Mob Mentality and the Sidelined Final Girl of ‘Halloween Kills’

Let’s get this out of the way early: Jamie Lee Curtis is largely relegated to a hospital room in Halloween Kills. Her iconic final girl, Laurie Strode, gets no kick-ass action sequences battling perennial boogeyman, Michael Myers. She winces (a lot) from her injuries sustained in the 2018 installment, threatens to go hunt Myers down, and waxes philosophical about the nature of evil—but gets to do nothing beyond these trivialities. Knowing that Halloween Kills is the bridge film between Halloween and next year’s Halloween Ends, one suspects that director David Gordon Green is reserving Curtis’ genre capital for a climatic showdown for the ages in the last film—but that does little to alleviate the feelings that something’s missing from this film; namely, the lynchpin of the Halloween franchise.  

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we can move on and assess Halloween Kills on its Strode-less merits. I’ve watched the film twice; the first time as my ten-year-old self who’s still enthralled by the boogeyman in suburbia, the second time with a more deliberate critical eye. Like any film in the venerable franchise, Halloween Kills is a mixed bag, hitting some of its marks with brutal precision while missing others completely.

The new film begins with a very clever prologue that continues the 1978 film’s storyline—the pursuit and capture of Michael Myers. It involves a young Officer Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and a life-and-death decision that changes the trajectory of far too many lives to count by now and an encounter between Myers and young Lonnie Elam (Tristian Eggerling). It also features an impressive—if improbable—cameo by a character from the original film. Green and company really shine in this sequence, which possesses both the look and feel of Carpenter’s original, and ably set the mood for what’s to come. After this pre-credit sequence, the film picks up where the 2018 film ended: Laurie’s compound engulfed in flames and its intergenerational trio of final girls—an injured Laurie, daughter Karen, and granddaughter Allyson—jostling down the road in the back of a pick-up truck en route to Haddonfield Memorial.

After giving the audience a reasonably plausible explanation for how he survives the fiery deathtrap Laurie rigged for him, a slightly charred and very pissed-off Myers goes on a rampage, slicing and dicing his way back to Haddonfield proper. Myers is angry in this movie—with the kills brutal beyond anything seen in the franchise since Rob Zombie took his one-two crack at it. While Mikey takes out the majority of Haddonfield’s fire department and a drone-flying interracial couple, the audience is re-introduced to the survivors from the original film—Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), nurse Marion (Nancy Stephens), and a grown up Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet)—who gather at a dive-bar for an annual commemoration of the tragic events of Halloween night ’78 and to toast Laurie. Elsewhere, Lonnie’s son and Allyson’s on-the-outs boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold) happens upon a critically injured Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). As the parties converge upon Haddonfield Memorial, news that Myers has somehow survived and is killing his way back to town gets out. The survivors—led by a baseball bat-wielding Tommy—decide that “evil dies tonight!” and a vigilante mob is formed to hunt Myers down once and for all. Otay, Panky.

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in Halloween Kills, it’s because there is. Green is firing on all cylinders in this one, his many story threads mirroring the growing chaos of the mob outside Haddonfield Memorial. Karen (Judy Greer), who’s given far more than the yeoman’s work she had to do in the last film, is convinced that Myers is coming to the hospital to kill her mother. Allyson (Andi Matichak) ignores her mother’s directive to sit vigil at her grandmother’s bedside, instead arming up and joining Cameron and Lonnie in their hunt for Myers. Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey, also returning from the last film) tries—albeit unsuccessfully—to control the mob tensions about to tragically spill over at the hospital, even getting into verbal fisticuffs with Haddonfield’s former sheriff, Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who’s now head of hospital security. And Michael Myers? He’s making a beeline for his former family home on Lampkin Lane, now inhabited by an affectionately quirky gay couple nicknamed Big John and Little John and played by MADtv’s Michael McDonald and The Mick’s Scott MacArthur. Suffice to say that Myers reaches the ‘ole homestead before the ragtag crew of would-be vigilantes does and is not a fan of the new color scheme. Or charcuterie.

The film’s third act coalesces in a weird, dreamlike, violent denouement—complete with voiceover by Laurie from her hospital room—the sole intention of which seems to be setting up the next film. It’s in this final sequence of events where Green is either going to succumb to the same fate as all previous sequel directors or rise above it in spectacular fashion: Explaining how and why Michael Myers “transcends” human mortality. It’s clear after the Haddonfield mob puts Myers through his paces that he’s something…beyond a mere mortal man. How Green will expound on this in Halloween Ends will ultimately cement his standing in franchise history.

