"Halloween Kills"

To celebrate the spooky season this October, I made it a personal project to watch a horror film every day for thirty-one days, the only rule being that none of them could be horror films I'd seen before. I watched a variety of pictures from the history of cinema, ranging from classic black-and-white Universal monster classics such as The Wolf Man and Son of Frankenstein through the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond up until the present day. About a third of the films I watched were instalments of the Halloween franchise, of which previously I'd only ever seen the first. Now I've seen all of them — every single one, with the exception of some different cuts — and I intend to do a rundown of the entire franchise as well. But to cap it off, film 31 on the 31st of October itself was the latest instalment in the franchise, Halloween Kills, the sequel to 2018's Halloween.

I only saw Halloween (2018) for the first time a few days ago, as of time of writing, and while well-made I felt like it suffered from the same problem that most of the sequels excluding perhaps Halloween 4 suffer from, which is the lack of characters about whom I really cared; you end up watching the film to see how Michael is going to kill people, and not because you particularly care if the notional protagonists escape or defeat him. I understand that the film wanted me to care about Laurie's daughter in that new timeline, Karen, and granddaughter, Allyson, but probably due to the fact that it was trying to introduce new characters as well as bringing back old ones and reintroducing the premise of the entire franchise for new audiences I felt like we just didn't get enough time to get to know them. I wanted to see Michael and Laurie, and that was about it. Laurie, incidentally feels absolutely nothing like the character from the original Halloween; I know the experience and forty years would change her, but c'mon, she's just a grumpy Jamie Lee Curtis in a wig and makeup to make her look more haggard than she actually is. A different film might have been able to get me to care more about the new characters, but I wasn't that invested in them, which I felt was the film's biggest drawback. Its greatest strength was probably the way in which, by ignoring every previous sequel, it took the character of Michael Myers back to his origins as a motiveless, unreasoning personification of senseless violence and meaningless death, which made the character disturbing in a way he probably hasn't been since the original in 1978.

I knew going in that Halloween Kills had not had a great critical reception, but for films like these that doesn't mean much; Halloween II, III and 4 all have bad reviews while also being, while not as good as the original, reasonably strong horror films in their own right. Obviously horror enthusiasts have their own tastes about these things and a lot of horror viewers don't go in expecting anything too groundbreaking. The worst thing a horror film (or indeed any mainstream film, really) can do is to be boring, which several of the later sequels (Resurrection and the second Rob Zombie one at the very least) are. Halloween Kills is relatively engaging in this respect, but it falls into the same trap as the ones I mentioned before of only really working when you're anticipating Michael's next appearance. Laurie spends the entire film convalescent in the hospital, and the majority of the other characters come across as buffoons who go out in hunting mobs trying to track down Michael despite the fact that they seemingly also know that practically everyone who ever runs into him ends up dead. This was a problem in the 2018 film as well, actually, in which a lot of Michael's mystique seems to be based on his presence in popular culture in general, having appeared, kitchen knife in hand, in a film fairly regularly, every few years, for four decades. Within the narrative of the 2018 film, however, as is pointed out, he's a criminal who murdered five people forty years previously and one more person fifteen years before that. He's not the unstoppable force of evil he's seen as being within that film's narrative unless everyone in Haddonfield has been watching the Halloween franchise.

Similarly, in Halloween Kills, the narrative seems to exist in complex conversation with the franchise as a whole. We see a flashback to 1978 to explain what happened in this new timeline's version of events; Michael was caught after he went back to his old house. Yet we see footage of Annie Brackett in a bodybag taken from Halloween II, the event in this timeline being represented by an image from a film the story of which didn't happen, and this film seems almost to set itself up as the deliberate antithesis to Halloween II. In that film, Laurie was taken to the hospital and Michael hunted her down because, as a result of late night drunken desperation on the part of John Carpenter, she was secretly his long-lost sister. In this film we spend plenty of time at the hospital but Michael never goes there because he has no reason to; it's pointed out to the audience very clearly that Michael doesn't care about Laurie at all and instead wants, for whatever inscrutable reason, to go home. But Michael being drawn back to his own home was already done in Halloween 5, 6 and Resurrection; it feels to me as if there's not that much new storytelling that either can be done or the writers feel capable of doing. The angry lynch mob accidentally killing the wrong person was done in Halloween 4 as well.

