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The masked Michael Myers in the 2018 film Halloween, looking quite haggard and glancing to the right. Universal Pictures

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The new Halloween is a terrifying slasher about survival

Jamie Lee Curtis returns for a horror movie about the aftermath of trauma

Laurie Strode was never the star of Halloween. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis was, particularly in retrospect, after the 1978 film’s release amplified her star power, but the movie didn’t explore Laurie as much as its series’ killer Michael Myers and his hyperbole-prone psychologist Samuel Loomis. Really, Rob Zombie’s Halloween II was the first film in the franchise to properly examine her experience as a survivor.

Director David Gordon Green’s brand-new sequel, by way of the producer behind Get Out and The Purge, finally gives Laurie her moment.

This month’s Halloween is the eleventh entry in the franchise, the third entitled Halloween, and the second direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original. Green, whose films include Pineapple Express, All the Real Girls, and last year’s Stronger, abandons most of the series continuity to focus on the fallout of the ’78 film and interrogate the aftershocks of trauma. How would a slasher attack affect both survivors and perpetrators? How would it linger and fester over the years, poisoning entire generations?

[Ed. note: This review contains mild spoilers for Halloween.]

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) dodging Michael Myers’s hand as it comes through the door in the 2018 film Halloween. Universal Pictures

Curtis’ 40-years-on return to the role is no cash-in; she gives an emotionally raw performance that makes Laurie the heart of the film. In ways that feel disarmingly, heart-wrenchingly true, aftershocks of her traumatic encounter with Myers continue to shake Laurie, her estranged daughter Karen (the great Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). It’s not even all done through dialogue, either; the action and craft tell the Strodes’ story just as much as the script and acting. I hoped Halloween would be scary. I didn’t expect it to be this moving.

Trauma doesn’t exist without the traumatizer, and Halloween revives its silent killer Michael Myers with implacable drive. Rooting the film in our post-Serial fascination with true crime stories, the movie reintroduces Michael via a pair of ambitious podcasters hoping to connect with the killer where his psychologists have not. From that chilling opening sequence to his inevitable escape and onward, Michael Myers is genuinely frightening, often because of what he doesn’t do than what he does. For a surprisingly long time, he doesn’t even have his signature mask, but his aged frame — photographed so that his face is never entirely visible — is no less imposing.

And once Michael’s iconography is restored to its mask-and-overalls glory, Green sets about creating a suspenseful slasher, nodding to Carpenter’s style while using the entire modern horror toolbox. From a former “comedy guy,” Green’s direction is eye-opening, wringing creative scares — and not just jump scares! — from his mundane Haddonfield, Illinois setting.

The film’s visuals and sound maintain the exact blend of bluntness that makes this series (and its killer) terrifying. The sound design is heavy, chunky, and harsh, complemented by a musical score — co-composed by Carpenter himself — that absolutely shreds, combining classic themes with newer, darker material. Michael’s William Shatner mask has weathered and cracked in the intervening decades, and in turn, his grisly handiwork now mangles bodies to a horrifying new degree. The Halloween franchise is not known for gore, but this film’s fleeting glimpses of it effectively balance dread with bloodthirst. Some kills shock with blood; others with the sheer inhumanity of what’s taking place onscreen.

Laurie Strode has become a personal-doomsday prepper over the past 40 years. Sequestered away in a fortress of a house, surrounded by homemade shooting ranges and avoidant of human contact, Reinventing Laurie as something of a killer herself, akin to Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, both psychologically and physically, makes her inevitable confrontation with Michael one hell of a tense third act.

michael myers in mask wielding a knife in halloween 2008 Universal Pictures

Likewise, Donald Pleasance’s presence has been replaced by psychologist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), whose writing and performance extrapolates Loomis’ obsession with Michael to its most horrifying possible endpoint. “You’re the new Loomis,” observes Laurie at one point, but in his pursuit of a psychological breakthrough, Dr Sartain goes to places Loomis would never have dreamed about.

Like most “legacy” sequels, Halloween is aware of the giant shoulders on which it stands, though its riffs on franchise and genre history are achieved with remarkable subtlety. From the opening titles, depicting a pumpkin rotting in reverse and implying a resurrection of a dead franchise, the film makes smart observations about itself and Halloween’s place in cinema. References to the other Halloween films — and there are nods to nearly all of them, even the underrated, Myers-less third movie — arrive via craft and camerawork, and generally aren’t treated as jokes so much as subversions of expectation. Likewise, its self-reflective observations on the slasher genre are rooted in character. Characters discuss the “myth” of Michael being Laurie’s brother; they debate amongst themselves whether a guy stabbing some people is even scary anymore in the fearmongering world of 2018. There’s even a joke about the notorious reluctance of Curtis and Carpenter to return to the franchise that’s so low-key it’s unclear whether it’s even intended that way.

Much like Jordan Peele did in Get Out, Green conjures terror, emotion, smart self-awareness, and comedy all at once. It’s in the last element that co-writer Danny McBride’s voice can be heard loudest. The jokes are never overwhelming the movie, instead offering the audience much-needed release. There’s a kid in the movie whose nearly every line brought the house down, which has the secondary effect of making the subsequent terror hit all the harder. As an audience experience, Halloween killed with the audience at its Toronto Film Festival premiere in September, and should kill with the public, too.

Halloween will never supplant the original’s slasher-defining thrills. My only significant gripe with the movie is a moderately ambiguous ending, which serves the idea that, for the survivors, there truly is no end in sight to Halloween. Of course, to make a film unencumbered by franchise baggage in 2018 would almost seem ignorant of developments in the genre and the world.

But Green’s Halloween is easily the best one since Carpenter’s, adding depth and emotion and confidence to a franchise that’s often stood on shaky ground. By today’s standards, it’s perhaps even a more “complete” film than the original, despite its reliance upon it. There’s a lot to be said for the single-minded simplicity of Halloween (1978), but Halloween (2018) has a lot more going on under the mask. Happy Halloween, indeed.

Halloween arrives to theaters on Oct. 19.


Andrew Todd is a Montreal-based writer seen at outlets like Polygon, IGN, SlashFilm, Gameplanet, The Spinoff, and Birth.Movies.Death., where he is Gaming Editor. He also makes movies under the Mad Fox Films banner and is an enthusiastic patter of cats.

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