Jan 3, 2022

HALLOWEEN: H2NO

I don't know why, but I've had the Halloween series on the brain recently. Perhaps it's because of the impending video release of Halloween Kills, or perhaps it's because I always do. 

After digging around the Internet Archive (best site ever), I found a treasure trove: a digital archive of Cinefantastique's thirty-plus-year run, and with it some coverage of Halloween: H20, specifically an interview with John Carpenter regarding his earliest flirtations with directing the film before ultimately passing. I was but a wee tyke when Halloween: H20 was released and it remains, to this day, the most excited I'd ever been for an upcoming movie. Because the Internet was still fairly new at the consumer level (my family was always behind the technological eight ball, so we weren't yet surfing on the world wide web), I'd made it a habit of prowling newsstands for magazine coverage in the off-chance I'd find a publication that had written about it in hopes of learning everything I could about this exciting new sequel. It was during this time when I discovered the existence of mags like Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Cinefantastique, and others that didn't just cover genre cinema but were actually dedicated to genre cinema. I was blown away and I snapped up every cover baring The Shape's mask, which is a tradition I dusted off for 2018's Halloween and its underwhelming sequel. 

I actually remember seeing this specific issue of Cinefantastique at my friendly neighborhood comic book shop (shout-out to A Time Lost and Found) back in 1998, over twenty years ago (what the fuck holy shit what's happening) and it was pretty wild to see it again.