughts, no other objectives, than slaughter on his mind.
With Michael’s boogeyman status fully reinstated, McBride and Gordon Green’s Halloween ends, fittingly, with a question mark hovering over the narrative. Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) cage and defeat Michael with fire, but as they speed away from the burning house that was once an ostensible prison for three generations of Strode women, the camera moves down and freezes on a bloody knife held by Allyson, a visual clue that, despite their triumph, the violence and trauma they’ve all endured for the past forty years will not magically go away. Further solidifying this, after the film’s end credits roll, we hear only one sound: Michael, behind his mask, breathing, a direct reference to the original film’s ending, in which Laurie survives the boogeyman, but evil does not die; it lives and breathes, literally, everywhere. This might be a tough pill to swallow, but especially in 2018, when it seems the very idea of safety is on the proverbial chopping block, it’s a message we need to hear. Just as Carpenter and Hill told us at the tail-end of the 70s, no matter how safe we think we are, there will always be evil. McBride and Gordon Green add to this basic message by further telling us, we must always be prepared for evil to show up at our doors.
Whether or not the new Halloween will spawn a sequel or two (or three or four) remains to be seen, though likely it will. However, fans of the franchise can rest assured that things are, finally, back on track. In 1978, the boogeyman was real, and now, forty years later, he has properly reemerged.
