"Halloween" Retrospective

Recently I've watched or rewatched every film in the entire Halloween franchise, and immersed myself in some behind-the-scenes content, so clearly it's time I gave my completely original thoughts on the subject.

Halloween (1978)

Needless to say, the original and the best. While a bit slow by modern standards, the film benefits from taking its time to set up the characters of Dr Loomis, Michael and Laurie, and to establish the spooky October atmosphere. Most importantly, something most of the others forget, we get to know Laurie: she's a smart student but shy; she has a crush on a guy named Ben Tramer but she's too nervous to ask him out; she has two friends named Annie and Lynda who seem to push her around a bit, but she gets along well with younger kids, like Tommy; she likes to follow the rules and seems to be afraid of getting in trouble, such as in the smoking scene. We get to know Laurie, and all this is interspersed with the haunting scenes of Michael following her around Haddonfield. The way the film is shot enhances the menace of the Shape, the music of course fills the night with anticipation, and Donald Pleasence brings the touch of old-school class that these films always benefited from. A classic for a reason.

Halloween II (1981)

While one of the better sequels, this one suffers from the fact that, unlike the original, there isn't really a clear protagonist. With Laurie confined to a hospital bed for the first two-thirds of the film and Dr Loomis on a wild goose chase trying to figure out where Michael is going, it's not clear who we're meant to follow. Jimmy the paramedic is likeable and seems to be set up in some respects as the hero, but the film never really commits to it; he slips in a pool of blood and knocks himself out for the finale, which is back to Laurie and Michael. That being said, the understaffed hospital is eerie, the death of the trick-or-treat-er on the street is shocking, and the ties in to the origins of the Halloween tradition are intriguing. Pleasence is again great and the young cast are fun to watch, but other than Jimmy the hospital characters are pretty forgettable and you're just waiting for Michael to kill them. The gruesome deaths seem to be an obvious attempt for the film to rival its own pastiche, Friday the 13th, and are in some respects perhaps needless; more understatement wouldn't have gone astray. The revelation of Laurie as Michael's long-lost sister is pointless and doesn't add the drama that Carpenter seems to have thought the script needed. It's a decent sequel, but a bit routine.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

The one that has nothing to do with the rest of the franchise, this is nonetheless an entertaining cosmic horror story which presages Carpenter's own In the Mouth of Madness (1994), with a mystery in an isolated town leading to the discovery of an apocalyptic plot, and a satisfyingly dark and pessimistic ending. I don't know that Tom Atkins is quite the leading man that some Carpenter fans seem to see him as, but Dan O'Herlihy is great as Conal Cochran, and there is an atmosphere of dread and emptiness which compensates for the limitations of the leading characters. This definitely justifies its place as the hidden gem of the franchise; the shots of kids all across America trick-or-treat-ing at dusk is the stuff that this franchise should be made of.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

I didn't expect to like this one at all; in fact, I didn't even intend to watch it, but I'm glad I did, because I definitely fall into the camp of those who think that this is the best of the sequels. What makes all the difference in the world is that Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell are so sympathetic and likeable as Jamie and Rachel. Even though I think the idea of Laurie being Michael's sister is stupid, the idea of Michael having a niece is interesting regardless of who her mother is, and the image of this remorseless killer hunting down an innocent child is, appropriately, horrifying. Pleasence makes a welcome return as Dr Loomis, the police are sensible and take Michael seriously, and when things get out of control with the mob they don't get too ridiculous. The image of the crashed ambulance in the river is fantastic and says it all. I don't know, with the ending, if they seriously thought Jamie would replace Michael as the killer, but I think anyone who thought it would go that way was kidding themselves. What it really comes down to, however, is that, like with Laurie in the original, we get to know the characters: Rachel is a girl trying to have an ordinary life; there's a guy she likes but he's not faithful to her; she wants to be protective of Jamie, but finds it challenging to understand her problems. Jamie's a little kid who has lost her parents and knows that her uncle is a serial killer; she's bullied by the kids at school and is afraid of Halloween; she wants to be part of the family with Rachel and the Carruthers, but it's hard to fit in. We don't even need Michael Myers for any of this to work, and that's why it does work. Easily the best sequel.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Obviously a weak entry, it's mostly worth watching for, once again, Loomis and Jamie. Rachel gets killed off too early and while I didn't find Tina, Samantha and Spitz as annoying as some do, I don't care much about them either. At first I thought Tina was meant to be the girl who picks up Rachel and Jamie from school in the fourth film, but it turns out she's a completely different character; too many perms. That girl was meant to be Lindsay from the original, too. Anyway, Loomis' confrontation with Michael is enjoyable, although I don't quite buy this film's explanation that Michael has a rage he is trying to contain. Once again you feel for Jamie in her plight, and Tina's sacrifice is a decent moment. All the "Man in Black" stuff is unnecessary of course and the film should have cut it. It's more or less what you would expect from a rushed sequel to the fourth film.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Despite having only so far seen the so-called "Producer's Cut", this is the one where I don't really understand what they were going for. The opening and closing have all this guff about a cult trying to use Michael Myers to bring balance to the universe through ritual murder or something, whereas the middle just seems to be about Michael being annoyed that Laurie's uncle's family moved into his house. Paul Rudd gives a weird performance as Tommy but he's Paul Rudd, you can't dislike him too much. Kara is an interesting concept for a character as a single mother moving back in with her parents, but doesn't have much to do; Danny seems pointless. The biggest problem is the way Jamie is used, i.e. to have a baby and then get killed. Putting aside the vulgar implication (or outright fact, in the Producer's Cut) that her uncle Michael is the father of her child, it's a bizarre way to use the character who was the hero in the previous two films; the sixth film should have been about Jamie finally dealing with her uncle, not weird stuff about cults and the invention of a whole new Strode family. Donald Pleasence's last outing, while undignified for an actor of his caliber, is at least elevated by his presence, while Danielle Harris' absence severely detracts from the film, although given how bad Jamie's role is in this film it's probably better that she wasn't in it. The idea of an insane psychiatrist trying to control Michael is interesting, but it's not handled well here and wasn't handled much better in the 2018 film. This is a bad film but the non-cult-related parts are at least watchable as more Michael Myers antics.

