HALLOWEEN KILLS (2021)

It’s been a very long time since I’ve encountered a horror movie as polarizing as Halloween Kills. I'd have to go back more than a decade to, ironically, Rob Zombie’s Halloween, or the Platinum Dunes remake of Friday the 13^th. Far be it from me to think I can cover anything that’s not yet been covered in reviews across the internet, from mainstream critics to genre-friendly websites to legions of social media posters. I have seen ten/tens, zero/tens, and everything in between. One commenter stated that the 1978 original and Halloween Kills are the only Halloween films they’ve ever liked, and they’d much sooner watch this newest sequel than the original. Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Halloween Kills has been hugely maligned for a whole host of reasons, most of them fair—depending on what “fair” means to you. Because of this disparity, reviewing Halloween Kills feels like screaming into the void alongside everyone else, like sitting in a room and arguing among friends about which local greasy spoon makes the best pizza—because everyone has an idea of what they want, and that idea can be radically different from person to person.

The problem with the Halloween series, or really any ongoing series that had a legitimately good first entry and later devolved into broadly distilled, sensationalized versions of the same concept, is that audiences become split as to what they want. The first movie creates the mold and the rules, but every sequel, by design, has to do something new, and through their very nature, they become sillier and sillier parodies of their own idea. So, who decides what a new entry in an established franchise should be like? Should every new entry try to be "good," or should it merely carry the torch and keep the franchise alive, just like all its lower-reaching sequels? The first Halloween is a critically lavished film that even Roger Ebert once referred to as a classic, so each time a sequel is made, a portion of the audience hopes to see something that lives up to that legacy—something classy with an emphasis on suspense over gore. Most of the Halloween sequels aren’t good movies, though they are fun in their own way (I'll always defend Halloween 4 as being a good one, though maybe I’m alone in that), so when you've got two halves of the audience vying for polar opposite experiences, what happens as a result? Well, those schools of thought collide in a violent crash, and because we're living in 2021 AR (After Reason), a time during which everyone is angry about everything all the time, even something as innocuous as a movie can cause blood-raging fights.

Once you see Halloween Kills—or any movie, really—you henceforth belong to “the audience.” We all become one mass, just one more community we now share, even though we’re all looking to the movie to satisfy our own personal desires with little regard to what the person in the next seat may want. Those desires can be polar opposites, but they can also, and often, be granular, as everyone has already established their own barometer for satisfaction. What’s that mean? At the end of the day, there’s only one version of a movie (well, for the most part—Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is somewhere saying, “Hold my four different cuts”), which means it’s only going to entertain a certain fraction of the audience—especially one as bloodthirsty as Halloween fanfolks. In an effort to entertain both schools of thought, I’m approaching this too-long review in a different way. The first half will be written by someone who wanted Halloween Kills to be legitimately good in the same way as the original and the 2018 reboot. The second half will be written by the part of me that acknowledges Halloween Kills is the eleventh movie to feature Michael Myers wandering around Haddonfield and killing townspeople in all kinds of ways, and as such, didn’t expect much beyond some senseless violence and a reasonably engaging story. Depending on what you want from Halloween Kills, pick your poison and read on. (Spoilers everywhere.)

Take 1: “I Wanted A Good Movie”

Prior to its arrival in theaters to both huge box office and critical acclaim, 2018’s Halloween seemed like a real longshot. In the years preceding, Rob Zombie had killed the series dead with his experimental nonsense, and this was after 2002’s dismal Halloween: Resurrection had already killed the series along with its leading final lady. (If next year’s Halloween Ends kills off Laurie Strode, that will be the third time her character has died in this goofy series—pretty impressive.) There was understandable excitement when it was announced that John Carpenter would be serving as spiritual consiglieri to the reboot after having spent the last 35 years away from the series, as the closest he’d come in that time was quitting Halloween: H20 in the earliest days of pre-production. Then came the announcement of Jamie Lee Curtis’s return as the embattled Laurie Strode and the mood went from “oh?” to “oh!” Enthusiasm for the project was palpable. Then came the announcement that the guys who had done Your Highness, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, would be handling the project, and the Internet had no idea what to think. I sure didn’t. These guys were going to resurrect a series that hadn’t been worth a damn since 1998? (Midnight Mass’s Mike Flanagan also pitched his own version for a reboot, most of which was repurposed for Hush, his Netflix Original home invasion flick. I'd still love to see what Flanagan's Halloween would've been like. Maybe someday...during franchise retcon # 3.)

Despite everyone’s usual cynicism, Gordon Green and McBride (and poor Jeff Fradley, the film's third co-writer who is seldom mentioned), under the watchful eye of John Carpenter, managed to deliver one of the best sequels in the series, with Carpenter going on record as saying it was better than his original. With the dream team having fairly earned the accolades for their approach, there was no reason to believe Halloween Kills wouldn’t be at least comparably good, or at the very least wouldn’t squander the goodwill established by their first go-round.

The curse of the sequel strikes again.

