Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Defensive wounds
Updated Halloween has a feminist slant, and all for the better
In an era when more and more people are avoiding the multiplex in favor of the comfort of their living rooms, watching movies alone on a flat screen TV, and saving the expenditure of theater popcorn and soda, certain films remind us why we so used to enjoy the theater experience.
There is power gained in the collective experience of an audience, each member of whom is internalizing what they’re seeing and feeling, but also enjoying the tribal campfire warming of community cohesion. This is never more true than at a horror movie, especially with a crowd totally geeked up for the experience together.
Watching a midnight screening of David Gordon Green’s new Halloween at the massive, ornate Winter Garden Theater in Toronto as part of the Toronto International Film Festival in September, I was reminded of how much better a film can be when it’s seen by an appreciate audience, all on its wavelength. The beauty of a darkened room with a lone, large, lighted screen drawing everyone’s attention is that you can lose track
of everything else in your life for two hours, just breathing in the experience along with 250 perfect strangers.
Green’s update disavows all the previous sequels in the 40 years since John Carpenter’s original offered us the blood-soaked night in Haddonfield, Ill., when Michael Myers came home. This is just as well, as the series had veered from boring homage, and beyond ridiculous genre-baiting, to brutish rebranding in its multitude of sequels.
Rather, this film takes place precisely 40 years after Myers was captured and placed in permanent psychiatric care, away from the town, and poor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), upon whose life Myers preyed that fateful night, killing several of her friends in the process. Interestingly though, Green has reimagined Laurie’s character. No longer the demure egghead we met as a lithe teenager, she’s now a divorced mother and grandmother, whose obsession with preparation for Myers’ inevitable return has her training for combat, and advanced weaponry skills, even as she builds her house with secret safe rooms and booby traps, and forces her now-grown and resentful daughter (Judy Greer) to train along with her.
In short, she has taken the last four decades to ensure she and her family will never again meet Myers unprepared. This feminist take, a welcome change from the standard, vastly more misogynist slasher trope, also adds depth to her character, allowing us to see how that one night of terror left its indelible mark on her, reverberating through two subsequent generations. Her granddaughter (Andi Matichak), now a high school teenager, only knows that the relationship between her mom and her grandmother is strained at best as a result of her grandmother’s obsession.
Naturally, on this Halloween night so many years later, Myers escapes the hospital via a bus transport wreck that leaves various inmates traipsing through the woods, and immediately heads back to Haddonfield for revenge against the woman who defied him before.
Green, all of 3 years old when the original was released, nonetheless seems to well understand the film from the fan’s perspective. He gets its appeal, and the ins and outs of what made it work so well to begin with, which adds a proper amount
of veneration to the project. Chock-full of small homages and Easter eggs for hardcore fans, it runs the delicate balance between echoing the original without parroting it altogether.
This is not to say the film is anywhere near as creepy as the original. As a point of fact, there wasn’t any moment to rival the original’s effective jump scares, but it was pleasurable enough to watch it play out — especially toward the end, when Myers finally makes his way to the Strode house — and given its respectful due. Green also gets a great deal of mileage out of reversing some of the classic setups from Carpenter’s film, putting Myers on the defensive in several scenes that feel genuinely subversive and thrilling.
These are the film’s most exhilarating moments, as it gleefully bends and kinks the beats we have come to know so well — one such inspired shot, which sets up the film’s fiery climax, left the midnight film festival audience laughing and cheering wildly — as it morphs into, of all things, a feminist slasher flick.
Naturally, the ending leaves things just ambiguous enough for a sequel (or six), but as a reimagining of one of the seminal horror films of our age, it’s surprisingly effective. It might not have the actual scares of the original, but its forward-thinking politics still twists the butcher knife in deeply satisfying ways.