Halloween Kills isn’t a perfect film and suffers from middle-child syndrome, the degree to which won’t be evident until it can be held up within the context of the full trilogy of films. As purely a sequel, it’s briskly paced with some exceptionally well-executed sequences, like the parkside SUV assault, and some less so. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Big John and Little John.) The nostalgia factor here with returning characters is high (hell if I didn’t get misty-eyed when Cyphers first appears on the screen), with surprisingly strong performances from Richards and Longstreet. Matichak, too, is exceptionally good. Disappointingly, Hall’s Tommy Doyle is a misfire. With his bellowing and menacing baseball bat stance, it’s as if he were channeling Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan from The Walking Dead here. Chalk this up to the film’s inconsistent writing, which Green shares with Scott Teems and Danny McBride. For every well-written scene (like the one in which Greer’s character attempts to help one of the escaped Smith’s Grove patients who’s been mistaken by the hospital mob for Myers), there are two that suffer from cringe-worthy dialogue and weird pacing. Even the big twist at the end of the film feels off, illogical in the context of time and what’s going on just outside the Myers house where it occurs. Elsewhere, Green makes at least one surprising choice in which a character most would peg as a goner early on actually survives their Myers encounter, which leaves one wondering if said character will have a part to play in the final film. On the plus side, John Carpenter (with son, Cody, and Daniel Davies) delivers another outstanding soundtrack that manages to sound distinctive while remaining true to his original ’78 score.

Like its predecessor’s commentary on generational trauma, Halloween Kills works better in a broader sense with its depiction of the dangers of mob mentality. When the hive mind overrides rational thought and reason, Green and company postulate here, the resulting consequences can be worse than the original trigger. The denizens of Haddonfield rise up—collectively—to defeat their longtime boogeyman. It’s a noble undertaking to want to reclaim their home, but Green is there to remind us that sometimes evil wins—especially if you’re the lady who brings an honest-to-God iron to the street fight. And, sometimes, there’s collateral damage. Halloween Kills gives us the collateral damage in spades. This Curtis-light entry in Green’s Halloween trilogy may be short on the Strode but it’s heavy on the brutality. Its breakneck violence works best when viewed as the (fast) moving part to a whole not yet fully in view.

Narrative choppiness aside, Halloween Kills ultimately delivers the slasher goods. Michael Myers is the soulless killing machine we’ve all come to know and love over the course of 40+ years in eleven films (with a twelfth on the way) and a body count now over 150. Best advice: Turn off your brain, grab some popcorn, and just ride the waves of slasher nostalgia. Let the armchair critics of the world argue pointlessly over the film’s merits—or lack thereof—and just lose yourself in the seasonal slaughter. There will be plenty of time for more serious discourse and analysis once we see what kind of bow Green slaps on his trilogy with Halloween Ends.

Rest up, Laurie Strode—we expect big things from you in the next one.

Revisiting Haddonfield in 'Halloween'

It seems that the promotional machine behind the new Halloween hasn’t stopped since star Jamie Lee Curtis took to Twitter in September of last year to announce that Laurie Strode was headed back to Haddonfield. From the earliest teaser photo of Curtis standing on a leaf-strewn porch in the same babysitter garb she donned in the ’78 film with nemesis Michael Myers looking on, the franchise’s sizable fan base has—quite literally—gone along for the ride from pre-production to premiere. Momentum grew in earnest after the first trailer dropped and reached fever pitch after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The promotional buzz has been deafening, and Curtis has so often and so eloquently now articulated both her gratitude for the career that Carpenter’s original gave her and the new film’s feminist timeliness in the #MeToo era that diehard fans could probably recite her answers to interview questions like lines from a script.

Logically, with such buildup comes expectation. And meeting those expectations would be a monumental task for any director of any film—let alone an unproven genre director who’s boldly taken on an iconic horror franchise with a fiercely loyal (and hyper critical) fanbase. Even with the blessing of the film’s original director and co-screenwriter and the all-in participation of, arguably, the most popular and recognizable scream queen in film history, success in the age of the armchair critic and Internet mob rule will be an uphill battle for David Gordon Green’s Halloween. For as eager as fans were for a new addition to the venerable franchise, they’re also loyalists and experienced genre veterans. Just as film scholars have come around to give Carpenter’s Halloween its rightful due, horror movie fans who grew up on the ’78 film and its countless knockoffs have hardened, grizzled a bit, and, perhaps, become slightly more discerning in their tastes.