The “good” news is Halloween Kills isn’t the worst sequel in the series, regardless of the timeline you’re sticking with—I don’t think we could ever plumb those kinds of depths ever again—but based on the pedigree involved, the poor execution of good ideas, and the good execution of a less intellectual and more visceral experience, that leaves Halloween Kills in a kind of cinematic no man’s land where it’s hard to choose one side or the other, and that’s worse. Halloween: Resurrection, for instance, is a piece of shit I’ll never watch again; though unfortunate, there’s no conflict there and I’m at peace with its place in the Halloween hierarchy. Halloween Kills has a lot to offer, and parts of it are terrific, but its best parts don’t push the narrative forward in any meaningful way, which is its biggest detriment. If your movie doesn’t have a point, then fuck—what are we doing here? Though Halloween Kills definitely tries, and it has ideas either brand new or fleshed out from previous sequels (the vigilante aspect from Halloween 4, for example), what we’re left with feels unfinished, overwrought, and aimless; really, it feels more like an extended opening act for Halloween Ends. It’s the holding pattern of horror sequels—the palate cleanser in between courses—and that sucks.

Though Halloween Kills continues exploring the concept of trauma as established during its predecessor, this time the series expands beyond Laurie Strode and her family and looks at how the other citizens of Haddonfield are still emotionally reeling from the night he came home and how that trauma manifests…which is with revenge. Right out of the gate, this newborn series seems to be transitioning from philosophical and intimate nuance to primal, in-the-streets chaos. Halloween Kills is a malfunctioning carnival ride wrenching loose from its hydraulics and shooting off a nonstop torrent of sparks in the form of very wet and crunchy violence with a plot inspired by the third act of 1931’s Frankenstein (only Michael Myers deserves it). In the conceptual sense, it doesn't stray too far from what Gordon Green et al. established in 2018, but it does choose to do something that feels quite wrong for a Curtis-having Halloween movie: completely remove her from the equation, making this latest sequel feel perfunctory and incomplete. Halloween Kills is the sixth Halloween film to feature Curtis' Laurie Strode, but the first in which she never shares a single scene with her masked nemesis. Of course, this was by design, as the filmmakers wanted this entry to be about the rest of Haddonfield ("One of their numbers was butchered and this is the wake," Loomis says in Halloween 2 while Haddonfield townspeople are vandalizing the abandoned Myers house), but also because the filmmakers would really be straining credibility in having Laurie walk away unscathed after so many encounters, especially with a gaping wound in her belly. While all of that is perfectly reasonable, at the same time, it makes the experience of Halloween Kills feel incidental—like it's not actually a Halloween sequel, but more like some random external adventure happening in a Halloween shared universe. If it’s Halloween, Laurie and Michael have to do battle—that’s, like, a rule. If you’re playing in the canon sandbox established in 1978, then you’ve broken that rule—just one among many. That’s like having James Bond call the police on the main supervillain instead of taking the guy out himself.

My biggest gripe with Halloween Kills is its poor treatment of the legacy actors and characters being glimpsed for the first time in forty-three years. Featured most prominently is Tommy Doyle, the young boy Laurie was babysitting Halloween night of 1978, this time played by Anthony Michael Hall. (Conversations were had about having Paul Rudd come back to play the part after having done so in the now de-canonized Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and at first it was disappointing it didn’t work out, but seeing what the movie had turned Tommy into, not even my perpetual love for the Ruddster is enough to convince me he could’ve played the part as required.) Alongside Tommy are Lindsey Wallace (a surprisingly terrific Kyle Richards), Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), and Lonnie Elam (the wonderful Robert Longstreet of The Haunting of Hill House) while retired sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) is working a security shift at Haddonfield Memorial. As a lifelong series fan, of course it was incredible to see those characters and/or actors return to the series...but also a damn shame to see how wasted most of them are. How do you have Laurie Strode and Leigh Brackett under the same hospital roof and not allow them to share a single scene together, perhaps one in which they collectively mourn over the slain Annie, her friend and his daughter? (Nancy Loomis appears in archive footage from Halloween and, oddly, Halloween 2, which technically doesn't exist in this new timeline, but which is still used in an appropriate and unobtrusive way.) Though the yearly Halloween-night binge drink was a clever way to group all those 1978 massacre survivors together, why not give them each just a single moment to come off like human beings with a shared history? Though I value their inclusion, their presence smacks of vapid “look, see?” fan service in hopes we’ll get lost in dreamy nostalgia and not notice how superficial their appearances are—not to mention that killing four out of the five characters seems a little sadistic, with three out of the four being killed in dismissive ways, as if their place in the series never meant anything. Brackett ranks a blink-and-miss-it face slash; Marion, who dies for the second time in this series, has the honor of going out looking like a fumbling idiot; and poor Lonnie doesn’t even get an on-screen death. Tommy is the only legacy character to get a ceremonial end, and even that felt wrong.

And all during this, bit players from Halloween '18 who were never even given names return in expanded roles, only so Halloween Kills can snuff out even more recognizable people, and with great violence. (I cringed at that "oops!" self-inflicted gunshot wound. Is this Halloween Kills or Abbott & Costello Meet The Shape?) While it makes sense to reuse characters you've already created instead of introducing new ones, it seems really strange that these characters, who haven't had their own face-to-face encounter with Michael Myers and who only learned about him for the first time Halloween night of 2018, would so immediately want to throw hands alongside these legacy characters who've lost loved ones, or nearly died at Myers' hands, or spent the last forty years navigating their own traumas. I'm tempted to think it's meant to be some kind of commentary on tribalism and the deadly consequences of in-the-bubble information loops, but I might be giving something called Halloween Kills too much credit.

