It’s axiomatic that horror movies tend to reflect
our contemporary societal insecurities and there is certainly a reading of
recent ‘domestic horror’ successes, such as the Insidious franchise or A
Quiet Place (2018), along those lines. Namely that our secure domestic
societies are being shaken up by outside forces over which we have minimal
control.
That being the case there is something very
satisfying about a good, old-fashioned horror movie which is what we have in
this incarnation of Halloween. This
is a return to the old style slasher movie; it’s very much a throwback to the
Seventies and it works well in those terms.
The 1978 version of Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, is of course the film that
kicked off the slasher genre. One of the interesting things about this version,
directed by David Gordon Green of whom more later, is that it resets the
continuity. The Carpenter version spawned a ten-movie franchise, including an
ill-judged Rob Zombie grindhouse trilogy, but all of that has been swept away
by this film.
There is the 1978 film then there is this
real-time sequel in that it takes place 40 years after the first one. Michael
Myers is back, Laurie Strode has been the woman who cried wolf for four
decades, now she has been proved right. All of her faintly paranoid survival
techniques are finally going to pay off as three generations of women are locked
in a house with a totemic serial killer. This is a slasher movie for the Me Too
movement.
I remember seeing the original in the Odeon in
Renfield Street in Glasgow when it was released. It was a sensation, you had to
see it or you had nothing to talk about; it became part of the national
conversation and my memory is of it playing to packed houses every night.
We had never seen anything like Halloween. It was the first and still
the best of its genre and it established all of the themes that are now
standard; the ‘have sex and die’ plot points, for example, and of course the
narrative trope of the ‘last girl’.
Laurie Strode was the ultimate last girl and it is
very pleasing to see Jamie Lee Curtis, the original screen queen, returning in
her most famous role. In 1978 she was a resourceful babysitter, now she’s a shotgun-toting
grandma who has waited forty years to finish the job she thought she had
accomplished in the first film. It’s a character that rather neatly parallels her
contemporary Ellen Ripley who was introduced only a few months later in Alien (1979)
Curtis is very good as a woman who is sufficiently
self-aware to know that Michael may not have killed her, but he did kill off
her chance of a successful and well-adjusted family life. She is estranged from
her daughter (Judy Greer), has a strained relationship with her granddaughter
(Andi Matichak), and the whole town thinks she’s crazy. She has sacrificed a
lot but she has always believed it would be worth it and tonight’s the night.
The film pays a good deal of attention to
Carpenter’s version – he, and Curtis are listed as executive producers – but it
also has something to say for itself. The first act is a little clunky having a
sly dig about the current hipster obsession with murder. Two smug podcasters
basically clue us in on everyone’s back story, and even though they are
intensely irritating we are consoled in the belief that they won’t be around
for very long once they have finished their recapping duties.
The film finds its feet once Michael returns to
Haddonfield and resumes his murderous rampage. Again there is an old-fashioned
quality to his killing spree. There’s no torture porn here; some of the
killings happen off-screen, some are only heard, and some are simply seen as consequences
after the event.
The look of the film very closely resembles the
original with David Gordon Green’s frame perhaps a little more restless than
Carpenter’s. Michael is often on the edge of the frame or just a little out of
focus. The effect is to make the audience ever vigilant to his presence and
that makes him much more of a threat.
David Gordon Green has had a curious career. He
began with well-regarded indies such as George
Washington (2000) and Undertow
(2004) and then switched to low comedy with Pineapple Express (2008) and Your
Highness (2011). But as a viewer he was a product of the VHS generation
and, while this is his best film in a while, it also reflects his 70s
influences with a very close homage to the original, including 70s pacing. This
film feels slower than ‘modern’ horror movies but is none the worse for it but
whether that appeals to modern tastes remains to be seen.
Halloween
deals in suspense and shock more than gore and is refreshingly free from
torture porn. Of course you know what’s coming but the impact comes from the cleverness
of the execution and the result is a good old fashioned shocker
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