And now, on the day that shares its name, I review the movie that provides a fitting bookend to the Michael Myers saga.
It’s kind of crazy how many movies have been made about Michael Myers. According to my googling, the masked killer has been featured in no less than ten films, including one full reboot and two soft reboots that start over some time after the original, iconic Halloween. (My googling also indicated that his last name is not spelled Meyers, which means my prior review spelled it wrong. What can I say, our full-time paid editor was off that day.) It’s crazy in the “Hollywood doesn’t have any original ideas” type of way, sure, but more specifically it’s crazy because Myers is barely a character. The reason he is the prototypical slasher is that he is presented as an elemental force of evil, scarier than other antagonists because he seemingly has no motivation for his killings. As his universe has expanded around him, filmmakers have tried to suture on backstory and complex familial relationships, but they never really stick. That’s why his story has had to be walked back so many times, because none of that shit is true to what makes him an icon of horror.
That brings us to 2018’s direct sequel to the 1978 Halloween, confusingly also titled Halloween. Set four decades after the events in the first movie, we catch up with Myers, who has predictably spent the intervening years locked up in a maximum security psychiatric detention center. He’s all set to be transferred to another prison, and… well you can imagine how that works out. On the other side of things, we check in with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, the final girl from the original story. She has led a rough life of paranoia and tactical battle training that has wreaked havoc on her personal relationships, especially that of her daughter and teenage granddaughter. Curtis remains a truly magnetic screen presence, and while the acting in this movie is uniformly good, she stands out. The inevitable escape of Michael and his collision course with the Strode ladies plays out over the course of the film, and it manages to capture a lot of what made the original Halloween special. There is a sequence where the killer is walking along a bustling neighborhood street on Halloween night, weaving in and out of houses and murdering along the way. It highlights the largely indiscriminate nature of Myers’ particular psychosis, the idea that you can’t prepare for him because his motives are so opaque. One of our strongest coping mechanisms for dealing with the onslaught of tragedy that the 24/7 news cycle provides, is by assigning cause. Oh, that person probably got murdered because they married the wrong person, or those people didn’t evacuate in a sensible time frame, or I would never go jogging by myself in the city, etc., etc. Basically, we rationalize why the many bad things we hear about couldn’t happen to us. Michael represents the terror of truly random calamity. He has no discernible motivation, which makes him impossible to avoid. Unlike the prior Halloween film I reviewed, this version seems to fully understand the character.
That sequence in the neighborhood has an interesting moment in it, that I believe speaks to the larger theme of the movie. After brutally dispatching a woman in her home, Michael comes across a crying baby in a crib, pauses to consider it for a moment, and walks out the door to the next house. Now, on its surface, I suppose you could see that as the filmmakers trying to ratchet up dread by making us worry about the safety of this child, or give some shades to Michael’s rampage by instilling some sort of rudimentary code. Like I said though, Michael is an effective boogey man precisely because he doesn’t have a code. What I kept reflecting on (after, yes, I worried about the immediate safety of the child) was that sparing that baby from death did not spare it from a life where its mother is dead. How long until someone discovers the crime scene, and thus the helpless crying child, with all of the other mayhem that is going on? Is there a loving relative at the ready to pick up the responsibility of caring for the baby, or is it destined to enter the foster system? What long-term scars were just imprinted on its tiny psyche? Those questions are at the heart of what 2018’s Halloween has to say. We tend to look at potential victims in horror films as belonging to one of two camps: Dead meat or lucky survivors. There’s a scene where Laurie’s granddaughter and her friends are having a discussion about the events in the original film, and one of them brushes them off as not a big deal. A few people got stabbed, sure, but that’s hardly the biggest tragedy to occur in the last forty years. On one hand, that’s a clever strawman to construct representing the increasingly violent slasher films that have come out since ’78, and how modern audiences might find the original version boring. More important, though, is his assertion that Laurie herself should get over it. After all, she landed in the right camp – she survived. How bad could it be?
A lot of characters, not just a dumb stoner teen, ask that question over the course of the movie, and you the viewer are invited to ask it alongside them. Halloween wants us to recognize, however, that the violence perpetrated by people like Michael Myers has lasting effects on the survivors that alter the course of their lives forever. That in turn has a ripple effect that spreads to everyone within their sphere of influence, and the sphere of influence of those people, and so on. And when all those ripples lap up at our feet at a safe remove from the original act of violence, our intuitive reaction, born out of self-preservation, is to dismiss, to rationalize, to insist that they “get over it”. We minimize, because it’s too painful to take it all on if we actually consider the real impact that it has. And you can easily extrapolate that well beyond the actions of a nigh-indestructible serial killer, to the types of things that happen all around us all the time. In that way, it is the perfect sequel to 1978’s Halloween. As ground-breaking as Carpenter was, he set into motion an entire genre of film that at its most ambitious wanted to give us a few scares, and at its most degrading asked us to root for the creative dismemberment of innocent people. It’s good to have at least one entry into the catalog that invites us to consider the impact of all that violence.
Comments