The last time we visited Haddonfield, Michael Myers got a backstory, someone else was playacting Laurie Strode, and fans were polarized—like Clinton versus Trump-level polarized. Indeed, Rob Zombie’s revisionist take on Carpenter’s source material in 2007, and then again in 2009, is still the stuff of much debate and deliberation—and sometimes raw emotion. Prior to that, we endured the largely unwatchable Resurrection outing in 2002—helmed by the original 1982 sequel’s director, Rick Rosenthal—that saw Laurie Strode die within the first ten minutes of the movie and Myers go on to terrorize Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. That trainwreck was preceded by the decidedly more watchable—and arguably one of the best—H20 installment. That film came 20 years after the original and took on much of the narrative that Green’s Halloween takes on two decades even further in—how does Laurie Strode fare after the fateful events of Halloween night, 1978? Going back even further than Halloween: H20, there were another four direct sequels to Carpenter’s film and one weirdly standalone film when Carpenter and Halloween co-writer/producer Debra Hill had thoughts of the series branching into an anthology series centered around the titular holiday—long before American Horror Story revolutionized the anthology concept. The Halloween franchise now consists of eleven films and stands—pre-release of the 2018 outing—as the fourth highest-grossing domestic horror franchise at approximately $668 million.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but David Gordon Green—who shares co-writing credit with Danny McBride and Jeff Farley on the new Halloween’s script—had his work cut out for him long before the cameras rolled. History, expectation, and nostalgia are strong forces in the universe of fandom. So, how’d he do? Let’s examine.

The first smart choice Green makes—and, ironically, his most controversial—is to fashion the new Halloween as a direct sequel to the ’78 film. That’s right: No hospital massacre, no sibling ties, no Jamie Lloyd, no faked death and headmistress gig, no fall off the sanitarium roof. Just Laurie sobbing on the floor declaring to Dr. Loomis “It was the bogeyman” and a forty-year flashforward. Interestingly, it’s not the first time the franchise retconned a timeline; H20 jettisoned the events of the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. This retroactive continuity allows Green and company to reset the clock and imagine a new series of events not mired in the myriad inconsistencies and questionable creative decisions of previous films in the series. And—color me crazy—but I find it vaguely comforting to know that Nurse Chambers never met the end of Michael’s butcher knife after all and picture her chain-smoking on a porch somewhere with a faithful Golden Retriever at her feet while she waits for a carload of grandbabies to visit(!). 

In the 2018 version of Halloween, we’re re-introduced to the two central figures in the series—Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Myers is revealed to have been apprehended and captured after the events of ’78, locked up in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium ever since. For all intents and purposes, his life and murder spree ended as if someone hit the pause button. Conversely, Laurie has lived forty years’ worth of life—she’s married and divorced twice, had a daughter, and now has a granddaughter—but it’s been a life irrevocably altered and affected by what’s come to be largely forgotten and relegated to an anecdotal footnote in Haddonfield’s history. Myers may be the one physically imprisoned, but Laurie’s been mentally held captive by the trauma of “the Babysitter Murders” for four long decades.  We see the toll her PTSD has taken—from her estrangement from the daughter taken away from her to the labyrinthine compound of traps, triggers, and panic rooms she’s rigged together. She’s a woman lying in wait, confident in her intuition that Myers will come for her again—even if everyone else from the local townsfolk to her own family have come to discount such certitude as the ravings of a damaged woman. She’s like the survivalist version of the neighborhood crazy cat lady.

Green chooses to re-introduce us to Myers first during a gorgeously shot sequence in the enclosed courtyard of Smith’s Grove. Two ill-fated British true-crime podcasters are there to interview him on the day (aka Halloween eve) he’s to be transferred to an out-of-state maximum-security facility. We’re introduced to his new psychiatrist, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer)—or the “new Loomis” as Laurie snarkily dubs him later—who’s a poor stand-in for Donald Pleasance. After inciting everyone but Myers with his old mask and histrionic pleas to “SAY SOMETHING, MICHEAL!”, the podcaster pair set off—post-opening credits—to interview the lone survivor of Myers' murderous rampage. Deep in the woods, locked behind sliding gates, steel-reinforced doors, and more deadbolts than you can count, we get our first look at this older, damaged version of Laurie, who’s apparently as short on patience as she is on cash.

We eventually meet the other key players, including daughter Karen (Judy Greer), son-in-law Ray (Toby Russ), granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), and Allyson’s assorted besties—Vicky (Virginia Gardner), Vicky’s boyfriend Dave (Miles Robbins), her boyfriend Cameron <wink-wink> Elam (Dylan Arnold), and Cameron’s best bud Oscar (Drew Scheid). Introductions are cursory at best because—as horror diehards know well—cast of characters in a slasher film is little more than code for body count. And Green doesn’t disappoint in that facet of the film.

