“This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore,” says a woman on the news after the latest batch of Michael Myers killings in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. But, honestly, was it ever? Or was the illusion of safety what people miss the most when it’s supposedly gone? For Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) that illusion vanished long ago, on Halloween night of 1978.
Perhaps that’s part of why you might say she’s overly “paranoid” and a little “crazy.” For the latest installment of the franchise, which picks up right where 2018’s Halloween left off, Laurie is more grudgingly ready to fight back than ever (even if mostly confined to a hospital bed). This follow-up, too, is directed by David Gordon Green, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Fradley and, for whatever reason, Danny McBride.
This edition of the Halloween series ignores that Laurie once had a daughter entirely different from “Karen” (Judy Greer) and, at one point, even had a son (Halloween H20). But then, when there are so many movies in the chronicle to keep track of, a bit of retroactive continuity is to be expected. Some need for shoving a round plot hole into a square peg, as it were. And being that most casual watchers of the saga aren’t doing so to critique it on a story-based level, those who revive it can’t always be bothered to refer to older versions of the narrative—relying instead on the trusty word “reboot” to explain away any potential audience gripes.
Thus, we recommence with an opening scene that follows Cameron Elam (Dylan Arnold), still dressed in his costume, in the moments after he was caught by Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak, a sort of Olivia Rodrigo type), cheating on her at a party. By now, of course, Allyson has more pressing matters to concern herself with, like how Michael killed her father, and her grandmother’s current hospitalization. And, oh yes, the realization that Michael, quelle surprise, did not die in the fire they custom-made for him.
In another part of town, the “B-cast” laying trauma claim to the original 1978 tragedy bum-rushes an open mic night so that Tommy Doyle (once upon a time played by Paul Rudd, but now manifested by Anthony Michael Hall) can remind those who aren’t familiar already with the lore. This includes Vanessa (Carmela McNeal) and Marcus (Michael Smallwood), the proverbial “token Black people” who get killed early on in the movie. Also dredged up from the 1978 era is, of all people, Demi Moore-lookalike Kyle Richards, which should attest to how limited in quality potential Halloween Kills can be. It’s all compounded by starting in medias res, which doesn’t do much to serve its purpose (and the purpose of any slasher and/or horror movie): building tension. But with that tension already established at the outset, the predictability factor of Halloween Kills amplifies.
Worse still, Laurie is in a coma for most of the movie, all the way up until the fifty-three-minute mark, assuring her daughter, reluctantly, “I’m fine.” Karen replies, “You’re not fine, you had a knife in your fucking stomach!” Clearly, she doesn’t know the resiliency of Laurie Strode and all final girls (as recently explored in Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group). A strength and resiliency that Karen’s daughter, Allyson, has seemed to inherit more of as she not only forgives Cameron for his indiscretion, but also joins him and his father, Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), to hunt down Michael, suddenly realizing that his end game has always been to go home. You know, his childhood home where his “pure evil” persona was first born by way of murdering his own sister. Picking off a few bodies along the way just happens to be a perk of the tradition.
Although past versions of the Halloween saga have added in the detail that Laurie is actually Michael’s younger sister, that detail doesn’t exist within this context, which makes it psychologically rife when Laurie is told that Michael’s quest has never really been about her. Even though she’s so determined to believe that she has been his raison d’être this entire time, the message of Halloween Kills shifts things to more overtly state what John Carpenter had always intended Myers to be a symbol of: pure evil. A phenomenon that can’t be “reasoned with” the way so many—especially of the Western government ilk—would like to believe it can be (see: the Taliban). Yes, Myers might have focused on Laurie because he fulfilled a sister role for him, allowing him to fetishize repeating the same original crime that started it all, but ultimately, he simply enjoys killing. To him, it appears preferable to sex, an urge he seems to have repressed his entire life (with some arguing that the reason he killed his own sister was to quell the sexual lust he felt toward her).