Halloween Kills thus becomes one of the many instalments of the franchise in which you come to see Michael, reflecting his own pop-cultural scion Jason Voorhees, killing stupid people in increasingly ridiculous ways, in this case impaling them with broken halogen lamps, squeezing eyeballs out, and in one case even hitting a car door into a woman's face so that she accidentally shoots herself. This, coupled with a flashback to 1978 featuring a recreation of the original Michael Myers costume and some very effective practical makeup work to turn an actor into a near-perfect lookalike of the late Donald Pleasence, makes the film at times feel more like a fan-appeal picture than anything really interested in conveying the heavy-handed messages it depicts and then has its characters spell out onscreen, which is to say that mob justice is not real justice, that taking the law into your own hands usually only makes things worse, and that fear and reactionism only play into evil's agenda. I'm not against the idea that the film imagines, as Laurie expounds on in the finale, that Michael is evil incarnate, he's the town's fear and short-sightedness reflected back on itself, but this didn't need to be spelled out, and it becomes somewhat absurd when we start seeing Michael taking out crowds of people in the open street on his own, making him seem less like a Bogeyman or Angel of Death and more like a supervillain. As soon as he emerged from the burning building at the start to confront the firefighters I couldn't help but think "1978 Michael would have ducked out the back door and snuck away into the woods while no one was watching." We also sort of see Michael unmasked again in this film, and I don't think the stunt performer's face works in these scenes; he just looks like a grizzled action man, akin to the antagonist from Don't Breathe, when the 1978 film deliberately depicted him unmasked with an "angelic" appearance to further unsettle the viewer. For a film so slavishly devoted to recreating elements from the 1978 original, I'm surprised that Halloween Kills (or its precursor) didn't depict Michael unmasked like an ageing Botticelli angel, with waves of curly grey hair and a sculpted jawline. Funnily enough, the stunt performer who played Michael in the 1978 flashback, as far as I can tell, retains something of this appearance, but we don't see his face.

Halloween Kills benefits from good direction and strong visuals; it's a nice-looking film, Michael is intriguing and the gore effects are pleasing if one is a fan of such things, although some of the kills are, I think, a bit too brutal for a trilogy supposedly going back to the original's understated roots. But there's not that much for Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie to do and the task of leading the film, which largely falls upon the characters of Karen and Allyson, is a problem because the characters simply aren't that compelling for the reasons I've stated before. The recast middle-aged Tommy is somewhat believable but is more frustrating to watch than enjoyable because of his rash decisions, and it's amusing and somewhat exasperating to see poor Nurse Marion get killed by Michael in yet another timeline reset just as she was in Halloween H20. It's actually somewhat weird that they got back the original actors for Lindsay, Marion and Sheriff Brackett from the 1978 film but not the actor who played Tommy (apparently they considered Paul Rudd to reprise it from Halloween 6, which would have been funny, but he wasn't available). Obviously that guy who played Tommy back in the day isn't the leading man material they would have wanted for the Tommy role but as far as I know he's still around doing conventions and stuff so it is odd that they bring back several cast members from the 1978 film but not him. I know I'm not the only one to say this but they really should have found some way to get Danielle Harris into this trilogy; it seems like no one's been more of a consistent ambassador for the franchise than her despite the fact that the two different timelines she was in are no longer "canon".

Taken on its own, Halloween Kills is a decent slasher/gore film, a not very subtle or elegant "message" film about violence and mob rule and a fairly weak character piece. I haven't even spoken about Hawkins, Cameron or Lonnie (another recast character from the original) because there just doesn't seem to be much to say. For such a messy franchise this doesn't really help; it feels like it's in a love-hate relationship with the Halloween legacy, wanting to do its own thing but also wanting to pay tribute to the original and re-do the sequels with its own vision of what's "better". We all know Michael Myers will never die, so it only leaves me curious about Halloween Ends in the sense that I wonder to what extent the franchise will continue, just like Michael himself, to wander around only to wind up where it began.