Let’s slash apart ‘Halloween Kills’
David Gordon Green confuses Michael Myers with Jason Voorhees.
This post contains spoilers for Halloween Kills.
I don’t think David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween is a great movie, but in its best moments the legacyquel is a reminder of why John Carpenter’s original is a horror classic. Green and co-screenwriter Danny McBride never forget that the power of Carpenter’s film is in valuing suspense over brutality and that the horror of Michael Myers is that he’s just a man.
As Michael hacks, gouges, crushes, maims, disembowels and decapitates throughout Halloween Kills, I wondered how they could forget so much in such a short time. The film is an ugly, nihilistic slog that could be mistaken for a random Friday the 13th sequel were it not for the William Shatner mask and clumsy attempts at social commentary. It’s neither fun enough to be a routine slasher nor competent enough to elevate the genre. It’s a mess, and one of the most unpleasant films I’ve watched in a long time.
Yet another return to Haddonfield
The film starts with promise, although I think its opening sequence might have worked even better in the 2018 film. It flashes back 40 years to that fateful Halloween night in Haddonfield to explain how a police tragedy and an attack of conscience led to Michael’s capture. The sequence is atmospheric, and Green captures the feel of Carpenter’s original in a way that feels reverent of that film but also tonally in line with it.
The film then flashes forward to seconds after the 2018 film ended. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and grand-daughter Allyson (Andi Madichak) are wounded and driving away from the home where they’ve left Michael to burn. But they’re passed by a line of fire trucks, on their way to put out the blaze. Which, of course, means they’re about to encounter Michael Myers up close and visceral.
Green’s 2018 film was more brutal and bloody than Carpenter’s original, but still showed some sense of restraint. Michael Myers was acknowledged not to be a supernatural beast but a mere mortal, a man with a childlike intelligence whose only inclination was to kill. Green allowed him to return to his stalker roots, slipping into houses and killing the unaware in tense sequences.
In Halloween Kills, Myers emerges from the burning house and makes short work of an entire squadron of firemen, impaling, slicing and sawing them into bloody bits. Curiously, the firefighters take on Michael much like henchmen take on James Bond — one at a time, as if waiting patiently for their turn to be killed. You’d think teamwork might be able to help them take down a 61-year-old man, but whatever.
It’s a sequence that might fit into one of the awful Halloween sequels that Green and his cast like to pretend don’t exist, but it’s tonally out of line for the boogeyman we met in Carpenter’s original. Green dismisses any pretense that he’s returning to Carpenter’s Hitchockian vibe and instead seems to mistake Michael Myers for Jason Voorhees. He’s a rampaging, unstoppable machine, and the film lingers on the spurting blood, gouged-out eyes, bashed-in brains and slimy entrails. By the end, when Laurie is making spiritual allusions to Michael’s unrelenting power, you begin to wonder whether what Green and McBride really hate about those Halloween sequels is that they never were allowed to make one.
And I’m not going to pretend that I don’t like a good, even bloody, slasher flick. I’m doing an entire series about them every Friday this month. There’s something charming about the 1980s slashers, with their dedication to producing elaborate gross-out gags on the cheap, and the best ones have a vibe that invites you to laugh at the extremity. But Halloween Kills seems to think it’s above those films, mixing a tone-deaf screed about groupthink and empty platitudes about trauma amidst its unrelenting brutality.
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The film goes completely off the rails when it brings in a group of survivors from Michael’s first rampage, who organize an angry mob to take down the boogeyman. Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the young boy Laurie babysat in the first movie, leads a group of townsfolk to the hospital to call for Michael’s death (why they gather at the hospital, when it’s clear Michael is about town, is never explained). It’s repeated several times that 40 years earlier, Michael killed three teenagers and then was caught and never heard from again until this night. While a tragedy, it doesn’t seem like this is the type of event that would keep a town in an angry, terrified frenzy for four decades. And it takes the townsfolk quite awhile to learn that Michael is back; even though this takes place in the modern era, none of them seem to get concerned texts or emails. In real life, that would be all over Nextdoor in five minutes.
There’s a good idea in exploring groupthink and how out-of-control fear can lead to tragic consequences. But Green isn’t interested in unpacking that. The director, who has made intimate masterpieces like George Washington and All the Real Girls, seems unable to handle the intricacies of group sequences, and the mob scenes are hysterical and loud, without any artistry, coherence or sense of tone. By the time a 50-year-old man is rallying his neighbors by saying “the boogeyman is at large” with a straight face and making sure he stops to call out his protest line (“evil dies tonight,” repeated over and over) before running off to chase a suspect, the film borders on parody. In fact, presenting these scenes as over-the-top satire might have been a better choice than trying to do it seriously.
A hypocritical mess
There are two sequences late in the film that, in the right hands, could be horrific and bring a resonance seldom found in slasher flicks. The first concerns a woman rushing to join a mob in the hospital and stumbling upon the maimed body of her son, a victim in the previous film, in the morgue. The second involves a patient who escaped with Michael from the sanitarium in the last film, who leaps to his death rather than be killed by the angry townies. After he splatters on the ground, Green lingers on the aftermath, including his still-twitching face and bloody brains spilled out on the pavement. The film stops to say “look how horrible this is; look how much tragedy is happening.”