Though Halloween Kills jumps from location to location and timeline to timeline, with something heavy going on almost all the time, it never feels like anything is happening; it’s desperate to do so many things that it eventually collapses under its own heavy load. It wants to be “about” something but executes that aboutness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It wants to pretend the reveal about The Shape being supernatural in nature is some kind of gigantic, world-stopping revelation...until your most basic fan remembers that Dr. Loomis shot him in the chest six times in 1978 and "he just got up and walked away," the discovery of which didn't surprise Loomis in the least. It wants to establish the origin story of Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) by trying to convince the audience that his past with The Shape is just as intertwined and significant as Laurie's own, but it simply can't stand up to the forty-year head start she has, nor with Curtis's consistent presence in the series, even if most of her sequels have been retconned out of this current continuity—along with the carelessly established motivation for Hawkins' character hinging on his forty-year regret for not shooting The Shape in the brain when he had the chance...even though it's been solidly established that probably wouldn't have killed him anyway. Even Andi Matichak’s presence as Allyson is wasted on the vigilante angle, which not only feels wrong for her character but feels more like the movie is babysitting her for the time being in lieu of offering her something more substantial to do. More than anything, and maybe years down the line he'll confirm this, Halloween Kills feels like the kind of senseless, garish sequel Carpenter would've hated, had it been attached to the franchise's first timeline that, after a while, he had nothing to do with.

Take 2: “I Wanted A Fun Movie”

Halloween Kills is a fucking blast. With a body count of fortyish people, there’s a violent and brutal death something like every three minutes. Though Gordon Green returns as director, and still channeling Carpenter by recreating a few shots from the original, this time he's embracing his inner Argento. The gallons of blood used during production must be somewhere in the thousands. Holy smokes, is this thing Italian? Between the bloodletting and the corny dialogue, it must be.

Halloween Kills also presents Michael Myers at his most brutal, vicious, mean-spirited, and utterly unremorseful. His fire-scorched mask gives him the Jaws 2 treatment, which is appropriate because Halloween Kills has turned him into an unstoppable killer shark. (Yep, I just quoted Busta Rhymes from Halloween: Resurrection. Haw haw.) James Jude Courtney, with a little assistance from Airon Armstrong for the '78 sequence, returns for another round of Haddonfield mayhem and strikes an even more imposing figure than his last appearance. The Shape of 2018 was methodical but physically capable; here, he's embraced his full-on Kane-Hodder-as-Jason-Voorhees, dispatching his victims in ways we've yet to see in this series. Sure, he does his playful cat-and-mouse thing by hiding in dark corners and behind closet doors, but really, who gives a shit? Why bother? The Shape of Halloween Kills is going for quantity over quality. He could've knocked on the door dressed as the pizza dude or popped out of a sugar bowl to lop off someone's head and the audience would've barely reacted. And that's because, as Halloween Kills ably communicates, the death of any character we see on screen is inevitable. There's no hope for anyone—not even Stewie from Mad TV ("Look what I can do!"). And boy, the movie wastes no time in getting to those deaths: the opening massacre of the first responders to Laurie's farmhouse inferno is awe-inspiring—and the closest we've gotten to seeing The Shape kill someone with a chainsaw.

Before the first retcon in 1998 with Halloween: H20, the Halloween series had been that random horror property Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in for just a couple movies before saying farewell and moving onto bigger studio fare, in the same way lots of actors had done their one random appearance in famous slasher series: Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13^th, Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street, even Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun. Though their involvement in said projects waver from pride to embarrassment, none of them really talk about them unless prompted, and they certainly never went back to that well for another go-round. (Sure, most of them died in their respective movies, but since when has that ever stopped Hollywood?) When Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the series for the first time in 1998, it felt like an event because it was an event, and though her presence in a Halloween film doesn’t guarantee it’s going to be good, it still feels right. And seeing her stick with this series forty years after the original movie is special. At this point, Halloween belongs to her and John Carpenter (and the every-day-missed Debra Hill), and here they are, all these years later, playing make-believe together like a bunch of kids once again—this time with filmmakers who grew up on the very movies they're now putting their own stamp on. Output aside, what a nice thing.

Speaking of, Carpenter, son Cody, and Daniel Davies return to score, offering another sinister, kick-ass musical landscape. Themes from both Halloween eras are present and accounted for, along with a whole host of new material to properly shadow this new take on Halloween lore. Their score even acknowledges the angry mob angle, for the first time ever adding a chorus of voices to the legendary Halloween theme, which plays over the opening credits that feature not just one illuminated jack-o-lantern, but a dozen—each one growing more intense with flames as they flow past. 

What does it all mean? 

Haddonfield citizens are mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.

