TRICKY TREAT
40 years later, ‘Halloween’ pumps more blood into slasher story
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, 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 hasn’t uttered a word in the intervening decades, says a doctor at the sanatorium that holds him.) 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.” As if to draw closer to the original (and to 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,” which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — 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 drugusing 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 rundown house on the outskirts of the fictional Haddonfield, Ill. She has turned her home into a training ground and domestic fortification (beneath the kitchen island is a well-armed shelter) 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.
Green, the sometimes brilliant, sometimes confounding filmmaker of art-house indies (“George Washington”), broader comedies (“Pineapple Express”) and, more recently, a few starry studio projects (“Our Brand Is Crisis”), can’t re-create the eeriness of Carpenter’s original. But he pumps more blood into the story, both literally and figuratively. Foggy nights and gas-station bathrooms turn predictably gory, more so than the original. But the scenes that fall between those foreboding, twinkling piano notes have far more warmth and spirit than you’d expect.
You almost wish Green — easily the most talented filmmaker in the franchise since Carpenter — were instead making something original here 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.