Mark Reviews Movies: HALLOWEEN (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 18, 2018

There hasn't been a good movie featuring serial killer/boogeyman Michael Myers since John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece Halloween, and there have been plenty of movies in this franchise. In addition to the original, we've had six sequels of decreasing quality (plus one that didn't involve Michael), a woefully misguided remake, and a sequel to that remake.

Over the course of the series, there essentially have been three different timelines: the original one, one that changed the previously established fate of Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, and the events of the remake. There have been all of these attempts and all of this shuffling, and still, no one has figured out how to do right by Michael Myers—let alone come close to the admittedly high bar of the original.

Forty years after Carpenter's film, though, we finally get a good sequel in this franchise. It's also called Halloween, and it serves as a direct sequel to the 1978 film (creating a fourth timeline for the series, by the way). Nothing else that we've seen in this series—none of the underdeveloped mumbo jumbo involving a Druid cult and none of the over-the-top psychoanalysis of the remakes—counts in this installment. The screenplay by director David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Jeff Fradley takes the mythology of Michael Myers seriously.

That's nothing new, of course, since all of the previous movies that tried to tackle Michael's nature and/or origin have seen it as serious business. The key difference is that this film actually understands what made Michael both terrifying and fascinating in the first place. It didn't matter if he actually was some psychologically tormented killer or the incarnation of pure evil. In the original, he was both, really.

The point was less about who or what Michael is and more about what he represents. In the sleepy town of Haddonfield, Illinois, he arrived one Halloween to upend the cozy comfort of the suburbs with primal terror. What made Michael the scariest of the assorted slashers that followed him was that he took his time. Walking—never running—with a singular focus on his prey, if he made a person a target, Michael wouldn't stop until that person was dead.

This film understands Michael on that fundamental level, and it treats him for what he is: a killer of uncertain power who's only certain about killing. He's slow but relentless. He stalks without distraction and waits in the shadows—until someone makes the error of trying to find him. It doesn't matter who or what he is. It only matters that he kills and turns the suburbs into a place of dread.

As such, the story of the film is mostly the same as the original. In fact, Green and his fellow screenwriters seem to have used the original film as a template. There's Michael's introduction (Without the mask, the character is played by Nick Castle, who originated the role, and with it, he's played by James Jude Courtney). There's an accident involving a bus from a psychiatric facility. There's his path home to Haddonfield, leaving behind a few bodies along the way. Finally, there's his seemingly unending assault on the little town.

The film is fine in this regard. It's a typical slasher plot, but Green fills in the required killing scenes with some effective tricks. The major one is that the scenes follow Michael for the most part, in a long takes of him finding a weapon, finding a victim, and then moving on to the next one. The clever part is how Green intentionally and gradually begins to lose track of Michael as those scenes progress. We catch his shadow looming on a house as he makes his way up a driveway, and suddenly, he's standing behind a woman in her house. It leads up to a sequence in which there are two possible victim, and we're not quite sure which one he's going after. On a side note, a later scene involving a motion-sensing light in a backyard is particularly neat.

The other side of the story, in which a group of people run from or attempt to hunt Michael, is what sets this entry apart from its predecessors. There's a reason that the filmmakers have returned to the original's schematic. The film is also about how the evil of Michael and his deeds has affected certain people, and if the story is familiar, it's because that's the point: Trauma, such as the one these characters experienced, doesn't simply stop.

Laurie returns, now holed up in a fortress of a cabin in the woods, having prepared for Michael's seemingly inevitable return. It has ruined the other aspects of her life. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) was taken away by the state at the age of 12, and now, Karen keeps her own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) at a distance from the teenager's grandmother.

The other hunters include Hawkins (Will Patton), the Sheriff's officers who apprehended Michael 40 years ago (One wonders how this was possible, given Michael's nature), and Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), "the new Loomis," as Laurie calls him, who's obsessed with understanding what makes Michael tick. This installment actually deals, if briefly, with the flip side of that clinical obsession.

It all leads, naturally, to a climactic confrontation between Laurie (with the aid of two, additional generations of women) and Michael. It's an impressive sequence that turns the tables on the established predator-prey dynamic, alternately putting Laurie and Michael in the role of the stalked (The switch begins with an amusing reversal of the original film's final reveal). Halloween earns that final battle. Michael becomes more than a killer or a boogeyman by the end. He's pure trauma that must be confronted, lest it destroy everything.

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