The 1978 timeline stuff, which sees Michael's detainment by Haddonfield police, including young Frank Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and his partner, Pete McCabe (the always enjoyable Jim Cummings, actor/director of The Wolf of Snow Hollow), works damn well, and is probably the best material in the whole movie. The loyal recreation of the Myers house is terrific, as is the mask, which is the closest this series has gotten to faithfully depicting those two holy totems. Evidently some fans have been blasting the “all CGI Loomis” that was inserted into this sequence, somehow not recognizing him to be a real, living, non-CGI human being (Tom Jones Jr.). Has CGI really gotten that good? I guess I haven’t noticed. Though the actor’s appearance is uncannily spot on, and overdubbed by the previous movie’s convincing Loomis soundalike, this new version of Loomis would've been better left in a blurry background, similar to how Michael’s maskless face had been obscured throughout the first two movies of this new trilogy. Still, seeing his trench-coated form standing at the Myers house threshold as the camera cranes back across the front yard, revealing a motionless Michael flanked by police—in a shot that mimics the original's opening scene where six-year-old Michael has his clown mask ripped off by his father—well, it’s the stuff of legitimate chills, and Carpenter and co’s revisitation of the same theme used for that scene but now gussied up with disconcerting overlays is probably the movie's greatest moment. (But where are the six bullets Michael had just taken to the chest?)

The fake ending, in which the Haddonfield mob finally appears to get the best of their boogeyman with a bad-ass beatdown, only for Michael to gain the unsurprising upper hand and give them all a little what-for, is terrific, exciting, and that offers the audience some manipulative catharsis—but in a strange way, also offers the audience a little hope. “He’s turned us all into monsters,” Brackett says following the hospital mob’s near-lynching of an innocent man, which may be the moral of Halloween Kills: no matter how vicious Haddonfield’s people become—and really, they're us; we’re that mob—we can never be as evil, black, and unfeeling as The Shape. In this scary day and age, I’ll take it.

Halloween Kills chooses to end with a shocker of a moment—the death of Karen (Judy Greer), which doesn’t just play out in Judith Myers’s old bedroom in the fabulously restored Myers house, but is even executed in the same way as Judith’s death in 1963: thrashing hands, obscured points of view—no glimpses of actual violent penetration, but still uncomfortable to witness. I’m surprised they didn’t pop in the ol’ eye-hole stencil to give us a look through Michael’s mask. A move like this is pretty ballsy, and is frankly the only important thing that happens in the entire movie, because it now means Laurie Strode, technically, has failed—that the years and years she spent training her daughter to survive against the evil in the world, which did permanent damage to their relationship and shaped them both into broken people, didn’t mean a damn thing in the end. And with the recent revelation that Halloween Ends is going to be set four years after the events of Halloween '18 and Halloween Kills, that’s plenty of time for Laurie to grow even crazier. And for the series to grow crazier, too.

If I had to break down this entire manifesto into one sentence, it would be this: Halloween Kills is a good slasher movie, but a bad movie in general…and yet I still kinda liked it. In spite of its hideous dialogue ("Evil dies tonight!") and aimless plot, I've actually been thinking about it off-and-on since having watched it, which is more than I can say about some other "better" flicks I've caught recently. No matter on what side of the fence you land, you can’t deny Halloween Kills offers a new flavor to the unkillable series, made with a certain operatic and violent flamboyance that’s difficult to shake. I don’t know why, but I have this odd feeling, in years to come, it’s going to enjoy a ground-up reevaluation—either by the first-round audiences left underwhelmed during its preliminary release, or by the next generation of viewers who find it, similar to how the wonky Halloween III: Season of the Witch has been recently embraced after so many years of dismissal. Love it or hate it, Halloween Kills may very well have staying power, and I’ll be morbidly interested to see how it holds up in five, ten, or forty years from now.

FREAKY (2020)

The slasher sub-genre has been around for almost as long as the horror genre itself, with elements found as far back as 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Ever since then, crops of filmmakers have been content to do one of two things with the slasher film: present a dependable, uncomplicated tale that relies on its simplistic foundations, or concoct a clever take on the concept that spins the sub-genre on its head. Halloween (1978) and Scream (1996) are two perfect examples of this dichotomy. The first took all the slasher elements that had existed at that time and finally planted them into an environment that most audiences could relate to – suburbia – whereas Scream, which gleefully embraced its Halloween inspirations, masterfully took all the elements that had existed by that time and blessed its characters with a working knowledge of how the sub-genre worked, theoretically making them savvier in the face of danger. Following its release, Scream was foretold to be the harbinger of the slasher flick’s ultimate demise. Because a film had come along that called out the tropes and pitfalls of the sub-genre, critics said there would be no going back to standard slasher films as we knew them. Thankfully, filmmakers went back anyway (and Scream wasn’t even the first to go full meta – see 1991’s, albeit terrible, There’s Nothing Out There), and though this new generation of slasher fodder may have been savvier, they still ultimately fell victim to the same pitfalls as before. Like many of their masked villains, slasher films had proven they will never truly die, with most of their future offerings eagerly going back to their roots of simplicity and watered-down mythology. (Ironically, enter 2018’s Halloween.)

