Halloween (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: For the past 40 years since the massacre in Haddonfield, serial killer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) has been locked up in a mental hospital. However, when the bus meant to transfer him to another hospital crashes, it seems that Michael is now on the loose and coming back to finish what he started. As he slashes his way back home, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) prepares as she has for the last 40 years to take down this vicious monster once and for all.

Even with Curtis’ previous returns to the series that made her famous, all of which have now been retconned out of existence, it’s hard to imagine Laurie Strode turning out any differently than she is presented here. Traumatized, bloody-minded and chiselled into a warrior made only to stop the creature that nearly killed her 40 years prior, Curtis is absolutely phenomenal here as she lets every syllable push just how much damage she has experienced as a result of her first encounter with The Shape. Castle, also reprising his role from the original as Michael Myers (with James Jude Courtney as stunt double), still carries that loping, steadfast menace that made him slice his way into the collective consciousness all those years ago.

Judy Greer and Andi Matichak as Laurie’s daughter and grand-daughter respectively do amazingly well at showing how Laurie’s trauma echoed through the generations, showing them as equally afraid of the beast that stalks them but also prepared by Laurie in case he… it ever came back. Greer especially knocks it out of the park, making for one of the film's most outright badass moments when it comes time for her to face Michael. Will Patton as the local policeman makes for some solid moments of tension, Rhian Rees and Jefferson Hall as two journalists investigating the original crime fill their voyeuristic roles quite nicely, and Haluk Bilginer as Michael’s new psychiatrist shows a very different look at how that much observance of a purely evil mind can do to a person, one that lets him comfortably stand out alongside Donald Pleasance.

The original Halloween is a culturally significant film for a number of reasons, not the least of which being how it revitalised the slasher genre and paved the way for night hunters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. However, what made him work so effectively is due to something so simple, so pure and so embarrassingly straight-forward that it feels like barely anyone even managed to figure out the secret. The secret is something that the original film, and this follow-up in turn, actually made perfectly clear to all in attendance: Michael Myers is evil. There is nothing to be reasoned with, nothing to be rationalised, nothing to be redeemed; he simply is evil in its most primal and destructive form.

It’s such a good idea to be wielded in the slasher genre, one where the villains often got the lion’s share of screen time over their victims, but something within the cultural mindset couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t possibly just be evil, could he? I mean, he’s still a human being; how is a single human being capable of being this malicious? Outside of the film’s universe, filmmakers spent decades trying to decode the reasons for Michael’s actions. The film’s sequels brought in elements of familial struggle, making Strode to be Michael’s sister to help explain things, and even went so far as to include literal magic and blood rituals to explain Michael’s murderous ways. Hell, the Rob Zombie films went so far to rationalise his killings that not only did Rob try and make him sympathetic (bad idea) but also made him into just another Jason Voorhees with mommy issues (even worse idea).

 

And this isn’t exclusive to our side of the screen either, and at least within the film itself, that was part of the point: No one wants to believe that evil like this actually exists. No one wants to believe that a child would be capable of murder, as was shown in the original’s classic opening. No one wants to believe that a person… no, a creature beyond human rationality, exists that cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. It exists solely to end lives, one body at a time.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that the film’s decision to retcon everything save for the original film from continuity makes a lot of sense, both in narrative and in staying true to what made the original work so damn well. Writer/director David Gordon Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley show an astoundingly level of understanding of what makes Michael Myers so fucking scary, depicting him far less as a human being and more like a force of nature. And opposite him, we have Laurie Strode, who serves as the human counterpoint to that level of forceful action. She also shows a one-track-mindedness in her actions, only those actions exist to stop Michael Myers should he ever return. There’s no reasoning with her that Michael is still human and shouldn’t be killed; he has to be killed, because nothing else will stop him. The only tangible difference between them is that, unlike Michael, Laurie has a reason for what she’s done. She has seen what Michael is capable of, and she is still feeling the soul rattle of her last encounter with him to this day. She doesn’t want herself, her family or anyone else in Haddonfield to have to suffer the machinations of this creature.

This is something that ends up being brought directly into the foreground during the initial scenes with the journalists trying to learn the Michael Myers story, complete with encountering Michael himself in a mental hospital courtyard that is framed like an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare, what with the checkerboard floor and what not. They show themselves to be so much more enamoured with Michael, the killer who no human being has managed to map out the psyche of, than any of his very human and (mostly) very dead victims. It ends up reflecting the reality of the franchise, and the cultural fascination with it, in rather unsettling ways. We’ve spent so long trying to figure out who The Shape really is… but we’ve spent far less time trying to figure out who Laurie is. Far as most filmgoers were concerned, she was just a babysitter in the wrong place at the wrong time, one of the few alive to tell of the monster that stalked her neighbourhood. The monster that everyone showed far greater interest in learning about and attempting to understanding. All that pretence of wanting to find the humanity in the truly evil, and yet we somehow overlooked the humanity in the truly righteous alongside it.

It’s the kind of indictment of the slasher genre, and its partakers, that would normally fall into outright insulting its own audience… and yet, while still making its point incredibly clear, it avoids that for two main reasons. One, because Laurie Strode has been fleshed out into a truly three-dimensional character, one whose motives are both simple and entirely understandable given her past. And two, because the filmmakers know full well that there is a reason why these films scare people, beyond just the original Halloween, and they certainly do their utmost to reflect that here. Gordon Green’s direction, combined with Michael Simmonds’ camera work and Tim Alverson’s very precise editing, give the film a rather rustic aesthetic, showing the world 40 years after Michael’s debut to be quite different in a few places but utterly the same in most others.

Same goes for the soundtrack, with John Carpenter himself returning alongside his son Cody and frequent collaborator Daniel Davies, who bring that iconically chilling piano score while letting those familiar synths and even guitars roar and rumble underneath it. It toes this weird line between updating for the times and trying to make itself as timeless as the original, and it succeeds in quite glorious fashion. Sure, it carries that Blumhouse mark of quite vicious displays of gore, but much like Myers himself, it never drags out the murder for longer than absolutely necessary. It’s sharp, it’s brutal, it’s frequently quite graphic, but never exploitative or used to the point of tedium. It is, quite frankly, as pure a slasher flick as Myers himself is as a slasher.

All in all, this is pretty much the perfect sequel to John Carpenter’s original. The acting is bloody fantastic, with Jamie Lee Curtis giving the performance that she seems born to play as the much older and much more vengeful Laurie Strode, the direction allows for pure translation of the original’s suburban aesthetic while giving it a more modern flair, and the writing fleshes out Laurie’s character to a tremendous degree as the counterpoint to the very real, very confronting and very inhuman force that is Michael Myers. This film being released now, 40 years later, only ends up adding to its effect, as it highlights how good the idea of The Shape works as a murderous character and how its simplicity became something that everyone, both outside and inside of the film itself, seemed unable or unwilling to accept as demonstrably and unmistakably evil.