“Haven’t you ever liked a girl that didn’t like you back?” asks Oscar (Drew Scheid), the predictably disposable friend zoned male of Allyson Nelson (Andi Matichak), who is about to have his fate sealed by the grim reaper himself, Michael Meyers. In fact, this question, when posed to Meyers, takes on a macabre overtone when considering that the murder of his sister, Judith (Sandy Johnson), could likely have been driven by a latent lust for her, a lust he could only kill literally while she just so happened to be in the buff (slasher movie rule of law). It would also make sense considering Michael’s overall need to stamp out any signs of sexual desire around him, perhaps so disgusted by his own that he needs to inflict his carnal self-hate on everyone else.
The Halloween films, always prone to enacting the device of retroactive continuity for the sake of squeezing just a few more million dollars out of the public, has, after many botched attempts at getting back to the core of what the original was about–fate and its immovability, especially when interlocked with another person you just can’t shake–succeeded in imbuing the woeful tale of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) with more substance than it has ever had.
That there were eighty rewrites in order to get it right proves just how important this latest installment was, especially since Jamie Lee Curtis was down to clown for it. Interweaving the lore of the past with the desensitization of the present, an exchange between Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter, and her friends, Vicky (Virginia Gardner) and Dave (Miles Robbins), sheds a tongue-in-cheek light on the disparity between the way things were and the way it is. “Everyone in my family gets a little crazy at this time of year,” Allyson explains. Vicky chimes in, “Yeah, if I was your family I would just skip straight to Christmas.” Dave questions, “Wasn’t he like her brother?” Allyson negates, “No that was just part of the myth.” Dave, still unimpressed by the amount of bloodshed Meyers inflicted that night in 1978–just five people–offers, “Compared to stuff that happens today, it’s really not that bad.” And yes, when Halloween is put into the context of today, in which the higher the body count, the more we’re supposed to be affected, Meyers’ massacre isn’t necessarily “impressive” anymore. But it is still rife with symbolism. That symbolism all tracing back to the unavoidability of fate. And how, in cases like Laurie’s, who conditioned her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), to be just as paranoid as she is by teaching her how to shoot guns and hide in the basement from the time she was coherent, fate can be damned to inflict the generations that come after you. The very ones you begat in the hope of avoiding the same fate. But then, doesn’t that just go to show the depths of human arrogance?
Assuming that none of the other movies have happened–even that one that came out in 1998, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, with Josh Hartnett in the role of Laurie’s son, John–the story now takes place forty years later, with Michael’s original doctor, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance), being replaced by his far more obsessed with studying “the evil” Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer). As fellow appreciators of the macabre and the many ways in which the human psyche can go awry, successful British true crime podcasters Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees) are admitted entrance into Smith’s Grove Rehabilitation Hospital by Dr. Sartain before Michael is to be transferred to a different facility that Sartain calls “the pit of hell.” Which, as a purely evil being, Michael surely belongs in.
That the film’s directing and writing team consists of those with more experience in the comedic realm, including director and co-writer David Gordon Green (best known for Pineapple Express, Your Highness–which co-writer Danny McBride also appeared in and co-writer Jeff Fradley helped pen the accompanying comic book for–and The Sitter), it makes sense that the horror and tension in the film should be so well-timed, for there is nothing more closely on the borderline of one another than comedy and horror (except maybe comedy and tragedy, which Woody Allen unsuccessfully showcased in Melinda and Melinda).
Showing respect and careful consideration of what to pay homage to from the original (with Carpenter himself serving as a consultant on the film), Gordon Green, Fradley and McBride very deliberately provide us with a classroom scene in which Allyson sees her grandmother eerily standing out front watching her in place of Meyers. In the 1978 version it is Laurie, herself on the honor roll sitting in the same position as Allyson, tuning out her teacher’s impassioned delivery of the lesson, “What Samuels is really talking about here is fate. You see, fate caught up with several lives here. No matter what course of actions Collins took, he was destined to his own fate. His own day of reckoning with himself. The idea is that destiny is a very real, concrete thing that every person has to deal with.” Laurie, intelligent enough to answer any question she might be unexpectedly asked even while not paying attention responds to her teacher that the fictional Samuels saw fate as “a natural element, like earth air, fire and water.” Pleased with the response, the teacher agrees, “That’s right. Samuels definitely personified fate. In Samuels’ writing, fate is immovable. Like a mountain. It stands where man passes away. Fate never changes.”
So it doesn’t. And, as many would argue in their assessment of Halloween, fate isn’t just what one is predestined for but the very fate that we must all come to terms with at some point in our lives: death. Thus, Michael Meyers is a sort of less gentle, slasher version of Ingmar Bergman’s iteration of death in The Seventh Seal. Not patient or abstract enough to sit through a game of chess, Meyers wants his bounty when he wants it–especially if that bounty is sexually active.
With every female in the Strode line irrevocably affected by the inherited trauma of their matriarch’s fateful Halloween of ’78, it’s no wonder Allyson somewhat insensitively yells at her grandmother, “Why can’t you just get over it and move on?” But how can a person ever really move on from the greatest trauma of her life–the very thing that shaped and transformed into the mistrustful mass of paranoia she is today? Particularly when that trauma is always so profitable at the box office.
