‘Halloween’ brings fresh frights
The new film offers a series of callbacks and allusions to that seminal killing spree from the 1978 masterpiece
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 has rarely seemed more laborious or self-defeating.
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, seems determined to invite such comparisons in the first place. Set 40 years after the notorious “baby-sitter murders” rocked Haddonfield, Illinois, this Halloween offers a series of callbacks and allusions to that seminal killing spree, stripped of irony and cleverly reverse-engineered 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.
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 emphasised by Curtis’ severe, bespectacled scowl and long, untidy hair that eerily mirrors her look from 1978. Rather than leave Had- donfield 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 and makes his way back to Haddonfield. The killer’s homecoming is signalled by a resurgent blast of Carpenter’s immortal piano theme.
Halloween marks Curtis’ fourth return to the role that made her famous, and she must have had an especially grand time playing Laurie as Haddonfield’s resident gun-toting crackpot, an unhinged teller of inconvenient truths. But within that highly entertaining formulation, there’s a sliver of insight that feels especially true to the present moment. Curtis’ performance is an intensely physical reminder that every assault leaves lasting damage, and that it behooves everyone to believe the survivors in their midst.
That might make this Halloween sound heavy with topicality, but it isn’t. It’s nasty and nimble and stumbles only occasionally, mainly when Green and McBride’s love of slacker humour gets the better of them.