Detailed spoilers for Halloween
1978 and 2018 to follow…
David Gordon Green’s Halloween
sequel/reboot is in most respects a superbly executed slasher movie. It’s excellently performed, phenomenally shot
and features genuinely clever twists on the original’s iconography. But it is also the complete antithesis of the
original in some fundamental ways. Some
of these make for satisfying inversions, some are the only option available to
put a new spin on tropes that have grown extremely hoary, and some of those
takes get so fresh as to completely refute the basic thrust of the original and
the very things that gave it staying power.
All of it flows from the basic premise, that this is a
sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween
that disregards all the other follow-ups and picks up 40 years after the
original film. Given its intent to
return to the more grounded reality of the original, this is really the only plausible
choice. But it still positions it with a
foot in several different spheres, with corresponding baggage from each; it is
at once a slasher sequel, a specific follow up to the iconic ending of the
original, and a “legacy” sequel, that increasingly common reboot/continuation
that dusts off a decrepit icon from decades past and tries to revive their franchise
cache for a new generation (see: Creed,
Blade Runner 2049, Disney Star Wars).
 |
| Do not see: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, any Die Hard After A Vengeance, Tron: Legacy, Top Gun 2099 (if they are actually serious with that shit) |
Taking each in turn…
ON SLASHER SEQUELS
All sequels struggle with the inherent dilemma of how much
to imitate what made the first entry a success versus bringing enough new to
the table to justify their existence as a separate entity. But slasher movies, for as relentlessly as
they are sequelized, have such specific requirements to function that
recreating them steers things immediately and pretty much inevitably into
self-parody. Even before smartphones,
it took some contriving to get a) a big enough group of people to provide a
proper body count, b) isolated enough that they cannot easily get outside help,
but also c) separated enough that they can be separated and picked off in
individual set pieces. The contrivances
required to serve up that same platter to the same killer a second time (much less
fifth and sixth) only compound on each other, and that’s without even getting
into the proliferation of immediate, effective communication devices that
everyone carries on their person at all times.
There’s a reason most slasher series tend to get progressively goofier,
while making their killer more explicitly supernatural, as they go. And they mostly ignore the implication that
the villain would immediately become the most notorious killer in history, which
renders the requisite naivete of the victims and obliviousness of law
enforcement in each subsequent installment all the more ludicrous.
To its credit, H18
manages to pull off a credible slasher sequel without doing any of that. Myers still enjoys the moderate teleportation
ability that all slasher scripts provide their killers, and there is the early
bit where his reaction to the mask seems to spread distress to other patients
and dogs in the yard. But that is more a
bit of creepy mood-setting than anything that has bearing on the plot. And
while the comedic bits are more overtly “comedic” (and identifiable as the
style of Green and collaborator Danny McBride) than the original, the central
threat of Myers is taken entirely, deadly seriously. I also want to single out the brief bit where
one of the teens points out that nightmarish rampage of the original pales in
comparison to what their generation experiences in schools on a bi-monthly basis. This is savvy, both as a succinct piece of
social commentary and as a subtle bit of justification for why the town of
Haddonfield can be sufficiently unprepared for the most significant and
traumatic event in its history to repeat itself so exactly.
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| Town Motto: "What are the odds..?" |
The 40 year gap also works to mitigate that self-parody aspect,
of an inmate famous for escaping a mental institution and going on a killing
spree on Halloween night once again escaping that institution and going on a
killing spree, on Halloween night, in the same town. And I will defend the “Evil Loomis” twist, which
is admittedly goofy, but is the one inversion of the original’s elements that
actually took me by surprise. And the surprise did serve to leaven the inherent goofiness required to once again spring
Michael on Halloween night and get him once again stalking Laurie Strode with a
big knife. Evil Loomis essentially steps into the shoes of the screenwriters,
contriving to create this scenario from within the story itself rather than their
doing so entirely from without. And I do
love how his scheming allows for the entire film and its climactic
confrontation to play out while leaving open the question of whether Michael even
remembers or cares who Laurie is. It
saps some of Myers’ cred as an unstoppable monster, which I’ll get into later,
but also preserves the opacity of his motivations that is so central to making
him one of horror’s most enduring icons. Which I’ll get into now.