Last year’s Freaky, directed by Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon, is the latest twist on a well-worn concept, taking both its concept and its namesake from, of all things, Disney’s family-friendly Freaky Friday films (the remake which stars, ironically, Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis, and which is GREAT – YEAH, I SAID IT.). Landon’s dedication to the genre is well established by now, having written most of the Paranormal Activity sequels along with another similarly quirky horror-comedy, Scouts Guide to the Apocalypse (2015); those stationary-camera haunted condo movies aside, his body of work proves he understands the workable balance between horror and comedy, with his scripts never coming down too prominently on one side versus the other. Freaky, which is brimming with homages to slasher films of old, clearly takes its cues from the aforementioned Scream and Halloween, while also throwing in some Evil Dead, The Shining, and Friday the 13^th for good measure. (Enjoy the homage to that latter title while it lasts, too, because thanks to all the lawsuits the series is currently saturated with, Freaky may very well be the final slasher flick to show you the below words on a movie screen…)

Though Freaky isn’t as innovative as something like Scream or Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, its concept is a clever one, mashing up two utterly disparate genres to create what amounts to a solid, entertaining, bloody, funny, and genuinely touching contribution to the horror-comedy sub-genre…and believe me, that ain’t easy – just ask…well, most horror-comedies. Freaky also offers just enough buyable aspects to its plot that the circumstances under which high school teen Millie (Kathryn Newton, Supernatural) and the town of Blissfield’s very own mass murderer, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn) end up switching bodies never gets too mired in its own mythology to the point where the plot overcomplicates itself. Once the body-swap happens, Millie, as now played by Vaughn, relies on her two best friends, Nyla (the forthcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s Celeste O'Connor, giving off strong Olivia Cooke vibes) and Josh (Misha Osherovich, NOS4A2) to track down the Butcher, re-swap their bodies before the switch becomes permanent, and save the town from the Butcher’s Voorhees-esque massacre. (His mask is one fresh coat of paint and few air holes away from being Jason’s hockey mask.)

By the sheer nature of the story, even though Newton does most of the killing, she’s not given the opportunity to lean into the new personality of her Butcher character as much as Vaughn has to somehow embody a teenage girl dealing with this absurd conflict. To be clear, it’s not a fault of Newton’s performance and it’s a joy to see her exact bloody revenge on all the dicks who made her high school life hell, but one “swap” was always going to be more interesting and entertaining than the other, and with that comes Vaughn’s triumph. Freaky, somehow, offers enough situations for Vaughn to sidestep the surface-level silliness of what he’s doing (and don’t get me wrong – he’s very funny, especially whenever there’s a longshot of him running like “a girl”) to present some honest emotional moments in which Millie can finally communicate, for the first time ever, the pain of losing her father and the angst of struggling to know herself to those closest to her. In those same kinds of absurd movie moments where the audience cries over Tom Hanks and Wilson becoming separated at sea or an aging Elvis slowly dying following a battle with a soul-sucking mummy at a convalescent home, Freaky generates handfuls of moments where the audience is sincerely touched by Millie’s emotional awakening even while wrapped in Vaughn’s serial killer body. (And if you’ve ever wanted to see Vaughn lock lips with a teen boy, well…) Luckily, thanks to Vaughn’s previous work in darker genre stuff, like 1998’s Psycho remake or 1999’s Clay Pigeons, he’s also able to convincingly play a deranged and sinister serial killer, saving his best and bloodiest for his final scenes. It’s the best of both worlds, and he’s never been more fun to watch.

Given that Freaky exists in a post-pronouns world, it’s not unfair to say that audiences might be expecting to drown in the film’s “wokeness” agenda, generated by its body-swapping plot, but except for subtly touching hands with the concepts of gender, gender roles, and cross-sexuality, Freaky never perches itself on a soapbox to offer any heavy messages – not because it failed to, but because that was never its mission statement. The characters weren’t designed to experience alternate perspectives based solely on their new bodies of the opposite sex – it was more so Millie could realize she didn’t have to be wearing the body of a tall imposing man to discover her inner strength, and so the Butcher could realize that prey was much easier to come by when the predator wore an unassuming form…even if it became much harder to kill. This careful balance of silliness and sincere conversation is just as finely tuned as its balance between horror and comedy, making Freaky not just a genre highlight of 2020, but one of the best horror-comedies to come down the pike in quite some time.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

A TIME TO KILL: ANTICIPATING AND DREADING THE NEW 'HALLOWEEN'

As a kid, I was a devout Michael Myers fan. Granted, I was a horror junkie in general, but there was something about that white-masked boogeyman that fueled my imagination and struck fear into my bones like lightning. I can still remember my elementary-school self waiting impatiently in the living room, on Halloween, for my older brother and his friend to complete their dead hockey player costumes by gluing half-pucks to their faces. It took so long, and I was so antsy to get out there and trick-or-treat, that I flipped on the television hoping to find distraction in the cadre of Halloween-appropriate titles sure to be on. While surfing, a burst of screams and frantic chaos in the dark caught my attention. Feeling good about my choice, I’d put down the remote and began to watch.

That was how I first discovered John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Okay, fine, it was only the last ten minutes or so, but as a young horror-loving fiend, what better time to tune in? The film was at its frenzied peak, and the suddenness and ambiguity of the terror helped to heighten the experience. Who was this man in the mask? Who was this old man in the trench coat trying to stop him? Why here, why now? What is this?

I saw it all — Laurie Strode fleeing and shrieking across the street from masked maniac Michael Myers; her frantic pounding against the locked front door; the couch attack, the closet attack, and the final confrontation where Michael was unmasked and Dr. Sam Loomis shot him directly in the jumpsuit.

For a moment, everything was quiet. The shot had knocked Michael offscreen into a back room. Surely he was dead, right?

