I don’t know if Halloween — the 11th entry in the horror franchise that codified the rules of the slasher subgenre — is a good movie, but I know it’s a cathartic one.
It’s ungainly and structurally off-kilter, and it erases from its canon every Halloween movie except the first one, which will surely anger some fans (though, really, most of those movies can go).
The fact that it grafts a standard-issue Halloween film, where a serial killer cuts his way through the teenage populace of a small town, onto something with the emotional resonance and mother-daughter bonds of Aliens is a little curious. And every time the movie builds up a head of steam, it veers left into some other story entirely, which hurts its momentum.
But my goodness, the last 30 minutes of this movie are fun. There’s something powerful in its notion of a world where men are stupid at best, incompetent on average, and completely evil at worst, and the only thing that will save us is mothers teaching their daughters to destroy those evil men with shotgun blasts. It has all the bloody kills of other Halloween movies, but it also aims for something like a rumination on shared generational trauma, passed down a family line from mother to daughter.
Does it pull off this objective completely? Not as much as it hopes to. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cheer when the film contrived to turn one last showdown between Michael Myers and Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode into a kind of runup to the apocalypse, with good and evil so thoroughly entangled that it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
The new movie crosses the Halloween franchise with Doomsday Preppers
By far the most intriguing element of this Halloween is what it does with Laurie, the teenager who survived Michael’s killing spree in the 1978 original. Here, she’s played once more by Curtis, who originated the role and then reprised it in the franchise’s second, seventh, and eighth films before returning again for this 11th one. As always, Curtis is terrific.
The film erases every Halloween movie but the first one in an attempt to get back to its under-the-radar, nasty spirit. (The original Halloween, I should note, is one of my favorite horror movies ever made.) As a result, it dismisses the idea that Laurie is Michael’s sister (first introduced in Halloween II), all of the supernatural oddness of movies three through six, and the franchise’s initial take on Laurie’s PTSD in Halloween: H20 (which, as you can almost certainly judge just from looking at the title, is the most 1998 movie ever made).
The result turns out fine. If you’re really dedicated to some part of the Halloween mythos — like Laurie and Michael’s sibling connection — well, you’ve got a bunch of other movies to watch that will uphold it. This Halloween wants to get back to the smaller-scale frights of the original, by placing most of Michael’s kills in mundane, domestic settings. He’s back in suburbia, and the deadliest weapon he possesses is a knife. It’d feel like a back-to-basics tale if not for everything else in the film.
Running parallel to Michael’s latest rampage through teenage suburbia is the story of Laurie Strode: Doomsday Prepper. She lives in a house out in the woods stocked with more security gadgets than you could possibly imagine. She has a touchy relationship with her daughter (Judy Greer), whom Child Protective Services took away from her after Laurie kept forcing the kid to learn how to fire guns and prepare for battle with a barely human monster man. She speaks only in gruff, determined sentences, chiseled from stone, in a fashion reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the later Alien movies.
Curtis, always the sort of performer whose physicality subtly shifts depending on the role, plays 2018 Laurie as a woman made out of steel wool. People keep their distance from her, as if they know that touching her would feel rough and raw against their skin, and she wears an unruly mop of hair that makes her look a little like Christopher Lloyd in the Back to the Future movies. She is a walking reminder of what her little town went through 40 years ago, and as such, most people prefer not to see her hanging around. She’s only too happy to return to the woods and oblige.
Truth be told, Halloween maybe doesn’t earn this idea. What Laurie went through in 1978 was traumatizing, to be sure, but the new film sometimes acts as if she experienced all 11 movies’ worth of trauma before decamping to her hideout, not just the one.
It too often settles for having Laurie explain something that happened to her rather than dramatizing it, and Curtis is so committed to what she’s doing that the rest of the movie occasionally feels a little lackadaisical. It’s hard to get too worked up about a teenager you just met getting stabbed through the throat when Halloween is simultaneously teasing an elemental battle between good and evil.
David Gordon Green directs with an eye toward breaking up the tension with periodic teenage idylls, like he’s trying to capture how it might really feel to live in a small town where Michael Myers was on the loose, and he stages at least one bravura sequence involving a motion-sensing light in someone’s backyard.
The screenplay from Green, Danny McBride (yes, that Danny McBride), and Jeff Fradley mostly just takes John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s durable ’70s concept into the modern era. You don’t need to hang a bunch of technology on Halloween to make it work. You just need a guy and a knife and a woman who can survive his onslaught.
The final section of Halloween is poignant and cathartic in equal measure
The single best reason to see the new Halloween movie is that it nails the last 20 minutes, when Laurie and Michael finally face off. It’s easy enough to nitpick some of the particulars, but the ways that Green sneakily nods toward the ’70s film while flipping things to put Michael in Laurie’s shoes, or vice versa, are so fun that it’s also easy enough not to think too hard about it.
What really works about the film’s final passages is the way that they flip the original story on its ear, so Laurie isn’t simply trying to survive Michael but is actively trying to destroy him, with the help of her daughter and granddaughter (newcomer Andi Matichak).
Halloween positions this shift less as Laurie overcoming her trauma and more as Laurie fighting back against something totemic that has plagued all of humanity — but, also, disproportionately women. Michael might be just one man, but he also stands in for every other version of himself, all those dark villains, both real and imaginary.
And, hey, if you wanted to interpret Halloween as a story of women working together to destroy a great and ancient evil who is still, nevertheless, just a very powerful man — making the film something more than “just” a scary movie — well, I wouldn’t stop you.
Don’t get me wrong. Halloween isn’t some sort of pop-feminist text in the way that Aliens was when it came out in 1986. By pushing the old “final girl” subtext as far as it can possibly go, Green and company drag certain aspects of it into the light in a way that sometimes exposes their flimsy storytelling constructs. (Halloween loses track of Laurie’s granddaughter for a good long while, mostly because it needs to, not because she’s organically fallen away from the story.)
But that doesn’t stop the story from being poignant or from feeling surprisingly cathartic, and it doesn’t stop the final act from subverting and twisting slasher movie tropes, almost as if it’s daring the audience to roll its eyes at the clichés before it pivots away. In the end, Halloween doesn’t need loftier goals, because it’s having lots of fun.
Sometimes, the most important thing a movie can do is end well. Halloween takes its lumps on the way to that point, but when it closes on a deft image that combines its twinned ideas of maternal strength passed down through generations of women right alongside shared trauma, it ends very well indeed.
Halloween is playing in theaters nationwide.