In a word: scary
New ‘Halloween’ ignores sequels in Jamie Lee Curtis tour de force
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” “The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story.” “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” One of the many downsides of Hollywood’s franchise mentality is that movie titles have become such long, torturously bisected affairs; you could be a gastroenterologist and not see this many colons. The burden of advertising something new — but don’t worry, not too new — has rarely seemed more laborious or selfdefeating.
This is hardly a recent development, as the beleaguered “Halloween” franchise can attest. The general futility of the Michael Myers Cinematic Universe has only been compounded by its more torturous titles, from “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” to “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later,” a movie that I had until recently assumed takes place underwater.
And so it is with admirable economy and brazen self-assurance that the new “Halloween” movie bills itself simply as “Halloween,” an elegant solution that runs the risk of inviting some tough comparisons. Four decades’ worth of sequels, reboots and pointlessly revisionist plot lines have failed to match the sleek, ruthless perfection of John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece, which set a slasher-movie standard and elevated Jamie Lee Curtis to the scream-queen pantheon.
Fortunately, director David Gordon Green, who wrote the “Halloween” 2018 script with his frequent comedy collaborator Danny McBride (“Your Highness,” “Pineapple Express”), seems determined to invite such comparisons in the first place. Set 40 years after the notorious “baby-sitter murders” rocked Haddonfield, Ill., this “Halloween” offers a series of callbacks and allusions to that seminal killing spree, stripped of irony and cleverly reverseengineered into the story of an epic rematch. Scary and propulsive, it doesn’t just forge a direct link to Carpenter’s original; it pretends all the garbage in between never even existed.
And why not? It must have been a relief to jettison the dead weight and get back to basics, to treat the elegant spareness of Carpenter’s movie as both a fresh jumping-off point and a guiding principle. (Carpenter himself served as an executive producer on the film, the first time he has been involved with a new installment of the series since 1982’s “Season of the Witch.”)
This “Halloween” does not venture too deeply into the weeds of serial-killer psychology in the manner of Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake; nor does it traffic in hoary elements of Druidic mythology like 1995’s “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.” Its most thrilling image, of Curtis storming down a darkened hallway with a shotgun in hand, recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s famous saying that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Butcher knives, hammers and hard-stomping boots come in handy too.
But for all the weaponry on hand, the emphasis here is rightly on the girl. With a canny balance of empathy and exploitation, “Halloween” treats its heroine’s lingering trauma with surprising emotional realism and only a hint of comic exaggeration. Laurie Strode has clearly never recovered from her terrifying ordeal, as emphasized by Curtis’ severe, bespectacled scowl and long, untidy hair that eerily mirrors her look from 1978. The collateral damage includes two failed marriages and an estranged daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), who keeps a healthy distance, along with her husband, Ray (Toby Huss), and teenage daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). Rather than leave Haddonfield and seek out a new identity, as past alternate versions of this story have suggested she might, Laurie has stayed put, walling herself off in a house fortified with metal fences, heavy door bolts and a basement panic room stocked with firearms. She’s preparing for — and perhaps even looking forward to — the day when Michael bursts out of maximum-security lockup and comes looking for her and her family.
There would be no movie if Laurie’s paranoia were not completely justified. Triggered by a pair of snooping British podcasters (Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees) trying to cash in on the true-crime craze, Michael (the masked character played here by both Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney) once again escapes during a nighttime transfer — is it Illinois state protocol that the criminally insane can be moved only around Halloween? — and makes his way back to Haddonfield. The killer’s homecoming is signaled by a resurgent blast of Carpenter’s immortal piano theme, tricked out with additional music by his son, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies, but still as gloriously dread-soaked as ever.