ON THE SHAPE
It can be easy to take the artistry of the original Halloween for granted because there is
nothing complicated about its execution. But that simplicity allows for a peerless
balance between ominous symbolism and chilling plausibility. The movie frames him as The Boogeyman, an avatar
of all primeval terrors that permeates the collective subconscious of humanity. But it also grounds him as a crazy guy with a
knife, which is a visceral enough threat to (pardon the pun) cut through all of
that cerebral claptrap and engage the lizardbrain directly. Which horror has to do, or else all the
richest, creamiest subtext in the world won’t penetrate the fog of boredom and
ugliness that an un-scary scary movie represents.
| There is that one guy who doesn't care that the plot is nonsense because he is really into the Jungian symbolism and Oedipal subtext. You don't want to be that guy. |
That balance is what makes OG Michael Myers such a perfect manifestation
of Evil; how he manages to embody all at once its indomitability, its ineffability,
as well as its banality. Because although we are given his backstory right up
front, it doesn’t make his motives any less inscrutable. The “explanation” doesn’t explain anything. To the childcare community of Haddonfield, he
is more than human, all their worst fears manifested in the horrible, faceless
flesh. But for the psychologists (and
latter-day bloggers) intent on deconstructing him, he remains maddeningly
unknowable because he is so much less
than human. As in, it literally drives
his shrinks mad – Loomis comes to the conclusion that the only treatment for him
is a bullet, which the DSM V identifies as “totally
not what psychiatry is about”, and his subsequent doctor goes even crazier
trying to find some hint of the layers that modern psychological theory would insist must
drive a pathology of such extreme behavior.
But there are no layers to Michael.
He’s more than an abstract concept, but less than a man. He isn’t even a “he”, not really, just a dark
and endlessly malleable shape. The Shape.
ON THE DIFFERENT ENDINGS
John Carpenter is the master of horror endings, and Halloween’s is in its own way as
apocalyptic as The Thing or Prince Of Darkness. But it packs an
even sneakier punch, because the stakes had not been set that high throughout
the movie. Laurie wasn’t fighting to
stop an alien takeover of the planet or the return of Satan, she was just trying
to escape a lunatic with a knife. And
it’s only after she does, and Loomis empties his gun into the Shape, that the
film fully embraces the nightmare logic it has toyed with all along as the body
(impossibly?) disappears. And then that’s
it, it’s over.
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| Can't get video to embed, so link will have to do |
A recurring theme on Schwartzblog is that I’m a big believer
in the power of endings. And Halloween’s
closing statement elevates the horror of the preceding hour and a half from the
visceral to the existential. There’s no
need for another chase scene with Michael as an explicitly unkillable hulk. As his theme music (and breathing) play over shots
of the empty spaces in the house where he could
be hiding, it accentuates how none of these places will ever be safe again. The Boogeyman is always out there. Evil can never be destroyed, only temporarily
escaped.
It’s not that you have to believe that “moral” is an
accurate reflection of the real world. I
don’t, really. But that doesn’t take
away from its grim potency. Speaking
generally, I don’t think horror films should be sober reflections of the real
world. In its purest form, horror is a
nightmare distilled for the screen. And
nightmares don’t come any more primal than to be hunted by unstoppable forces
we can’t quite define.
By contrast, in Halloween
2018 Michael is defeated more thoroughly.
Yes, there is a quick shot of the burning basement with Michael
conspicuously absent, which is an attempt to maintain that not-quite-explicitly
supernatural mystique (and keep the door cracked open for further sequels). But for one thing, that “ambiguity” can’t
match the gutpunch of the original’s much starker revelation. And for another, it doesn’t even matter all
that much if the film had actually come out and confirmed he is definitely
immortal. Even if The Shape still can’t
be killed, H18 shows that he can be fought
and he can be beaten. He spends the entire second half of the film being
manhandled, undressed, shanghaied, mangled, tricked and trapped. The entire point of the third act is that he
becomes the hunted rather than the hunter. The Boogeyman becomes the underdog.
