Halloween Odds and Ends
he gets knocked down, and gets up again
This essay appears in video form at filmindublin.ie.
There may be no horror movie quite as iconic as Halloween. It’s both a canonical chapter in the filmography of its director and the progenitor of the entire slasher subgenre. Talk to any 8 year old boy with an interest in seeming grown up beyond his years, and he’ll know the name Michael Myers.
I’m not old enough to have seen Halloween in cinemas, but in 2018 it sure felt like I did. That was the magic of the lega-sequel, and David Gordon Green’s Halloween was smack in the middle of the form’s golden age, which I’ll place as starting around 2015 with Jurassic World and ending around 2022 with Top Gun: Maverick. (Is it over? It feels kind of over. That’s a topic for another essay.)
But anyway, David Gordon Green’s Halloween is great. 9 sequels on and the powers that be finally pulled off the balancing act of paying tribute to the original while pushing the mythology in fun and interesting ways. People were hyped. I saw this movie with a gaggle of friends in a packed cinema.
Four years and two sequels later, and I was watching Halloween Ends, a film created by the same creative team, and I was seeing it by myself in an empty multiplex. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me.
To go by letterboxd ratings, Halloween (2018) is challenged only by the original, whereas Halloween Ends is at the very bottom, in the same tier as Halloweens 5, 6, and Resurrection, films that even I would hesitate to defend.
And yet, I walked out of that cinema elated. I went in with rock bottom expectations and I loved what I saw. To get into why, I’m going to need to take you back through the annals of Halloween history. So let’s start at the beginning.
Halloween stands apart among the big three slasher franchises of the 80s -- Nightmare on Elm Street was born from a master of horror, but 1991’s New Nightmare aside, most of its sequels were directed by filmmakers working in service of Freddy Kreguer, rather than the other way around. The same is true for the filmmakers behind Friday the 13th - at the end of the day, the name on the marquee that matters most is Jason Voorhees. (Even for the two movies where the killer isn’t actually Jason Voorhees.)
There’s something to be said for the consistency of those franchises - if you want the feeling of a Friday movie or a Nightmare, you can more or less put any of them on.
But there’s a fraught quality to the Halloween movies that makes for fascinating viewing. Maybe it’s the fuck you spirit of John Carpenter pervading the character’s DNA, but the franchise is always slashing back and forth between competing authorial visions, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing its iconic killer.
In case you’re not familiar, this is the plot of Halloween: There’s this fucked up kid named Michael Myers who lives in a town called Haddonfield who kills his sister and is sent away to an asylum. Some time later he gets out and stalks a babysitter name Laurie Strode and kills all her friends. She narrowly escapes and Michael is shot by his old psychologist, Dr. Loomis. Somehow, he survives. The film was made for a couple hundred grand and changed cinema forever, revolutionizing horror and proving just how profitable independent film could be.
After the first film launched Carpenter’s career into the stratosphere, he treated Michael less like a cash cow and more like a sacrificial lamb. Carpenter got into this business to make cowboy movies, not worship some masked killer, and Halloween II (1981) sees Michael get blown the hell up. Having moved on to directing films like Escape from New York and The Thing, Carpenter still served as a producer for the Halloween films, and seemed intent on cutting his slasher down to size. Halloween III pivots away from Michael Myers entirely, depicting an entirely new story where the infamous Shape only appears briefly on a TV screen.
People were not happy. It was 1983, Jason Voorhees had just donned his hockey mask in the third Friday the 13th movie in three years, and the fans were clamoring to build a similar relationship wish horror’s original slasher. The guy who Carpenter envisioned as the incarnation of evil, a figure to be combated and destroyed, was quickly becoming something else to a fan community still in its infancy — a Horror Movie Boyfriend.
Talk to those fans today, and many will cite Halloween III as a triumph, a bizarre left turn that gave audiences a creepy atmospheric criminal conspiracy critiquing the consumerism that was already pumping out Michael Myers masks and action figures. It’s one of my favorite films in the franchise, and reminds me of the slow burn horror of John Carpenter’s The Fog, his initial follow up to Halloween.
That said, the film cost more than the first two Halloweens combined and grossed a fraction of either. This led to the first Halloween reset, with producer Moustapha Akkad buying the rights from Carpenter and producer Debra Hill and giving the fans their Horror Movie Boyfriend, back from the dead.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is the first of what fans call the Thorn Trilogy. This is the most Friday the 13th the series gets - we’ve got a masked guy who keeps coming back from the dead to kill a lot of people. It’s the quintessential slasher, with a cult of druids thrown in for good measure. This is probably my least favorite era, but plenty of people love it.
Still, the junkiness had a negative impact on audiences, with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers ultimately making the least money of any film in the franchise. The sixth film, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, released in 1995, barely did any better. (It did, however, include the big screen debut of Paul Rudd.)
The slow decline of the Thorn Trilogy coincided with declines for Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, too - the market was oversaturated, the product was formulaic, and fans were hungry for flesh blood. They got it one year later in Scream, with director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson introducing a self reflexive, genre savvy style that reshaped the genre.
It also reshaped the Shape. Halloween: 20 Years Later or H20 was released in 1998, just two years after Scream. Kevin Williamson is all over H20, which begins the next phase of the Halloween franchise. Though it throws away the canon of Halloweens 3 through 6 entirely, it is still thoroughly self-referential, even bringing in Psycho’s Janet Leigh for a cameo scene with her real life daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis.
The junkiness of 4-6 is pretty much gone here; Instead of a high body count of bit players, you’ve got a well furnished cast of hot young actors, from LL Cool J to Michelle Williams. Even tiny Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets an ice skate to the face. Instead of treating the audience like a cult of Michael Myers, they are actively trying to connect to a changing viewership. If you want to hear the power of Williamson, just compare the film debut of Josh Hartnett in H20 to the film debut of Paul Rudd just three years earlier.