Loomis ran into that same back room after him. Michael waited in the darkness — still, and very much alive.

At that moment, seeing his unnatural stillness framed by darkness, I was petrified. Beyond petrified. I couldn’t move — something so simple as a scary mask in silhouette, with a bit of inhuman breathing, and I couldn’t fucking move.

Five more gunshots rang out. Michael flew backwards off the balcony and landed with a crash on the  cold hard October ground. Finally, he appeared dead.

But after a quick cut away, his body was gone.

And thus began a forty-year legacy.

After that fateful television viewing of Halloween, I was hooked. One by one I sought every remaining sequel, skipping Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, as I’d go on to learn that it didn’t feature the babysitter murderer known as The Shape. (I’d eventually mature and warm to this entry, which I now watch every Halloween.) This love for the series continued for years. I bought every Halloween available on VHS, including multiple copies of the original. I bought every magazine or book or figure or poster or anything that bared the face of Michael Myers. Had there been a Halloween secret society, I’d’ve been a charter member.

1995 rolled around and I was in the fifth grade. One Friday in September, a childhood chum named Barry and I were swapping weekend plans on the bus ride home.

“My sister’s taking me to see Halloween 6 tonight,” Barry said casually.

My face went full :O and I begged him to take me along.

He did, and soon after, he became a boyhood best friend.

Flash forward a few years. It’s 1998, and I’m in eighth grade. My love for horror continues, and sometimes I’m successful in forcing my friends to go along with it. Scream 2 had proved such a massive box office success that Dimension Films re-released the sequel for encore showings. And so of course I went. It was then, in the popcorn-smelling dimness of the auditorium, that one particular trailer stuck out among all others:

From the audience’s point of view, we glided down long hallways as heavy winds made curtains billow and dry autumn leaves dance across the floor. An ominous voice growled, “he has pursued her relentlessly…”

Meanwhile, the tick-tock piano music in the background sounded so familiar…

“He has hunted her…everywhere…”

I knew I’d heard that music somewhere…

“Twenty years later, the face of good and the face of evil will meet…one last time.”

The music was a track called “Laurie’s Theme” from the Halloween soundtrack, and the trailer, which suddenly flashed to Jamie Lee Curtis looking through a window directly into the darkened eyeholes of Michael Myers, would end with the Halloween theme and the title Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later shrieking across the screen.

What I felt at that moment was indescribable — an insane amount of shock and surprise and excitement that I still haven’t felt for a movie to this day. It was euphoria. It was like meeting a superhero, or winning the lottery. A franchise that had seemed all but dead after the abysmal Curse of Michael Myers was suddenly back with a vengeance, and not only that, it was also hailing the return of Laurie Fucking Strode, the ultimate final girl.

In the dark, I could feel my friends look over at me and make their own :O faces. They didn’t care nearly as much for horror and the Halloween franchise as I did, but I could feel their excitement for me. And they were right. At that moment, I didn’t care about anything else. Once I regained my composure, I excitedly ran out of the auditorium and to the nearest payphone. (Yes, a payphone — it was 1998, ok? The only people with cell phones at that time were Mulder and Scully.) There was one person who needed to know – Barry, my horror movie/Halloween partner in crime – and he needed to know NOW. I was overjoyed, over the moon, and not thinking clearly. I felt like a celebrity, as if I had been the first person in the world to experience such groundbreaking news, and it was my privilege and duty to alert the masses.

Seeing that trailer was magical. To be taken completely by surprise still lives on in my mind as one of the happiest moments I’ve ever experienced. And here I am, nearly 20 years later, and the idea behind what I am saying – undying devotion for what is essentially Halloween 7 – sounds completely ludicrous. But that’s the kind of magic I suspect dies off as your childhood does.

By the time I got back to the auditorium, Jada Pinkett was already dead. I was so excited by this revelation that the exploits of Ghostface and the stabbing of Sarah Michelle Gellar barely registered in my mind. Suddenly, Scream 2 didn’t mean shit in the face of Halloween: H20.

For months after that, I waited impatiently for the poster to appear in the theater’s lobby — to confirm that it wasn’t all just a dream, but a reality. And once it arrived, I stared at that poster and marveled at The Shape’s mask, and took in the pure pleasure of knowing it was coming soon…

Consumer-grade internet had just become a thing (we’re talking AOL 3.0), so naturally, for the next several months until Halloween: H20’s release, I would Ask Jeeves and AOL Netfind everything I could about this new sequel. I’d click over and over on distributor Dimension Films’ official website and watch the trailers and look at the photos. Every fold of my brain needed to be saturated with every bit of info I could find. Though I’m now of the age where I depend significantly on an internet lifestyle, I can also remember what life was like before it. Back then, if you wanted to know about the next installments of Phantasm or Halloween, you only had Fangoria Magazine. And all you were allowed to know about their productions was what Fangoria allowed you to know – a quote here, description of a scene there, and topped off with a publicity still that, nine times out of ten, wasn’t indicative of the final film. Back then, I wasn’t in the habit of bookmarking film sites and receiving daily news updates about projects in production. Nowadays, as a grumpy adult with the internet on his phone, I can assure you that finding out about a new Halloween sequel coming soon in the form of an article by an online pipsqueak movie writer isn’t nearly as magical as seeing that same sequel’s trailer in a theater for the first time — the very first sign to you that it existed.