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)

The first film to ignore the sequels, Jamie Lee Curtis makes a welcome return as Laurie, but the film itself is pretty mediocre. All the best stuff happens in the opening, with Michael attacking Nurse Marion's house, bashing in a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face with an ice skate, and absconding with a car that he later replaces in a spooky scene at a rural rest stop. Everything else, however, falls a little flat. As would happen again in the 2018 film, this film's Laurie feels nothing like that of the original or even the sequel, with Ms Strode, or "Tate" as she calls herself here, just seeming like a hard-drinking Jamie Lee Curtis who has panic attacks. The setting of a private boarding school in a Californian Spanish villa compound feels very artificial and lacks the ambience of the earlier films' suburban menace. The supporting cast are all pretty forgettable and the entire thing feels very "Nineties", with a bright lighting, lots of wide shots and an orchestral soundtrack. The best bit is almost certainly Laurie decapitating Michael with an axe; the rest is pretty routine and for a film that wanted to ignore several previous films it commits some of the same sins.

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

It doesn't really bear mentioning that this is one of the worst if not the worst film in the franchise, with a completely arbitrary premise and no interesting or likeable characters. In fact the most likeable character in the whole thing is probably Michael himself, as the scenes where he is on screen are really the only times the pace picks up. The idea of filming a reality show in the Myers house, while believable for the time period, offers nothing in terms of interest, and none of the characters are, once again, portrayed in enough depth to make them sympathetic. Sara is almost devoid of personality. Other than that, seeing a young Katee Sackhoff get decapitated and some of the ridiculous Busta Rhymes one-liners are really the only spare moments of ironic amusement in a deeply tedious film.

Halloween (2007)

Rob Zombie's remake of the original is visually appealing, with effective cinematography, colour and lighting. I also don't find the characters as annoying as some people make them out to be. The problem is that once again there's no one to root for; we don't meet Laurie until about an hour into the film, and she's just an ordinary girl without much detail afforded to her personality. The film is more interested in Michael Myers, but by depicting him as having the psychopathic traits characteristic of real-life serial killers, like abusing small animals and perhaps confused sexual urges, the film ultimately doesn't work when, after the first act, it transforms him into the mute incarnation of death characteristic of the original. Zombie wants Michael Myers to feel like Michael Myers, but by doing so he renders the first half of his film pointless, because we can't see that kid in the character of this faceless killer. The final chase in the Myers house is boring and we don't care enough about Laurie to want to see her win. It's a messy remake with some interesting ideas mishandled, and it's mostly carried by its visuals, not its writing or character direction.

Halloween II (2009)

This sequel to the remake only makes the flaws of the remake worse, as the focus is now on the boring Laurie, whose trauma at the events of the first film and horror at discovering her familial relationship with Michael lack impact because, again, we don't get to know her well enough as a character. The film needed more scenes like Laurie eating with Leigh and Annie Brackett (played well in the previous film and here by horror alumnus Brad Dourif and franchise stalwart Danielle Harris) and fewer extended dream sequences of Rob Zombie's wife, and Laurie being chased around a hospital by a grunting, roaring Michael. I had trouble getting through this one because I found it so boring. It only really picks up at the very end when Loomis arrives to confront Michael; other than that, and again the strong visuals, I don't feel like this misery-fest has much to recommend it. I watched the theatrical cut, and supposedly the director's cut is better, but I doubt I could face watching this again any time soon.

Halloween (2018)

Pulling the same trick as H20 by ignoring previous sequels, this time every sequel altogether, the 2018 film works by making Michael more mysterious and therefore more threatening, but the characterisation of Laurie isn't, in many respects, massively different to that in H20, nor is her relationship with her child. We see the effects of trauma, but it could be handled differently. The point I've laboured throughout this article is once again true here, that the new characters aren't given enough characterisation to make me care. I want to care about Karen and Allyson, but all we see about them is their relationship to Laurie and her past. We don't get to know them well enough in themselves. The podcaster characters and the Loomis-replacement psychiatrist are slightly ridiculous, feeling like caricatures in a film which is notionally trying to ground itself in the relative realism of the original. The ending confrontation in Laurie's house, and the scene of Michael's senseless massacre in the neighbourhood, are the best bits of this somewhat awkward reprise.

Halloween Kills (2021)

I've reviewed this in full here, but suffice to say that this is more of the same as the previous, struggling to find interesting characters outside of Laurie and Michael, and delivering a weak and inept message. Like the film before it looks nice and has a fairly strong atmosphere, but it's mostly worth it for the gore effects, the presentation of Michael, and the flashback scene to 1978, and that's mostly going to be of interest to horror fans and fans of the franchise specifically. Yet the film tries to be more than that, tries to have something to say about society, and doesn't really succeed. It's messy, as these films often seem to be when they try to do too many things at once.

"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.