But you can’t have these sequences in a film that also presents Michael’s kills as money shots, lathering on the grisliness and carnage in sequences that seem to invite us to cheer and scream in horror and delight. In the middle of all the attempts at commentary, there’s a sequence where two men are stalked in Myers’ old house, and their bickering is presented almost comedically. When Michael catches up to them, he smashes one guy’s eyes in with his thumbs. Green treats the eyeball popping out almost as a punchline. He punctuates other kills with callbacks to other movies (the masks from Halloween III are a blatant attempt at fan service) and dispenses with suspense altogether. Now the fear is less about when Michael may strike but how much fake blood the prop crew is going to use for the kill, and it turns the film into a freak show. Again, I have no problem with a good, dumb slasher movie; but presented alongside these attempts to elevate the genre and the filmmakers’ comments about tackling social issues, it feels deeply hypocritical.
The 2018 Halloween actually was a story with social resonance. It was written before the #MeToo movement came along, but released in the throes of it. And its story of Laurie Strode confronting her trauma and the man who’d stolen any hope of a normal life had primal power. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it deep, but it had thematic heft. It worked as a piece of social commentary without sacrificing its responsibility to its main character.
In Halloween Kills, there are few characters to anchor to. Laurie spends the entire film in a hospital bed, chatting with a police deputy from the last film (Will Patton) about Michael’s first appearance in Haddonfield. Tommy Doyle is too obvious a mob allegory strawman to pin any hopes on as a sympathetic lead, and Allyson quickly throws in with the mob so she can avenge her father (who was killed by Michael in the previous film). Judy Greer does her best to bring some sort of compassion to the film as Karen, but the movie is so overfilled that she gets lost in the fray until the film needs her for its tragic close.
That leaves Michael Myers as the protagonist, which makes sense since he’s the only character Halloween Kills seems interested in. The only times Green’s direction achieves any sense of horror is when it lingers on Michael (a scene in which he absentmindedly stabs a man with multiple knives while a victim watches on is suitably creepy). Michael’s the only one the movie spends any time invested in, mentioning him ad nauseum and constantly presenting him in striking hero shots. By the end of the film, when the mob catches up with him, the movie nearly crosses over to having sympathy for Michael Myers (it’s also worth noting that its anti-mob moralizing and the crew’s recent comparisons to the Black Lives Matters movement is really odd for a film that also argues the police should have just shot Michael Myers when they had a chance).
And then, in its final act, Halloween Kills totally falls apart.
You can’t kill the boogeyman
The final 20 minutes of Halloween Kills include some of the most baffling choices this franchise has made over the years (okay, maybe not as bad as druids).
The entire sequence with the crowd pummeling Michael Myers is such an odd moment. I get that we’re supposed to be horrified by their actions; and yes, when you stop and think about it, an entire town turning out to bludgeon a 61-year-old man is, not to be too bold about it, concerning. And the film plays it as horror, with Michael helpless on the ground as everyone takes their whacks.
But here’s the thing: For three films (or 11, depending on how in play the sequels really are, something the movies isn’t quite sure of), Michael has been presented as the personification of evil. He murders everyone who gets in his way. He has no remorse or conscience. I’m not saying I condone mob justice. But if someone’s just killed nearly 30 people in the space of an evening and has a 50-year history of murder and the cops seem unable to apprehend him, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that the crowd takes matters into its own hands (in a movie; this should go without saying, but mob justice is bad in reality).
But then, the movie makes another puzzling choice by having Michael get up and slaughter the entire mob (and again, like the firefighters from the beginning, they line up courteously, one at a time). As this happens, we get a voiceover from Laurie saying that the fear is helping Michael transcend, and that she is the only one who can stop him. And so this series, which course-corrected by stripping Michael of any supernatural abilities and making Laurie Strode obsessed with Michael, not the other way around, abandons its two most interesting conceits.
Whether they reveal any explicit supernatural power for Michael in next year’s Halloween Ends or not, they’ve already set precedent that he has some sort of super-power. Sixty-one year old men don’t just get up after a beating and then single-handedly massacre an entire crowd. And Laurie does become his nemesis, the only one who can track him down and who is fated to defeat him. Which robs the original Halloween of some of its terror. The scary thing about Halloween was never that Laurie and Michael were nemeses destined to meet. It was that he chose her randomly; she was just home when Michael went killing. And the final scene, in which Michael murders Karen after she randomly returns to his home (she sees a boy in a Halloween costume — is this a ghost story now?) seems like a needlessly cruel set up for a sequel.
The more the original series ladled on explanations for Michael’s abilities or created a connection between him and Laurie, the more convoluted it became, ultimately creating such a mess that it has been rebooted and remade three times, to the point where this is the third sequel to a movie called Halloween.
And in the end, given how badly Green bungles Halloween Kills, I assume we’ll eventually see this series rebooted, years after Halloween Ends claims to end the Michael Myers saga for good. And if they want to choose another sequel to ignore, this would be a good place to start.