Always the pioneer, I began assembling my own version of Halloween: H20 “special features” on a VHS tape based on material recorded off television; it included a Sci-Fi Channel hour-long making-of special; an MTV thing where the cast and story writer, Kevin Williamson, hosted Dawson’s Creek trivia in between music videos; and multiple appearances of the cast on late-night talk shows. I watched that tape over and over until I could finally see the film for myself.

Opening weekend, I finally did — myself and a whole host of my chums I’d likely strong-armed into going. My eighth-grade self was not disappointed. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis holding an ax and furiously bellowing her brother’s name gave me chills. By film’s end, I was legitimately shocked and a little heartbroken to see Michael lose his head. I was very happy with it, and my chums seemed to have enjoyed themselves as well. After months of foreplay, the big moment had arrived: the rolling out of Halloween: H20 felt like the successful culmination of a plan I had nothing to fucking to do with, yet I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself. At home I put together a framed Michael Myers memorial, complete with birthdate and death date, because I was a silly nerd/psychopath. Too young to understand the concept of commerce over creativity, I felt assured Halloween: H20 would be Michael Myers’ final hurrah (LOL), and while that made me sad, I felt that it was a perfect finale. (As an “adult,” I look at Halloween: H20 with a more critical eye, as its shortcomings are no longer veiled by childhood romanticism. The mask, which changes frequently, even relying on CGI for one scene, is terrible; the California shooting location lacks that small-town and autumn feel of Haddonfield, Illinois; the stuntman who donned Michael’s mask and jumpsuit was just a hair too pint-sized to be fully intimidating; and except for the lush and orchestral rendition of the Halloween theme, John Ottman’s score, Frankensteined with Marco Beltrami cues from Scream and Mimc, is all wrong. Those misgivings aside, I still think it’s the best Myers-centric sequel since Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.)

What might be the longest intro in the world leads us to the point of all this.

I was born in 1984. By then, the original Halloween was six years old, though I wouldn’t know it existed until the mid-’90s. That’s ten years. When you’re a kid, ten years is forever. Halloween: H20 was the twentieth anniversary of the original film, but to me it was basically Halloween: H4VR. Anything that predated my existence didn’t jive with the timeline of my life. I couldn’t appreciate the full sense of that anniversary because I didn’t exist or wasn’t cognizant for most of it.

Halloween: H20 may as well have been the bicentennial.

Here were are, in 2017, just a couple weeks away from 2018. And with it comes the twentieth anniversary of Halloween: H20, and the fortieth(!) anniversary of the original. A new Halloween film is in production — for the intent of my point, let’s call it Halloween: H40. Like Halloween: H20, this new film will be ignoring all the sequels and getting back to the original’s roots of dread, suspense, and little emphasis on violence. And Jamie Lee Curtis returns as the embattled Laurie Strode.

If you can avoid getting caught in the petty trappings of the internet, Halloween: H40 has a lot going for it. The production is in good hands with Jason Blum, who has kick started the horror genre over the last decade by sacrificing multi-million dollar budgets in exchange for handing off full creative control to the films’ talented writers and directors (a refreshing change of pace from former rights-holding and extremely meddlesome Dimension Films/the Weinstein brothers), with this approach resulting in new classics Insidious, Sinister, and more. (Dude might also be nominated for an Oscar for producing Get Out — you read it here first.) Jamie Lee Curtis is returning, of course, but the casting of Judy Greer as her daughter shows that the production is more interested in talent than vapid Facebook-level recognition value. John Carpenter returns to compose and consult. And it’s being directed by David Gordon Green — an actual filmmaker — who, comedies aside, has a solid body of work, including the very underrated, Night Of The Hunter-ish stalker thriller Undertow.

As of this writing, not a single frame of Halloween: H40 has been shot, but it’s already as terrifying to me as the original was all those Halloween nights ago. Because, to me, Halloween: H20 is only a few years old. I remember everything about the excitement I felt in the months leading up to its release. I remember going to see it, that all my boyhood chums came with me, and what each and every one of them said about it after the credits rolled. I even remember, upon Michael’s first on-screen appearance, my friend Kevin jokingly whispering to me, “It’s him, the guy from the ad!,” quoting from an episode of The Simpsons — something we did constantly.

Within the confines and timeline of my life, Halloween: H20 feels like it just happened to me. There’s no possible way it’s been twenty years. Yes, I’ve lost friends and family; I’ve moved multiple times; I’ve gotten numerous jobs; I’ve been lucky enough to have fallen in love a couple times. Those childhood friends who went with me to share in my excitement of Laurie Strode’s return, all of whom I miss dearly, eventually scattered to different parts of the world, and it’s been years since I’ve spoken to any of them. All of that makes a solid case for a two-decade timeline. But there’s just no way. I can’t fathom it. And I don’t want to.

As a film fan, a horror fan, and a Halloween fan who has weathered some serious mediocrity over the years, I’m more excited than anyone for the coming of Halloween: H40.

But as a mere mortal keeping a wary eye on the clock and the calendar, it just might be one of the most terrifying films I ever see.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

REVIEW: SINISTER

Within the first ten seconds of Sinister, I knew I was seeing something fresh, new, exciting, and creepy. And within that first ten seconds, I knew I would love it.