Laurie is barely finished with her Annie Oakley-style target practice (complete with every leftover mannequin from the prop closet of Tourist Trap it seems) when Michael’s transfer goes not-shockingly-but-necessarily awry. Carpenter’s updated iconic score kicks in and Myers is back on the streets of Haddonfield, slicing his way through town before an incoherent, annoyingly convenient, and completely out-of-left-field twist delivers him to Laurie’s well-lit doorstep to kick off the film’s third—and most satisfying—act. Suffice to say that it takes a village—or at least three generations of well-armed women anyway—to bring Myers’ reign to its simultaneously inevitable and questionable end. It’s kickass, well-paced, and loads of fun; the audience I saw it with was screaming and cheering.

Curtis delivers the goods and is the heartbeat of the film. This is a movie about a victim weary of being a casualty of her shared history with her aggressor. Laurie has painstakingly prepared and patiently waited for forty years—at great personal sacrifice—to reclaim her narrative, and Curtis’ performance reflects that well-worn resolve. She’s nothing short of a marvel—particularly in a scene where she waits outside the sanitarium in her pick-up truck, gun in one hand, booze in another, and watches until Myers is loaded onto the bus and pulls away. Her face conveys everything the character has suffered and lost—pain, rage, vulnerability.

There are three standouts in the supporting cast: First, Andi Matichak who does a competent job essentially portraying Laurie’s younger self. As Allyson, Matichak embodies the quintessential high school girl—an updated Laurie Strode, if you will—with enough presence to be memorable without overshadowing the character she’s modeled after. Although this Halloween doesn’t give her the screen time that the original gave Curtis, she still manages to leave her mark. The second standout is veteran character actor Will Patton. As Haddonfield’s current lawman Officer Frank Hawkins, Patton is given a sizable role on point with that of Charles Cyphers, who played Haddonfield’s original sheriff in the 1978 film. He’s believable and likable and really lends solid support, especially in his scenes with Curtis as you see his reluctant transition from someone who fell squarely into the camp who dismissed Laurie as an eccentric to someone who now—with equal reluctance—realizes that she was right all along. Finally, Judy Greer gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Laurie’s adult daughter, who herself has been the victim of generational trauma. On the surface, it first appears that Greer is given yeoman’s work here but watch a little closer and you’ll see an exquisitely subtle rendering of a daughter grappling with the necessity of self-preservation against the strength of familial bonds. It also doesn’t hurt that Greer gets, arguably, the best line and cheer-worthy moment in the movie.

Overall, Green delivers the requisite slasher goods. The film’s post-Myers’ escape pacing is spot-on, and the body count is suitably upsized from the film’s 1978 counterpart, which is cleverly acknowledged as being tame by today’s standards in the film. He does an exceptionally good job of liberally sprinkling in Easter eggs for the franchise’s faithful—almost two dozen by count—without pulling the new Halloween out of the present and into the past. This reviewer isn’t sure that the casual viewer (or even the diehard fan for that matter) will realize what a tricky balancing act this is. After all, with forty years of history, it would be a missed opportunity not to pay tribute in some way to what precedes Green’s film; conversely, done too obviously or without careful regard for tone and pacing, viewers could be pulled right out of the film. Wisely, Green limits most of his Easter eggs to visual references—sheets hanging on a clothesline, familiar rubber Halloween masks, a closet with louvered doors, a memorable tombstone, a hastily drank glass of wine—and eschews actor cameos (with the brilliant exception of one vocal cameo by a member of the original film’s cast). Sure, I still think Kyle Richards’s adult Lindsey Wallace bumping into Curtis’ character on the street while trick-or-treating with her kids would have been brilliant, but I give Green credit for resisting the easy and obvious stunt cameos.

Again, with forty years investment in the franchise—its characters, its storylines, its hits and misses—it would be easy to nitpick the hell out of the new Halloween. After all, who knows the film better, more intimately than its loyal fanbase whose affection for the series rivals the generational affection of any sports fan for a particular team? I’ll limit my criticisms to those I felt actually detracted from the film—as made—versus any personal projection of what should have been done/included.

