Forty years ago, John Carpenter emerged out from the shadows
to bring us a film that in many ways, codified modern horror as we know it. Sure,
there were a handful of bloody slasher flicks beforehand, and you can all trace
it back to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but 1978’s Halloween was the one that gave the
craze that lead to everything from Friday 13th to Nightmare on Elm
Street. Most of these films focused more on over the top gore or killings, and
their success in turn influenced the increasingly crappier instalments to the
Carpenter original.
The white-masked killer Michael Myers went from an
indecipherable Shape to just another Jason Voorhees, inexplicably bulletproof
and all. Standing out in the series was the oddball Halloween III—in my mind,
not really the unfairly maligned classic that some make it out to be lately,
but an enjoyable piece of 80s horror cheese nevertheless. It didn’t come over well
with audiences, however, so the series went along the route of convoluted plots
and lame stabbings. Rob Zombie attempted his own reboot in 2007, and, well,
gave us something that replaced subtlety and tension with dialogue where every
line could be boiled down to ‘fuck fuck fuckity fuck’.
So as you can see, the franchise has gone through some
turbulence. But now it’s starting afresh, with a new film that ignores
everything since the original, focusing once again on the legendary Jamie Lee
Curtis as scream queen survivor Laurie Strode. It’s a similar premise to Halloween
H20 in 1998, also an anniversary reboot of sorts, but that one largely suffered
from being a slasher film trying to find an identity in the wake of Scream.
This one really does go back to basics—there’s no convoluted family history between
victim and killer, and the focus is once again on the creeping tension and the
mute inscrutability of Michael Myers. John Carpenter is even back to do the
score for this one. So, how does the rather confusingly titled Halloween—the
third one in the series to be called that—hold up?
For the most, pretty good—the first film in 35-odd years to
match the original. From the outset, as we’re greeted with an odd and
discomforting asylum setting that still feels stuck in the seventies, the film
does the right thing by emphasizing the sheer incomprehensibility of Michael Myer’s
sadistic and ‘pure evil’ mind. Characters want to understand him, get him to
communicate…but there’s simply nothing to grab onto. Immediately, it earns
solid points for re-establishing the creepy psychological elements from the
first. Michael here isn’t some misunderstood child of an abusive family as in
the Rob Zombie version, nor is the puppet of a bizarre pagan cult as in the
shitty sequels to the first—he’s there to kill, for amusement or something
else, and he wastes no time in getting back to work. He's also not explicitly supernatural this time, having aged and still carrying scars, creating just about the right level of verisimilitude.
Jamie Lee Curtis is amazing here, with her character having
spent forty years preparing and fortifying, at the cost of her crumbling
familial relationships. She truly sells her character as a survivor of a
horrific scenario, and watching her desperately try to track and react to
Michael’s rampage draws you in all the more for it. The rest of the cast sees
Judy Greer and Andi Matichak as Laurie’s daughter and granddaughter
respectively, who do reasonably fine jobs. The supporting cast is a bit more
mixed—there’s the typical archetypal teen characters whose fates are pretty
obvious. Will Patton plays a cop who was there on the 1978 night, who also does
a good job of being sympathetic, and Haluk Biligner plays Dr. Sartain, a
replacement of sorts for the iconic Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis.
Once Michael hits the town of Haddonfield, there’s a lot of
fun and scares as he goes about his business, even if some were unfortunately
spoiled by the trailers. There’s some great tracking shots as he starts
entering homes without breaking a stride, and the sheer inhuman way by which he
goes about things highlights what made his character so iconic. It’s all
highlighted by Carpenter’s score—and as someone who loves his music, this is
heavenly. It has similarities to the original, and obviously draws on its main
theme; but it has a more complex, layered sound, more low pulsing notes, and
use of electric guitar. In some ways, it’s more reminiscent of Carpenter's
scores for The Fog and Escape From New York, and the synth elements of
Morricone's score for The Thing.
The film isn’t perfect—some plot ideas are raised but not
really fully followed upon, and there’s some kinda goofy moments mixed with
typical teen antics that sort of trip up the mood. Nor does it really do
anything that new, strictly speaking—the plot and setup are fairly
conventional, but what sets it apart is that it’s the first of its kind, at
least in a while, to do it actually pretty damn well. But the final sequence is
wracked with classic Carpenter-style tension—there’s the usual visual callbacks
to the original throughout, but often with a new spin on them.
Overall, Halloween 2018 (or Halloween H40 as some fans dub
it) is a welcome return to form for blood-soaked horror movies, and a worthy
salute to John Carpenter’s legacy. Inevitably there’ll be another one, and
hopefully it’ll keep things up. Maybe even they’ll return to the anthology
format they attempted to kickstart with Halloween III. But I definitely recommend
it for horror fans or fans of the original—once more do we return to the chill
of being stalked by an indecipherable Shape in suburban streets on a cold,
darkening Halloween night. Check it out.
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