This month, Universal released Halloween Kills in theaters and on Peacock. It’s the latest entry in one of the oldest and longest American horror franchises. In 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween brought a new sense of terror to the American suburbs by unleashing the seemingly unstoppable serial killer Michael Myers on the quiet fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Carpenter, co-writer Debra Hill, and the original Halloween team crafted an enduring horror story by exploiting the inherent lack of security in American society––a murderer could walk through your back door completely unnoticed and come for your loved ones with little resistance. That original film intentionally withheld personality from its antagonist: Myers never speaks, shows his face, or indicates any internal motivation for his killing spree. He’s framed as a powerful, unknowable force of nature whose lack of characterization makes him scarier.
Any further appearance of Michael Myers will pale in comparison to the razor-sharp original movie, because any additional information about him will demystify his mythic status. But that hasn’t stopped a small army of filmmakers from trying, as the series has spawned a dozen entries in the 43 years since Carpenter’s original, and all but a couple contain something worthwhile. The first two sequels maintain Dean Cundey’s tremendous nighttime cinematography and John Carpenter’s minimalist score, while the next two feature magnetic performances from Donald Pleasence and Danielle Harris. Later, the oddly-titled H20 brings Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie back into the fold, and Rob Zombie’s remake and its follow-up try some fascinating strategies to humanize Michael Myers by interrogating the broken social conditions that could produce a mass murderer. But the majority of the Halloween movies are mixed bags at best, and as the series progressed, Michael got less and less scary because the series assigned more and more lore to his character. First, he’s revealed to be Laurie Strode’s brother in Halloween II, and later films revealed his immortality was the result of a druid curse.
David Gordon Green’s 2018 movie––perplexingly titled Halloween––cleared the slate and allowed a breath of fresh air for the series by going back to basics: it ignored every previous movie except the 1978 original, completely scrapping any semblance of Michael’s backstory, which results in his most terrifying appearance since Carpenter’s movie. It brought Jamie Lee Curtis back as a severely traumatized Laurie Strode, and even commissioned a new score from Carpenter himself, who left the franchise after the third entry.
Green’s movie functions as a sequel to the original, but also as a quasi-remake of it, as it heavily borrows from its narrative structure: Michael breaks out of captivity, attacks Haddonfield babysitters on Halloween night, and confronts Laurie in the finale, all while pursued by an unhinged psychiatrist. It’s the Force Awakens to the original movie’s Star Wars, telling a suspiciously similar story to its predecessor while also thematically grappling with its legacy. That film introduced two new generations of Strode women: Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) has an icy relationship with her paranoid mother, while her own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) struggles to balance her love for the family’s dueling matriarchs. While it’s far from a perfect movie, Green’s sequel ultimately worked better than the majority of the series’ other films because it grappled with multigenerational trauma and the complexity of the Strodes’ relationships––and still delivered a simple, entertaining slasher.
Green returns to the franchise with this year’s Halloween Kills, which feels starkly different from both his previous outing and the 1978 original. Instead, it has much more in common with the inconsistent sequels of the ‘80s and ‘90s––which shouldn’t be a surprise, given that it’s the twelfth entry in a franchise so convoluted that it’s also the fourth movie that could conceivably claim the title Halloween III. Yet its more complicated and ridiculous elements make Green’s back-to-basics approach in his previous movie much more baffling, as Kills steers the franchise into the absurd terrain that the 2018 entry escaped.
Keeping with Halloween sequel tradition, this movie opens with events that occur concurrently with the finale of the previous film: Allyson’s boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold) stumbles onto the dying body of Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), who was viciously attacked near the climax of the 2018 film. The movie then flashes back to the worst day of Frank’s life: Halloween night, 1978, when he failed to stop Michael Myers’ original killing spree.
That opening sequence sets the thematic tone of the overall film––and also immediately establishes its narrative messiness. If Green’s first movie gave Halloween the Force Awakens treatment, then this is his attempt at a Last Jedi: a bold but inconsistent meditation on personal failure and the limitations of traditional social structures in moments of crisis. Every character makes multiple baffling mistakes that will inevitably make audiences shout at the screen––but unlike many lesser horror movies, those mistakes aren’t always lazy plot devices to propel the story toward the next gruesome kill. Instead, Green and his co-writers, Danny McBride and Scott Teems, linger on the emotional effects of making the wrong decisions at crucial junctures, particularly when you have a lifetime to regret your actions.