My chief grievance is the film’s uneven editing. There are scenes—important scenes like the one with Curtis, solo, in her truck—that are cut so abruptly that they’re jarring. It leaves the finished film feeling like there was too much to cram into some subjective studio-mandated running time constraint. No doubt the film’s future home video release may shed some light on what was cut and how—or even if—the trimmed footage changed the movie’s original footprint. My second beef is the inclusion of too many unnecessary characters—chief among them Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey) whose wholly pointless presence seems purposed only to fill an arbitrary diversity quotient and whose ridiculous cowboy hat to remind us that we’re in the Midwest. Third, Green’s film has been woefully shortchanged by the film’s marketing. Too many trailers showing way too much footage (including some footage that obviously fell victim to the editor’s hacksaw). Forget what I said a moment ago about ruminating on the should’ve, could’ve, and would’ve. The studio should have literally let Curtis talk the movie up the way she has with virtually nothing but perhaps a single trailer with flashes of images. Less would have been infinitely more here. Audiences know—or can easily deduce—the entire storyline going in. That lends itself to the problem of expectation mentioned earlier. Truly brilliant marketing would have been to let audiences walk in blind, having only Curtis’ well-articulated treatise about post-generational trauma in their heads as they settled into their multiplex seat to watch the movie.  

Lastly, and ideally, I would have liked to have seen a new Halloween that was relentlessly grim and frightening. Yes, I know in the post-Scream era that horror films—especially slashers—are required to infuse humor in between the murder and mayhem. But why? As films like The Descent and The Witch and The Babadook and Hereditary have shown us, it’s ok to just go for the jugular and scare the living shit out of an audience. Horror audiences are a durable bunch who don’t need chuckles sandwiched between the jump scares. Halloween, circa 1978, worked so well and has endured because Carpenter understood that. Any laughter elicited was nervous laughter. Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace added to the tension with their childhood fears, not detracted from it with precocious one-liners like (the admittedly adorable) Jibrail Nantambu’s Julian does. His Webster-like comedy schtick just undermines what should have been a horrific, traumatizing scene.

And there you have it: David Gordon Green’s Halloween is an enjoyable, if imperfect, roller-coaster ride that does what it sets out to. Buoyed by a franchise-best performance from Curtis, some impressive set design and cinematography that captures the essence of the titular holiday, and an altered timeline that simplifies matters and brings the proceedings back to the spirit of Carpenter’s original, the new Halloween is a respectably solid addition to the Michael Myers mythos. Like time proved ultimately kind to Carpenter’s original—hey, even The New York Times recently gave the original film a proper review after a forty-year oversight—years and endless analysis will ultimately give Green’s film its rightful ranking within the franchise canon. For now, go see it—have a laugh, scream a little, cheer a lot. There’s something cathartic about watching a woman long-scorned taking names and kicking ass in this revitalized feminist age.

Plus, it’s Halloween—everyone’s entitled to one good scare, no?

Trick 'r Treat

Hadn’t heard about this holiday-themed horror nugget before, but the trailer was posted on the Shocklines message board recently and really grabbed my attention. Boasting the killer tagline “Drowning, poison, claw, or knife. So many ways to take a life” and a beautiful, atmospheric look, Trick 'r Treat is an anthology movie that highlights the scary (and deadly) consequences of dismissing a tradition. Four vignettes are (according to advance reviews) seamlessly interwoven Creepshow-style (minus the clearly defined segments) in what Bloody Disgusting compared to a live-action Nightmare Before Christmas. From Warner Bros:

It is said that Halloween is the night when the dead rise to walk among us and other unspeakable things roam free. The rituals of All Hallows Eve were devised to protect us from their evil mischief, and one small town is about to be taught a terrifying lesson that some traditions are best not forgotten. Nothing is what it seems when a suburban couple learns the dangers of blowing out a Jack-o-Lantern before midnight; four women cross paths with a costumed stalker at a local festival; a group of pranksters goes too far and discovers the horrifying truth buried in a local legend; and a cantankerous old hermit is visited by a strange trick-or-treater with a few bones to pick. Costumes and candy, ghouls and goblins, monsters and mayhem... the tricks and treats of Halloween turn deadly as strange creatures of every variety-human and otherwise-try to survive the scariest night of the year.

Indeed, watching the superb trailer brings to mind Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. See what you think:



In yet another testament to the inanity of the Hollywood machine, Warner Bros. Pictures dropped the film from its roster last year — despite excellent advance word coming out of test screenings — leaving it in distribution limbo. Keep in mind that this is the same company that opts for wide releases of subpar J-Horror remakes like One Missed Call, the sequel to Rest Stop (!), and duds like The Reaping. Enough said.

On a positive note, Trick 'r Treat has been given the honor of opening the 2008 Screamfest Horror Film Festival at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on October 10th. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with first-time director Michael Dougherty. Dougherty is also an accomplished artist and has chronicled how his artwork inspired the film in the new book Trick 'r Treat: Tales of Mayhem, Mystery & Mischief, which he’ll be signing on October 9th at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.