Halloween (2018), the third movie titled Halloween in this series, was a smash hit when it hit theaters in October 2018. The first chapter of a new trilogy starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween (2018) was a critical hit as well…relative to the rest of the sequels, anyway. With the final chapter of the trilogy coming to theaters and Peacock later this week, it’s the perfect time to look back at the start of Director David Gordon Green’s trilogy.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Halloween (2018)
Directed by David Gordon Green
Written by Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak and Will Patton
Halloween (2018) Review
The history of the Halloween franchise is a convoluted one. By the time Halloween (2018) began development there were already three different timelines Michael Myers had existed in. The original movie was followed by a direct sequel that brought back stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. Halloween III took a detour out of the Michael Myers story completely. When Halloween 4 came out in 1988, Jamie Lee Curtis did not return, and her character was said to have died in between movies. Donald Pleasence did return, and the story follows him and Laurie Strode’s daughter through three movies. Halloween H20 saw Curtis return to the franchise and rendered the previous three movies irrelevant. This thread would last for two movies. In 2007, Halloween was rebooted, by Rob Zombie, for two movies that have no connection to any previous installment.
The first choice Halloween (2018) makes is the correct one. It tells you to ignore every movie in the series aside from John Carpenter’s 1978 original. Not only does this streamline a complicated and contradictory forty years of canon…but it also undoes the worst decision the franchise ever made. Michael Myers and Laurie Strode were no longer related.
So why does it still feel like they are? There’s a real missed opportunity in this David Gordon Green directed trilogy that will hopefully be addressed in its final chapter Halloween Ends. Although Halloween (2018) makes sure to put in a scene that directly tells you that Laurie is not Michael’s sister…it has failed at every turn to show that Laurie understands there is no connection between them. It’s a minor annoyance in this first chapter as all of Michael’s actions can be easily explained away as having been put into position for a showdown. Halloween Kills has a far more egregious problem…but it can wait for its own review.
Taken on its own merits, Halloween (2018) is a good, but flawed, movie. Taken in context of the many other attempts to build from the original masterpiece…it’s an unqualified success. It provides the best version of Michael Myers the series has seen in decades. Finally stripped of his motivation again, this Michael is free to just be a walking killing machine. His mask, weathered by time, arguably the best since the original.
When we catch up with Laurie Strode, 40 years later, she’s a woman consumed by one terrible night. Laurie has seen failed marriages and an estrangement from her daughter, but she lives as if she has never moved on from that night. It creates an interesting comparison to Michael, who picks up exactly where he left off 40 years ago when he escapes custody. The idea that these two were frozen in time…one by trauma, the other by a complete lack of outside purpose…is a strong one. It should lead to a crushing revelation for Laurie in Halloween Kills…but, again, we’ll get to that another time.
One way that Halloween (2018) does deal with the passage of time is by upping the body count. Adult Michael only kills 4 people in the original movie…and one of those is off-screen. The young people in Haddonfield even question how big of a deal Michael’s 1978 killing spree would be today. With every other movie set aside in this timeline…Michael Myers has killed a total of 5 people in his lifetime (including his sister Judith when he was a child). The teens of 2018 see larger scale tragedies on the news constantly. To rectify this, old man Michael more than triples that kill count.
In place of Dr. Loomis, we have Michael’s new doctor…Dr. Sartain. The Sartain storyline wasn’t the most well received aspect of Halloween (2018) upon its release, but it’s due a reappraisal. Sartain is obsessed with understanding why Michael Myers kills. There’s something satisfying about a side story that deals with a psychiatrist driven mad by a patient refusing to speak to him. Sartain, here, represents the countless Halloween sequels that sought to give answers to something that never required one. Laurie says it best early in this move, “There’s nothing to learn”. Fittingly, Sartain meets the same fate that this movie gives to all the previous sequels that sought an answer.
Although Laurie calls him the “new Loomis” in the film, Sartain isn’t there to embody what the Loomis character brought to the series. Laurie is. This time she is the one burdened with the knowledge of what has come home. Podcasters, a crazy doctor and disbelieving youths dismiss Michael for what Laurie knows him to be. That’s straight out of the Loomis playbook. In a way it makes perfect sense…we may have wondered what kind of person Laurie Strode would be after coming face to face with pure unexplainable evil…but we already saw what that does to a person in the form of Dr. Loomis.
Sartain and the two podcaster characters who intent on finding the truth about Michael Myers seem to be metaphors for the franchise itself. The more you try to explain Michael Myers…the worse it’s going to be for you. Like Loomis in the original film, Laurie is the one who knows the truth. That there is no truth. There is purely and simply evil.
Eventually the movie gets down to brass tacks and delivers what people had been waiting for…a confrontation between Laurie and Michael. The roles are largely reversed this time with Laurie stalking Michael, looking to end him once and for all. It’s extremely satisfying to have Jamie Lee Curtis back in this role again. Halloween (2018) gives her some meat to the role for the first time since H20. It’s direct sequel, Halloween Kills sidelines her once again, but, again, we’ll get to it. The final chapter of the trilogy, Halloween Ends looks to put her back in the deserved spotlight and end her character’s journey once and for all.
Scare Value
Not without its flaws, Halloween (2018) was a welcome return to the Halloween franchise. It gave us classic Michael Myers walking through Haddonfield on Halloween night, carving up whoever got in his way. It also gave us back Laurie Strode as a wiser, prepared protagonist. What more can you really ask for from a forty year later sequel? The movies rating here may be impossible to do in a vacuum. On its own merits as a film, it probably should score lower. As the tenth movie about Michael Myers, whose character has endured ups and downs and fundamental misunderstandings of what he truly is, it has to score higher.
4/5
