40 years later, ‘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 movement never rises 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, David Gordon Green has resurrected the faceless bogeyman 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.
There are no roman numerals in the title of Green’s film, nor any of those dopey subtitles like 1998’s “Halloween H20,” which presumably delved into the very real fears of dehydration.
As if to draw closer to the original, and ignore the nine sequels and reboots in between, 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 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. 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, Illinois.
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 son-in-law (Toby Huss) have grown tired of Strode’s fanatical survivalist paranoia. Their high-school daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak) isn’t so sure, and she naturally gravitates to the grandmother she’s been shielded from.
Needless to say, both those who dismiss Strode’s deep-seated trauma and those who would rather study evil than confront it are going to get their comeuppance. When Michael is transferred to another facility, hell predictably breaks loose. And evil—soulless and unkillable—lurks everywhere.
Green can’t recreate the eeriness of Carpenter’s original, but he pumps more blood into the story. Foggy nights and gas-station bathrooms turn predictably gory, more so than the original. You almost wish Green—easily the most talented filmmaker in the franchise since Carpenter—was instead making something original on the same streets, with the same cast (including the scenestealing Miles Robbins) and none of the skull crushing.
But there are rituals to observe, and this “Halloween” lives up to its name.