Film Review: Halloween

In the 40 years after John Carpenter’s Halloween unleashed Michael Myers onto the pop culture landscape, we’ve gotten sequels, knock-offs, parodies, remakes, the influence of the property is endless. So, it was only a matter of time before we got one of those “rebootquels” that Hollywood is obsessed over these days.

The new – and obnoxiously titled – Halloween takes place 40 years after the events of the original, wiping all over sequels from canon. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has become a paranoid recluse, living in a fortified home in the woods, away from her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), who she lost custody of when she was 12, though she still occasionally meets with and gets along with her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). However, it turns out her preparation is about to pay off when a bus transporting Michael Myers (Nick Castle/James Jude Courtney), crashes, and he escapes, thus beginning a new rampage through Haddonfield, Illinois.

David Gordon Green directs the film, which co-wrote it with Danny McBride, and Jeff Fradley. John Carpenter serves as executive producer, and even provided the score along with Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies. It’s clear that this was made to bring the series back to its roots, and deliver the same thrill that made Carpenter’s film so effective. Green and his cinematographer, Michael Simmonds, use a lot of Carpenter’s tricks, such as hiding The Shape in the background, tracking characters around, building tension in slow, methodical ways before the kills come. There’s no doubt this was made by people who got the original.

They even explore some new ideas. The big one being how the violence that Laurie experienced all those years ago would affect her over time. The toll of that violence shows in all her actions, and Curtis does a wonderful job at embracing all the pain and ugliness that comes in dealing with that kind of trauma, and how it affects her relationships. Greer and Matichak also have a compelling dynamic, with both of them fully on board with tackling the complex and emotionally driven theme of grappling with pain and how it can break people apart as well as bring them together.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really do much work in exploring these ideas. It has a few scenes that deal with them head on, but fail to deliver a satisfying payoff beyond the obvious beats that don’t feel as earned as they should be. The whole film is full of half-realized ideas. There are several moments spent with Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), who has a strange fascination with Myers, and everything he babbles about doesn’t go anywhere. And any thematic threads that the film weaves during the first act is more or less forgotten about so we can have an extended sequence where we get to see Myers kill a bunch of teenagers. It’s not bad, but it’s strange for a film that seems to be interested in more weighty thematic stuff to simply drop everything and go back to schlocky territory. It’s like the film has an identity crisis, it wants to satisfy the no-nonsense thrills of recent slasher efforts like The Strangers: Prey At Night and Hell Fest, but then decides at random that it wants to be “about something.” At a mere hour and 45 minutes, the story is told and paced like a no frills slasher, so the themes don’t quite resonate as strongly since so little time is spent on them.

But I doubt those problems will bother most fans of the franchise. In many ways, it’s like the Force Awakens of the series, remixing various images and iconography from various entries, and recontextualizing them in its own distinct way. It’s full of moments designed for fans to go, “Oh, I remember that,” and it’s got its fair share of crowd-pleasing beats. At times, it feels like these moments get in the way of a far more interesting story about three generations of women united by pain and trauma. It’s also not fair that a much better exploration of this theme was done just recently with The Haunting of Hill House miniseries on Netflix.

I kept my expectations in check, so I can’t really say Halloween was a disappointment, especially when you compare it to some of the really bad ones in the franchise. I do think it could’ve been a lot better if it was able to make up its mind as to what it wanted to do. If it wanted to be a simple slasher, be a simple slasher, or it had bigger, more thoughtful ambitions, it should should’ve taken its time to explore them. I wish we got more with Greer and Curtis, instead of having their backstory reduced to a brief monologue. But still, it’s not bad. I did have a good time, it’s great with a crowd, it has a great sense of humor, it’s well made, and in a way, it did exactly what it needed to do, even if there’s a better movie inside trying to crawl its way out.