Every lifelong horror fan has a story about Halloween. Mine happened when I was 8 years old.
I can still vividly recall standing in the kitchen of my childhood home as my occasional babysitter told my parents about this scary-as-hell movie she and her boyfriend had watched the night before.
It was early November 1978, and John Carpenter’s original Halloween had only been in theaters for a few weeks. I listened intently as my babysitter described every frame in grand detail, right down to Laurie Strode’s eerie final exchange with Dr. Loomis:
Was that the Boogeyman?
As a matter of fact, it was.
A few years later, once my family broke down and ordered HBO, I finally got to experience Michael Myers up close and personal, sitting in the dark, late at night, after my parents had gone to bed. It didn’t matter that I already knew everything that was to come. I was fucking terrified. But along with the fear coursing through my prepubescent veins, there was the hum of excitement and the thrill of watching a masterpiece unfold.
Since that time, I have never missed a sequel or a remake or a sequel to the remake. It’s hard to believe that since 1981, nine more films have explored the Myers mythos, ranging in quality from decent (1981’s Halloween II), barely related (1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch), unexpectedly good (1998’s Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later) and awful (Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween and 2009 Halloween II). That’s not even accounting for 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, which starred Paul Rudd and featured a what-the-fuck swerve into Samhain lore with a cult trying to steal Myers’ infant offspring.
How then should a fan approach this, the first new film in the franchise, nine years after Zombie nearly burned the whole enterprise to the ground?
Let me tell you, I went in as a bundle of nerves and geeked anticipation, and I emerged energized and elated. Halloween is back, and finally, there’s a new film to rival Carpenter’s opus.
The new Halloween, as directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Stronger) and written by Green, Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, wisely erases the nine films in between and serves as a straight sequel to the original.
It brings back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, but not in the way you might expect or remember. This is a searing portrait of a woman who survived a massacre but never allowed herself to keep living. A woman who trained herself to be proficient with weapons and booby traps because she knew one day her nemesis, the Boogeyman, would return. A woman who schooled her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), to always be prepared for an attack, which forced child welfare workers to remove Karen from her custody at age 12. A woman who barely knows her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), who is now just about the age Laurie was when The Shape first appeared.
Green’s Halloween opens spectacularly, with two British true-crime podcast journalists visiting Smith’s Grove Sanitarium to view Myers, who has been held there since the original babysitter murders in 1978. It’s a wonderfully uncomfortable exercise in dread-setting, and it launches straight into the title sequence, which itself is a wonderful reinvention of Carpenter’s original opening credits.
Halloween
4 out of 5 stars • R • 106 minutes • Directed by David Gordon Green
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Haluk Bilginer, Will Patton, James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle
Opens Friday, October 19
There’s a new doctor in charge of Myers, Loomis’ protégé Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), who has spent his career trying to unravel the mystery of the Boogeyman.
“Dr. Loomis was the only one to see him in the wild,” Sartain tells the journalists, barely masking his envy.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Green’s Halloween, it’s with Sartain, who veers wildly off-course as a character in the third act.
But that’s a minor quibble compared to all there is to champion about Green’s vision. His Halloween is lean and mean. His Myers is a feral killing machine, and less of an immortal amalgamation of all things evil. There’s humor, but it’s wisely contained and appropriately distributed.
And the callbacks and shout-outs to many of the most iconic Halloween moments will leave you gasping and cheering.
More than anything, Green’s Halloween serves as the first, proper horror film of the #MeToo era. His trio of leading ladies are not victims or stereotypes. They each are strong in their own right, but together they represent a reckoning that is, honestly, a thing of beauty to behold.
Curtis shines throughout, even at her most desperate and vulnerable moments. You feel her pain and you understand her motivation. Gone is the girl who hid in the closet with a butcher knife four decades before. This new version of Laurie Strode is perfectly equipped to kick fate in the nuts and wield karma like a bludgeon.
It’s been 40 years since we were first introduced to Michael Myers, but Green’s Halloween makes it seem like barely a day has passed.
This may not be a perfect sequel, but what it accomplishes is something far more significant: Green’s Halloween not only makes you believe in, but truly fear, the Boogeyman once again.
This article appears in Oct 18-25, 2018.