A bulky subplot about mob mentality overlaps with these ruminations on failure, but feels more distinct in its poor execution. The Strode women are all still here, but they’re far from the movie’s sole focus, as Anthony Michael Hall plays the grown-up version of Tommy Doyle, the kid that Laurie babysat as Michael chopped up her friends on that night in 1978. The filmmakers team him up with a couple of other Michael Myers survivors played by Carpenter’s original cast members: Lindsey (Kyle Richards), another former babysittee, and Marion (Nancy Stephens), a retired nurse who encountered Michael in Dr. Loomis’s car. And the film perplexingly invents another character who briefly saw Michael while trick-or-treating: Lonnie Elam, played by Robert Longstreet in the present and Tristian Eggerling in flashback.
These four characters, understandably triggered by Michael’s return to Haddonfield, lead a relentless mob of civilians to hunt the killer down in an effort to ensure that “evil dies tonight” –– a phrase that is annoyingly chanted about ten thousand times over the course of two hours. The fear-mongering mob subplot could easily be reduced to a two-minute sequence because it has so little bearing on the plot, which means its inclusion was more thematically-oriented than narratively-focused –– it’s here to make a point and to make you think, not to further the overarching story or develop the main characters. But it fails to justify its existence because its themes are so mishandled, as it tries to convince the audience that mobs are Bad, Actually, in the most on-the-nose manner imaginable, while also attempting to utilize the same mob as an outlet of relief and catharsis when it eventually confronts Michael.
Aside from Rob Zombie’s two-part hard-reboot of the series, Green’s 2018 Halloween was the first entry to try addressing loftier themes like family trauma, so it makes sense that the filmmaker would attempt the same strategy in his follow-up. But the 2018 movie’s thematic and emotional groundedness only worked because it made Michael an almost-believable antagonist again. Sure, he carves a jack-o-lantern into a police officer’s skull, so he’s not completely realistic, but the druid-induced invincibility and the familial link to the Strodes of the preceding sequels were, thus restoring the mysterious allure of the heavy-breathing villain. The 2018 movie is the only one aside from the original in which Michael seems like he could conceivably be killed by an over-prepared Laurie Strode, and that relative realism made him far scarier. In Halloween Kills, on the other hand, Green bafflingly rushes to restore many of the elements that his earlier movie so pointedly rejected. The new version of Michael immediately seems invulnerable again, and Green suddenly wants to assign him some psychological interiority that the 2018 movie rallied against. The pairing of lofty themes and a supernatural stalker might work in other movies, but they can’t coexist in the Halloween world that Green and his team built three years ago.
The movie’s only saving graces are its brutal kill sequences, particularly in the first half. They’re uncharacteristically complicated and drawn-out compared to Michael’s murders in previous movies, so they don’t seem particularly fitting for a Halloween film and don’t quite gel with Green’s previous vision of the character. But divorced from broader context, the sequences are consistently, grotesquely entertaining––most of Michael’s victims are brand-new characters introduced mere minutes before their deaths, so the killings almost feel like unconnected short films that deliver brutal thrills.
In an era of endless sequels and reboots, franchise films must make choices that standalone movies needn’t consider. Will the latest entry in the series stand on its own and make sense to audiences who haven’t seen preceding movies, or will it simply function as the next chapter of a larger story that can’t be enjoyed without thinking about the big picture? Halloween Kills undoubtedly falls into the latter category, as it’s completely incomprehensible without a working knowledge of both the 1978 and 2018 Halloweens, yet it still continually feels the need to clumsily re-explain the events of those two movies––not to bring new viewers up to speed, but just to remind existing fans about its painstaking connections to its predecessors. The bland competence of its filmmaking style ensures that it’s not the worst movie in the series––that title belongs to either Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers or Halloween Resurrection––but at least those movies are so insane that they have a certain campy watchability to them. This movie’s failed seriousness is sometimes harder to watch than the mindless violence of more conventional horror trash. It’s too steeped in its own lore and mythos to work as a standalone movie, yet it’s also too inconsistent, overstuffed, and self-important to function as a chapter in a larger story. Instead, it settles for something miserable in the middle of the two, with too many characters, too many lofty ideas, and too little thought.