Halloween

Halloween, the latest film in one of horror’s most persistent franchises, makes a smart choice. Coming 40 years after John Carpenter’s much-imitated 1978 original, it’s set 40 years after the events in that film, and serves as its sequel. Meaning, its unlikely makers, writer/director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride — yes, the creative pair behind both All The Real Girls and Eastbound & Down — have essentially made a sequel. Meaning that they’ve wisely decided to pretend as if the previous nine films in the franchise, from the by-numbers VHS-core ’80s instalments to the dreadful Rob Zombie ’00s ‘reimaginings’, never really existed.

Wiping the sequelising slate clean is a great start —as is bringing back a doomy synth score by Carpenter— but it would’ve been better if this Halloween had redressed more of the clichés of the slasher genre, and the sins of the original. Do we, in 2018, really need teenagers getting stabbed to death for the great moral crime of pre-marital sexual activity? Does the franchise’s unspeaking, unfeeling, inexpressive ultra-villain Michael Myers still have to be an unstoppable killing-machine; possessing super-human strength even though he’s a 61-year-old man who has barely moved for four solid decades? Do all the luckless souls in its fictional shrine to bucolic small-town Americana, Haddonfield, Illinois, still have to be so fucking stupid?

The stupidity begins in that most 2018 of ways: with a true-crime podcast. Mocking the conventions of true crime is definitely ripe for satire, but here the self-important podcasters are too broadly/badly drawn. The his/her pair boast —in their toffee English accents— of their “award-winning” work as “investigative journalists”, but their podcast —were they not soon to be dispatched by our anti-hero, in a public toilet, as punishment for their haughtiness— would be borderline unlistenable. The pair record their narration not in a studio, but whilst driving in a car, in a windy graveyard, and walking the alarm-festooned halls of a high-security asylum.

They pay Jamie Lee Curtis —reprising her character from the original— $3,000 for an interview (journalism!), then ask her a couple of entry-level questions before she shuts them down. And their chosen serial-killer is famous for saying nothing; a sequel to The Jinx this shan’t be. Perhaps feeling frustrated at the futility —and imminent failure— of this podcasting venture, the bearded male half (Jefferson Hall), upon granting access to see the whilst-he’s-still-locked-up Michael Myers, repetitively screams “say something!” at his unspeaking/unmoving subject.

From there, the stupidity moves to the Haddonfield police department, who —embodied in the form of Will Patton’s tottering old deputy— display a unique mix of poor decision-making skills, cluelessness, malpractice, and chronic understaffing. Whilst real American police-forces are being turned into hyper-militaristic units, liable to bring a tank to a peaceful protest or send in a SWAT team to take down a solitary tweaker, here the handful of cops are resolutely old-timey. Meaning: the kind of people who’ll speak aloud the cliché —“Michael Myers loose in Haddonfield with a bunch of nutbags on Halloween night?”— but not think of keeping kids from trick-or-treating when a superhuman serial-killer who murders on Halloween has escaped; who’ll care more about protecting the life of a random but plot-important teenage girl (Andi Matichak, playing Curtis’s granddaughter) than trying to apprehend the bloodthirsty killing-machine wandering local streets.

In keeping with slasher-flick inflation, the body-count in this Halloween is out of control. In the original, there’s only five deaths; here, I lost count trying to keep up. We meet charming, well-drawn, instantly humanised characters —attractive babysitters, stoner boyfriends, pathetic teen pick-up artists, bánh-mì-eating cops— only to find them swiftly dispatched in increasingly-elaborate ways. Myers may not talk, feel, or stop to take a piss, but he evidently has time to impale a chubby teenager on a wrought-iron fence, or to, um, hollow out the insides of a policeman’s skull and insert a flashlight in his neck to make a creepy real-man jack-o-lantern; an endeavour that could take hours, not to mention a serious amount of invention, imagination, and handiwork (again, by a 61-year-old man who has barely moved for 40 years).

These deaths really aren’t in service of any great parable or point; Myers forever — except in those dreadful Rob Zombie ’00s ‘reimaginings’— a blank-slate, some personality-free embodiment of evil. Given his targets, in the original, were all young women, you could make a case he’s the manifestation of cultural misogyny, and, in turn, that Green is out to combat that. Here, the finalé is foreshadowed, from the beginning, as a years-in-the-making showdown between the masked villain and his former victim. The gender-studies quality of this is made forthright by the fact that, come climax, it’s three generations of women —Curtis, Judy Greer, Matichak— uniting to stand up to this ultra-violent old man.

Yet, any kind of progressive politics are counteracted by what, at first, seems like a thoughtful piece of writing. Curtis’s character is depicted as having spent 40 years suffering from the events of that long-ago Halloween night, dealing with PTSD, seeing a boogeyman (but, sadly, not a Boogie Man) lurking in every shadow. In turn, she’s become a gun-nut living in an isolated fortress, stockpiling guns, canned goods, and, um, creepy mannequins. Given the inevitable finale where Myers does indeed come calling, her cache of weapons is proven a wise investment, our off-the-grid/hands-off-my-guns vigilante eventually vindicated for her years of paranoid persecution, doomsday prep, and NRA membership.

When this end comes, and the showdown does go down it feels final. But, given the amount of cash Halloween made upon its US release, this resolution will clearly resolve nothing; a sequel to this sequel to a 40-year-old original surely on its way ASAP. Let’s hope, next time, there’ll be more smart choices, less on-screen stupidity.