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| And any fan knows, Michael Myers is only ever at a disadvantage against Flip Mode |
There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily. It’s an empowering turn, and it isn’t hard to
see why people, particularly less miserable pricks than myself, would find it
more satisfying. Moreover, there is a
fairly limited matrix of options for how you resolve things between Laurie and
her tormentor once you resolve to bring her back, and I don’t find any of them entirely
satisfying:
1. She Dies, He Lives
There was never much possibility that the
level of talent involved would go to this much trouble reviving the character
just so the monster can finish the job.
For one, Curtis had already gone through similar motions 20 years ago
with Halloweens: H20/Resurrection. For another, it would lean right into the
misogynist underpinnings of the slasher genre in a really ugly way, and come on.
No one was going to make a movie this high profile in 2018 without a credible
line of defense about how it’s actually about female empowerment for the press
junkets. I may take some issue with how
much Michael gets batted around in the final product, but I would have reacted worse
to a movie that seemed to exist just so the filmmakers could go back to the
prototypical Survivor Girl four decades later and “get her” this time.
But even if you ignore any sex-based
implications entirely, killing her would still be a miscarriage of the thematic
thrust of the original ending. There is a big difference between a final note that
says “no matter how defeated Evil appears, you will still never truly be safe
and can never rest easy” and one that says “no matter how defeated Evil
appears, you will still definitely be stabbed to death with a big knife”. By removing all the Implication, you take a
creeping existential dread and render it fully (if not cartoonishly)
nihilistic. The original ending is so
striking because of how it pivots from a movie that has been about the fear of
dying horribly to a horrific thought about living. Kill her off at the end and it closes off all
the open-endedness and makes it just
about death.
At first blush, this seems to hew closer to
the “no escape” ethos of the original ending, while taking it the further step
that would justify a sequel as a thematic continuation instead of a simple
regurgitation. But it still closes
things off in a way that provides finality.
And however grim that resolution may be, my contention is that it is precisely
the way the original snatches closure away at the last moment that elevates
it.
3. They Both Live
No matter how enamored I may be
with the original ending, there is not much point in dragging everyone back a
lifetime later just to recreate it exactly. It’s the basics of diminishing
sequel returns; if you do the exact same thing and only the same, then who could
care? Even if you improve production
values, have better dialogue and so on, if you’re throwing the exact same
punch, the second will never land as hard as the first. In order for H18 to have any reason to exist as a
“serious” sequel, it needs to advance the Laurie/Michael dynamic in some way,
not just regurgitate it.
4. She Lives, He Dies
This provides closure too, but of a more
upbeat variety. And it invites the
question of whether we want a happy ending in horror movies? Personally, I tend to think that horror works
best as a provocation without providing a resolution.
Ultimately, the movie splits the difference between options
3 and 4. It tries, rather weakly in my
opinion, to preserve some of the open-endedness from ‘78, but there’s simply no way to replicate the way the original found
to make that ambiguity land with the force of a sledgehammer. It’s mostly that we’ve seen the disappearing
act before and are prepared for it this time, but also that Laurie was prepared
for him, and even if Michael did get away, he’s already been cut down to size. Even before the fire starts, he’s no longer
the unstoppable, ethereal Boogeyman. He’s an old man, permanently maimed, who
can be batted around by an old woman.
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| An old woman with the bowels of a champion, but still. |
To hone in on a particular detail to illustrate this point, I
think it’s when we see the shotgun blow off his fingers that the spell was irrevocably
broken for me. A subtly brilliant touch
in the original was how it had Myers jerk in reaction to the gunshots, but not
to use squibs or show any bloodstains in the grass when the body
disappears. In addition to saving on
effects budget, it both makes his disappearance more eerie, and keeps one toe
in the realm of rationality even as it raises the question of whether he is actually
supernatural. Could Loomis just be a
terrible shot, missing any important body parts? Could Michael have some kind of armor under
the jumpsuit to stop the bullets? Is it
a less frightening thought if he is an immortal revenant, or if all our efforts
and bravery can still fail to stop a single mental patient from wreaking
whatever havoc he wants? If he is actually immortal, what does that mean?
