‘HALLOWEEN’ SLASHES AGAIN
With hollow eyes and sagging cheeks, the flabby white mask of Michael Myers is horror’s great blank slate. Project your fears here, it says. Myers doesn’t speak. His movements never rise beyond a deliberate gait (well, aside from all the stabbing and strangling). Even his name is purposefully bland.
Decades after John Carpenter’s slasher landmark, director David Gordon Green has resurrected the faceless Boogeyman of “Halloween” and set him loose on another Halloween night, 40 years later. Time has done little for Michael’s personality. He is still a poor conversationalist. He is still handy with a knife.
As if to draw closer to the original, this “Halloween” has simply taken Carpenter’s 1978 title. And with gliding cameras, Carpenter’s score and original cast members Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle (the man under the mask), it has tried very hard to take much more, too.
But while Green’s “Halloween” has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film, what makes his “Halloween” such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor.
Setting the template for countless slashers to follow, Carpenter’s film often reserved its most painful endings for more promiscuous girls or drug-using teens. As a grim reaper carrying out a metaphorical reckoning, Michael had questionable biases.
But what Carpenter did do was equate sex with violence, a connection that Green has elaborated on with a more feminist streak. Having survived the “Babysitter Murders” of 40 years ago, Laurie Strode (a fabulously fierce Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising the role that was her film debut) is now a self-described “twice-divorced basket case” living in a run-down house on the outskirts of the fictional Haddonfield, Ill. She has turned her home into a training ground and domestic fortification for the second coming of Michael she’s always been sure will happen.
Her daughter (Judy Greer) and her son-in-law (Toby Huss) have grown tired of Strode’s fanatical survivalist paranoia. Certain that the world isn’t so bad a place as Strode insists, they plead for her to get over it. Their high school daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), isn’t so sure, and she naturally gravitates to the grandmother she’s been shielded from.
The curiosity of “Serial”like podcast journalists (Jefferson Hall, Rhian Rees) introduces us to both the locked-up Myers and the withdrawn Strode. Before curtly dismissing them, Strode insists their investigation into Myers is pointless. Hunt evil, she believes, don’t analyze it.
Needless to say, both those who dismiss Strode’s deep-seated trauma and those who would rather study evil than confront it are gonna get their comeuppance. When Michael is transferred to another facility, hell predictably breaks loose. Once Michael is again stalking the suburban streets of Haddonfield, and the shadows and closets of seemingly safe neighborhoods are again rife with danger.
Green can’t re-create the eeriness of Carpenter’s original. But he pumps more blood into the story, both literally and figuratively.
But there are rituals to observe, and this “Halloween” lives up to its name.