But Williamson’s grip on the series was loose - he developed the story and did some script doctoring, but this guy was busy in the late 90s. Williamson was behind so many major cultural artifacts from that time, from Dawson’s Creek to I Know What You Did Last Summer - he didn’t have time for a franchise mired by its past. Even if H20 is only aspiring to the cleverness of something like Scream, it is still miles ahead of its successor, Halloween: Resurrection. This 2002 film struggles for relevancy—Michael’s childhood home is now the set of an online reality show—But there is just no unifying voice here, and so instead it’s just a bunch of elements thrown at the screen. That’s not dissimilar to the Thorn trilogy, but Resurrection’s inflated budget removes any charm from the scrappiness of those films.
Like any slasher, the film still has its champions, and they will be likely to point you to this clip of Busta Rhymes drop kicking Michael in the face.
So again we have another decline into irrelevance, this one happening even more quickly and definitively. Michael Myers went into hibernation for another five years; By the next time he returned, his ownership had been passed down from Moustappha Akkad to his son, Malek, who took the series in a new direction. He handed the reigns to filmmaker and heavy metal frontman Rob Zombie. For the first time since 1978, Halloween was in the hands of an auteur working to make Michael Myers his own. And BOY did he!
This film is about as far from John Carpenter as you can possibly get, leaning into the grungy grossness that Zombie made his trademark in House of a 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Instead of an unexplainable evil haunting suburbia, Michael Myers is the product of a messed up world, with Zombie taking us into a childhood of abuse and institutionalization that takes up nearly half of the film.
People were pissed. While Zombie wasn’t killing Michael Myers, he was doing something even worse in the eyes of some fans - he was changing him. Still, the film was successful enough to warrant a sequel, and like Carpenter before him, Zombie chose to bite the hand that fed. Halloween II (2009) is a bizarre fantasia, taking us into Michael Myers’ dreams, including striking black and white imagery and visions of his dead mother. Zombie’s response to the criticism that he was humanizing Michael Myers was to take us deeper behind the mask than ever before.
Just like the Carpenter-produced Halloween III, Zombie’s Halloween II was a divisive financial disappointment. And…there are many now who claim it as a masterpiece. The subjective dreaminess is unlike anything you’ll find in any other Halloween movie. Even if it feels perverse for Zombie to put you in the brain of a serial killer in his first film, the empathy he creates for Michael as this lost, tortured soul in the second is kind of beautiful in its subversiveness.
But subversion doesn’t always sell movie tickets, and this time the franchise lay dormant for nine years - the longest in its history. When it finally did return, the producers handed it to another established writer-director, this one a relative newcomer to horror - David Gordon Green. The results were better than anyone could’ve expected - This movie made more money than any of the Halloween sequels, and it was made for less than any of them since before H20. In addition to bringing back Jamie Lee, John Carpenter returned as producer, for the first time in 36 years.
Obviously this movie was going to get a sequel. But despite coming from the same creative team, Kills did not hit with fans in the same way. Halloween Kills pulls the audience at both ends, filled with gruesome deaths than any gore hound would love but might alienate a more casual viewer, yet interspersed with some pretty heavy handed themes that feel out of place in a movie that is ultimately about people getting chopped up.
Fans were grumpy, but the movie still made a hefty chunk of change and the producers stuck with David Gordon Green’s vision for the series’ epic conclusion.
Halloween Ends is weird. Like many of these films, it starts with an opening kill, but this one has…nothing to do with Michael Myers? Well, it does, it’s about the mass hysteria still gripping Haddonfield years after the events of the previous film, but the death is an accident, after this guy Corey Cunningham opens a door too quickly, sending the prankster twerp he’s babysitting plummeting to his death. He’s cleared of any legal responsibility, but everyone kind of hates him on account of the child death, except for Allyson, granddaughter of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode. Laurie and Allyson’s story has been building over the course of the three films, but Corey is new. I’m like a whole paragraph into this movie and there’s no mention of Michael Myers, which sounds suspiciously similar to what other Halloween movie?
Unlike the first Halloween III, Michael does appear here, but he takes the outcast Corey under his wing, passing his darkness unto him. Michael gets some kills in, but Corey actually gets the higher count over the course of the film. After giving fans everything they thought they wanted in his first Halloween film, David Gordon Green is following in the grand tradition of Rob Zombie and John Carpenter before him. He is truly making Michael Myers his, creating a moral universe where evil isn’t solely embodied by a big scary guy in a mask.
Beyond my admiration for Green’s audacity here, I think the film touches on scary ideas that are new territory for the franchise. The thought of accidentally being responsible for the death of a child? Jesus Christ that’s scary! A dark romance between Allyson as the new Laurie and Corey as the new Michael? That’s twisted, dude. And what a scary idea — that the person you’re falling in love with, who you know is capable of redemption, chooses instead to embrace the seduction of becoming that which everyone fears them to be? I love it!!
Of course, people were pissed, perhaps more than ever before. This was supposed to be Michael Myers’ grand finale, and he’s playing second fiddle to some guy named Corey? But if there’s one thing this franchise has taught me, it’s that evil never dies. We’re coming up on fifty years since Michael Myers first stalked Haddonfield, and I have to imagine he’ll be making a comeback. In the years to come, I suspect I won’t be so lonely in my reclamation of this final chapter in the legacy sequel era of the franchise. Each one of these cycles ends in some kind of disaster, but it’s either a slow descent into irrelevance or a wild swing into oblivion. I’m glad David Gordon Green knew which direction he was stabbing in.