The original ending doesn’t just leave us with questions, its
parting shot actually raises a host of new ones. The only question 2018 can leave open is whether or not the dragon has actually been
slain. But that question doesn’t feel as urgent when we’ve already seen its
fangs removed (or at the least, sanded down considerably). In any case, Laurie has protected her progeny,
confronted her demons and lived to tell the tale. I consider that a happy ending. At least by horror standards, and certainly when
contrasted directly with its predecessor.
ON HAPPY ENDINGS
So what’s wrong with that?
Nothing really. I can recognize
that in the abstract, a scary movie with a happy ending is not worse than a
downer ending, it’s just different. So
more power to anyone who finds 2018’s
resolution, or its more-vincible monster, more appealing. But it raises the question of whether it is actually
horror if it has a happy ending. And I
don’t really think so. If in the end,
the monster is slain and the hero(s) survive, you essentially have an adventure
story with a lot of gore.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Genre classifications are not badges of quality
unto themselves. The best works in a genre are often hybrids with others, whether
that is Star Wars blending sci-fi
and fantasy, Alien or the Terminator mixing sci-fi with horror,
or the Cabin In The Woods blending
horror and comedy. So when I argue that you
can’t have “real” horror story with a happy ending, it’s not to say that “real”
horror is inherently superior to the “fake” kind. There are certainly other things besides scary
that a movie can be that are just as worthwhile.
| For instance, some films are Dirty Work. And that's great. |
Buuut, the thing is, Halloween is as pure as horror gets. It’s not cross-pollinated with any other
genre, or polluted by any ulterior motive except to put a nightmare on screen. The “value” of horror storytelling, as I see
it, is that it is a way for audiences to confront primal fears in a low-stakes,
if still emotionally intense, context.
Ideally, this would be the first step in exorcising such fears; a sort
of low-grade exposure therapy for the cultural consciousness. But it’s my opinion that when a horror movie
seeks to perform that exorcism itself, it robs both those fears and the
audience of their full due. Therapy only
works (I think) if the patient is doing some of the work along with the doctor.
Which is all by way of saying that a bleak ending is not
inherently better than a happy one. But
a Halloween movie with a happy
ending is less powerful than one that ends on a gutpunch.
ON LEGACY SEQUELS
Most of these issues with the revival arise directly from
the reintroduction of Laurie Strode as an elder, grizzled slasher-prepper. This is characterization makes sense, in that
it is about the only believable way for her to still be around and involved this
far down the line. Having her scarred
but willing and able to fight back and, with the help of her progeny, vanquish
him; this is a cathartic arc and resolution for the character. As outlined above, it’s about the only
satisfying way to resolve things if you’re going to revisit her, and it perhaps
has special resonance in 2018 to see the Boogeyman beaten down by his would-be
victim(s).
But with all the considerable respect due to Jamie Lee
Curtis, the character of Laurie Strode was not the source of fascination that kept
the franchise alive for decades. Nor was
Dr. Loomis, or the iconic score, or any other element that outlasted her original
tenure. It was The Shape. And giving Laurie her due comes at the
expense of that mythical menace. It has
to.
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| Aw, cheer up, champ. I'm sure you'll get her when your prison bus crashes again in another 40 years |
Similarly, the revival takes the wind out of the original ending just by existing. And in its efforts to re-ground him in a plausible reality, it offhandedly reveals that the outcome of the horrifying revelation that Michael had escaped again was as anticlimactic as it could get: the cops picked him up shortly later. And I found that striking, since it is completely inverted from most legacy sequels, which usually have to revoke the happy ending the characters got in 1983 in order to find more story for them in 2015.
