As a kid, I was a devout Michael Myers disciple. Granted, I'd already been 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. And the memory of when I first made the Shape's acquaintance still lives gleefully in the back of my brain where all the best memories are stored. It was Halloween, somewhere in the latter portion of my elementary school years. I was sat in the living room, in my costume, waiting impatiently for my older brother and his friend, who had both chosen to trick-or-treat as dead/undead hockey players, to master the art of tediously gluing half-pucks to their faces. Understandably, I was beyond antsy to hit the streets and fill my pillowcase until the seams threatened to burst, so I flipped on the
T.V. 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 heightened 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 III: Season of the Witch, which I’d learned didn’t feature the babysitter
murderer I'd come to love. (I eventually matured and warmed to this entry, and while there have been past seasonal celebrations in which I may not have watched many or most of the main Halloween series, I've never not watched Halloween III.) 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 novelization or figure or poster or comic book or anything that bared the mask 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 casually 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 springtime, 1998. Now up to eighth grade, my love
for horror continued and sometimes I was 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, I immediately recognized the tick-tock piano music in the background as the growly voice continued…
“He has hunted her… everywhere…”
Could it really be...?
“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 hailing the return of Laurie Fucking Strode, the ultimate
final girl.
In the dark, my friends looked over at me and made 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. 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 like that still lives on in my mind as one of the happiest moments of my life.
And here I am, twenty 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. Suddenly, Scream 2 didn’t mean shit in the face
of Halloween: H20.
For months after that, I prowled theater lobbies waiting impatiently for the poster to appear, to confirm that it wasn’t all just a dream, but a
reality. And once it arrived, hung there in its shadowbox like a work of art, 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, leading up to Halloween: H20’s August release, I Ask-Jeeved and AOL Netfound everything I could about this new
sequel. I clicked over and over on distributor Dimension Films’ official
website, transfixed by the primitive Flash animations, to watch trailers and look at publicity 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 from an article by an online pipsqueak 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 relied heavily on that tape to tide me over until I could finally see the film for myself.
Opening weekend, I finally did — alongside a whole host of my chums
I’d likely strong-armed into going. And it was everything I could've wanted.
Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis holding an ax and furiously bellowing her brother’s
name during her mano-a-mano third-act confrontation set to an orchestral rendition of the Halloween theme gave me chills and was worth the price of admission alone, and I was legitimately shocked and a little
heartbroken to see Michael lose his head. As the credits rolled, 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 it was a perfect finale—indisputable death at the hands of his sister. (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 autumnal 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 that orchestral rendition of the Halloween
theme, John Ottman’s score, Frankensteined with Marco Beltrami's cues from Scream and Mimc, is all wrong. Those misgivings aside, I still think
it’s one of the better sequels.)
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 may have been 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 been keeping the horror genre alive and thriving 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. How could it not be? I still remember everything about the excitement I felt in the months leading up to its
release. I still remember going to see it—even that my mother drove us—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
the wind, 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.]
[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]
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