When Sinister was announced as far back as May of 2011, I began keeping an eye on any developments almost immediately because of the director attached to the project: Scott Derrickson. While he’s not a household name, at that point he had already given us the extremely undervalued The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the unfairly maligned Hellraiser: Inferno (my personal favorite entry in the Hellraiser franchise, even though it was never meant to be a Pinhead movie, anyway). I don’t really blame him for the completely inept remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, being that it was a Fox Studio movie, and as many know, they are a studio that can’t keep their grubby mitts off their larger, tent pole films.

Developments on Sinister began rolling in, using the terms “found footage” and “true crime.” Being that I’m a found footage nut ball, this sounded only but good to me. Then Ethan Hawke was announced for the project, and I was completely confused.

“Why are they casting such a big name celebrity for a found footage movie?,” etc.

Now that I’ve seen the film, and know how the found footage is incorporated, it all makes perfect sense.

Ethan Hawke plays true-crime writer Ellison Oswald, who rose to prominence and fame with his book Kentucky Murder, written ten years prior to the events of Sinister. His prominence and exposure came when his book made known the fact that law enforcement had dropped the ball in a number of places while investigating during whatever murderous crimes that took place (they’re kept purposely vague), and Ellison’s book brought to light a lot of information that had been left behind. This is all well and good, and resulted in a bestselling book and a tidy little sum of money for the author and his family. However, there’s a blemish on Ellison’s career called Cold Denver Morning, another true-crime tome that unfortunately got some things wrong and allowed a murderer to walk free of his crimes.

Ellison moves his family, unbeknownst to them, into a Pennsylvania house where the previous family had been hung from a tree in the back yard. He hopes to investigate the unsolved murders and write the book of his career –  one that will erase all his past indiscretions and award him with all the fame and fortune he claims not to desire.

After discovering a box of super 8 films marked “home movies” up in the attic, Ellison begins going through them one by one, and what he sees before him are mere moments of idealized familial happiness and togetherness before the films jump cut and see those very same families being killed in some gruesome or intricate way. They aren’t just shot or stabbed – they’re tied to lounge chairs and pulled one by one into a swimming pool, or they're bound and gagged and pushed into a car filled with full cans of gasoline, only to burn alive. What’s important to note is this murderous footage features not only the family who had previously lived in Ellison’s new house, but other families from other houses from all across the country – and all involving one member of the family, a child, going missing soon after. The footage is genuinely unnerving, made all the more so by the very unorthodox musical choices of such avant garde/ambient musical groups like Accurst and Ulver, while Christopher Young, goddamn legend that he is, scores the more traditionally shot portions of the film.

Though Ellison tries as best as he can to isolate his family from his creepy discoveries, his son's previously conquered night terrors begin happening again with much more intensity, and his daughter begins to draw on her bedroom wall images featured in his ghastly filmstrips.

As Ellison investigates each murder, he begins to slowly realize that he’s not just dealing with terrible murders, but something much more than that…something beyond that boundary he never thought he would cross…something supernatural.

Something named Bughuul.

Blumhouse Productions, who produced Sinister, is quickly becoming a best friend to the horror community, having produced the Paranormal Activity trilogy (make that quadrilogy), Insidious, and the television series "The River." Blumhouse et al. and director Derrickson (along with first-time writer C. Robert Cargill, who knocked this out of the park for his first time out) work well together, and all seem to be on the very same page in terms of realizing this project and bringing it to the forefront. Sinister plays out very much like a kindred spirit to Insidious, with a heavy focus on quiet horror mixed with legitimately creepy imagery, non-melodic music, even down to a monstrous face appearing in every filmstrip Ellison watches.  It contains the perfect balance of quiet terror, disturbing images, and comic relief (which we end up relying on to take a breather from the mounting terror that befalls Ellison every night when the antiquated projector in his locked-up office kicks on by itself…)

What works in Sinister’s favor is that it’s a very simple and very contained story. There are only six people featured prominently in the movie (alive, anyway) and the action hardly ever leaves the Oswald family’s new home. And as for the story being simple, that’s not a slight against the film. Some of our best horror films – Halloween, Psycho – had simple stories, and because Sinister's filmmakers didn’t feel bogged down with having to provide exposition, this allowed them to create sequences to unnerve the audience.

It goes without saying that Sinister is Derrickon's best effort as a director. Watching the film gives you a feeling he's achieved a new way of approaching his material, and it's one that also feels the most unrestrained. It feels as if he was given nearly carte blanche to make this film the way he intended without a studio looking over his shoulder.

Sinister also features a strong supporting cast, featuring Juliet Rylance as Ellison’s wife, Vincent D’Onofrio as a local university professor (featured only in a Skype video chat), James Ransome as Deputy So-and-So (see the movie and you’ll understand), and even Fred Thompson as the town’s grizzled sheriff.

Horror needs more movies like Sinister. It needs high-concept and original ideas that are only out to scare audiences in the purest ways – with images, mood, music, and good story telling. I can only hope that Sinister sees success at the box office when it opens in a wider release on October 12th – not so it can be sequalized, but so once again, like Insidious and the PA films before it, studios can see that low-budgeted original horror fare can and will be successful, so long as you give it a chance.