With something like Star
Wars, for instance, many fans took umbrage at how The Last Jedi brought back Luke Skywalker as a broken old man. Which was an intentionally sharp contrast to where Return Of The Jedi left him, at his point of apotheosis to full
blown wizard-savior. Whether Rian Johnson actually went overboard in dragging Luke
through the muck is debatable, but the impulse is a necessary one, since there
is not much in the way of compelling story to spun around someone who begins as
an all-powerful wizard-savior (for further information on this difficulty, see The Matrix sequels). Interestingly, not as many fans got mad about
how Han and Leia’s stories in the new Star
Wars trilogy crap even harder on their happily-ever-afters, if you actually
look at it. I put that down mainly to how hard The Force Awakens tries to
avoid acknowledging that at all. That’s a movie that never stops sprinting to
keep ahead of the audience cottoning to any number of absolute nonsense storytelling
and characterization beats. Not least of which is that it wants to pretend that Han gallavanting
about is just as much fun as when he was doing the exact same thing 40 years earlier,
ignoring that he is now a 70 year-old man whose family collapsed in a whirlwind
of murder and recrimination.
| "Well, no, I wouldn't say it's the most cowardly and soul-crushing coda to my journey in the original trilogy possible...but...uh..." |
But I digress. The
point is, there is no point checking in on “happily ever after” if it actually
is ever after. So if you are going to
revive a character decades down the line, it has to turn out that things aren’t
actually so happy. So it goes for the Skywalkers,
Balboas, McClanes, and Rambos of the world anyway. Halloween
works in the reverse, as returning after its existentially dark ending requires
a retroactive catharsis that the original pointedly denied, and punctures the
entire mythological power that denial wrought.
Rather than being in all (and none) of the rooms in the final montage, Michael
had to go somewhere specific and literal, and that place turned out to be nowhere
new or especially exciting. Just locked
back up.
And in turn, barring the (thematically and politically untenable)
route of killing her off, Laurie’s story can only get better than where we left
her. And so we get Curtis kicking ass in her 60s, which is par for the course
for most of these legacy sequels. They often seem to exist just so aging stars
can “prove” they “still got it” by pretending to kick even more ass than they pretended
to kick in their prime. The best of them find more interesting things to do
than play out some divorced dad’s three-quarter-life crisis fantasy. Mad
Max: Fury Road sidesteps the
whole issue by eschewing continuity and the need to incorporate a 60-something Max,
or Mel Gibson, into the mix. The most
interesting thing about The Last Jedi
is how it pointedly avoids making Luke a bigger badass than ever. Creed
is great in no small part because Sylvester Stallone had the grace to abdicate
the ring for a supporting role. Perhaps
he found it easier to step aside and let the younger generation take the lead
since he’d already brought his iconic bruiser back from retirement to prove he could
still kick 20 year-old ass in Rocky V. And also in Rocky Balboa.
| And also in Rambo (2008). And The Expendables. And The Expendables 2 and 3. |
Speaking of Sly, before he was the poster boy for the efforts
to forcibly botox the entirety of the 1980s into the 2010s, he was a preeminent
force in the spat of movies in the 80s where he or Chuck Norris basically went
back and got a do-over on Vietnam, so we could win it this time. It may seem like I’m veering completely off-topic,
but this sort of thing relates to my antipathy about bringing Michael Myers back to
Haddonfield so he can lose this time. Because while this impulse is sort of
silly and self-indulgent when you dig into it, at least Vietnam was real, a legit trauma
for the psyche of a nation. The Boogeyman is not, and apparently my generation’s Vietnam, the formative trauma we are still struggling to process as we advance into
middle age, was a slasher movie. It’s one thing to use narrative fiction to game the system so that
you can vanquish your historical enemies, in however a vicarious a fashion. What does it say when you have to use a movie
to game the system to defeat another movie?
Something faintly pathetic, I suspect. Which is part of why no matter how good Halloween 18 was in most respects, part
of me still feels that it may have been better to let sleeping Boogeymen lie.
| THREE STARS (Judy Greer rules) |