Then there is the belief that Myers is the ultimate final product of growing up in suburbia, the number one generic capital of repressed emotions, bound to manifest in some abrupt and inexplicable “lashing out” when a person finally snaps from keeping it all in. Myers represents so many things, particularly when it comes to American life. But in Halloween Kills, that luster of “intelligent commentary” that only Carpenter himself seems to be capable of carrying off with this character is entirely lacking.
A lot of the time, it feels more like a sequel made solely for Jim from Edward Scissorhands, with Anthony Michael Hall running around like an obsessed madman himself. Out for revenge at any cost as he leads the too often repeated cry, “Evil dies tonight.” Allyson is in agreement, defying Karen’s wishes for her to simply stay at her grandma’s bedside and let the “proper authorities” handle things. Tantamount to Berger’s Post-It reading, “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me,” Allyson ends up leaving a note behind in a get well card for Laurie that asserts, “Evil can’t win. I love you. I love Dad. I love Grandmother.”
The more the likes of Tommy vows to “get” Myers, of course, the easier it seems for him to be able to kill. As Laurie puts it, “The more he kills, the more he transcends into something impossible to defeat.” As though dead bodies are his life force.
Karen, meanwhile, in the typical fashion of a “Karen,” tries to prevent Laurie from leaving her hospital bed by insisting, as she did to Allyson, that the authorities are better equipped to deal with Michael. She declares, “There’s a system.” Laurie counters, “Well the system failed. Now get the fuck out of my way.” It could easily double for a reference to so many of America’s currently failed systems that don’t work as the majority still tries to pretend they do. In this case, when one takes off the mask, so to speak, what’s behind it is even scarier than the mask itself. To that end, there is an instant when Michael’s mask is removed, but naturally, we never get a good look at his face—just enough to tell us he’s aged appropriately. For that was always the point of Halloween, to show us that evil is faceless; it can be anywhere and everywhere just waiting to jump out.
As mentioned, “Evil dies tonight” is the oft-touted phrase throughout the movie. It gathers momentum as the angry mob of Haddonfield waits for Michael to show himself. Of course, they didn’t seem to get the memo based on white supremacy that evil never dies, it just gets channeled into different people, passed on through generation after generation.
Laurie, however, would like to avoid passing her curse down to more generations, therefore pulls it together by injecting herself with some pain alleviator in the style of the eponymous protagonist of a recent Netflix movie, Kate, in order to prepare for battle.
But the tenets of horror movie convention still have one more minority to tick off: the gay couple. Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), who now reside at Michael’s childhood home, are watching, of all things, Minnie and Moskowitz when their time comes. And it allows Michael to take his “rightful” place staring through the window.
Back at the hospital, a heart-rending scene of the cornered scapegoat (a fellow escaped mental patient from Smith’s Grove) about to become the sacrificial pig shows just how blood-lusting a mob can become—at times worse and more single-minded than a maniacal killer. Thus, one police officer points out, “Now he’s turning us into monsters.”
As Myers’ lumbering rampage continues, even the Gen Z ilk can’t deal with someone as analog and now seemingly innocuous as a man in a dyed William Shatner mask. Despite Myers’ ostensible enthusiasm for pop culture in this regard, Halloween Kills is certain to dehumanize Michael as much as possible in order to make the ending palatable. Laurie narrates, “I always thought Michael Myers was flesh and blood just like you and me. But a mortal man could not have survived what he’s lived through.” The same might be said of Laurie, his only true match (as we’ll see—yet again—in next year’s Halloween Ends).
She persists in trying to make it relevant to America’s current unprecedented political divide by further remarking, “It is the essence of evil. The anger that divides us. It is the terror that grows stronger when we try to hide.” Thus, Michael has now been rendered into a definitive symbol, as opposed to anything like a human (after all, he’s just “The Shape”). And it’s surely no coincidence that evil is embodied by a man. One who can’t, incidentally, compete with his younger self in terms of being “endlessly watchable.” The same thing most women are told after a certain age, as a matter of fact.
