31 Days of Halloween: Halloween

2018, David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) -- Crave

I am reading a lot about writing these days. Not writing a lot (this only peripherally counts) but reading about technique and style and method and the work required. One thing always mentioned is edit edit edit. Go back, remove unnecessary words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, sections. Remove. What is left behind is Your Story.

Halloween (not The Sequel, not Part Two, not any nomenclature) does just that; not just within itself but to also all previous attempts to follow up the franchise. It even shaves off the direct sequel Halloween II, eliminating the idea that Laurie Strode is Michael's sister. You can say that this movie, set exactly 40 years later, is the one and only sequel. And it's a perfect one.

You can tell the production team loved the original movie. It is present in the tone and the cinematography and in the music. But it updates and expands, while not straying into the lunacy the other sequels did; no cults, no supernatural elements, but enhancing the immense feeling of dread that comes with this character. This dread is almost tangible.

Michael has been in a sanitarium for the past 40 years. Laurie has become this franchise's Sarah Connor, remaking herself into a survivalist and tragically imposing that paranoia & fear onto her daughter, and granddaughter. Michael is being transported to another asylum, but not before some podcasters from England ask to interview him, and just end up taunting him with The Mask. The isometric layout of the sanitarium grounds where the dumbass holds out Michael's mask to him is like some evil, deadly game of chess. Of course, we know where all this will lead.

The movie is very very aware of what came before and what is going on now. The original was set in the era when America was a very safe America. Kids enjoyed Halloween, spree killers were campside tales of bogeymen. But now we get a spree killing almost every weekend and the idea that a crazy man stabbed five people to death 40 years ago holds absolutely no weight, and a side character pretty much says that. But we the viewers, and they the characters who experienced the first movie, know otherwise. Michael may not be supernatural but he is entirely unnatural.

Once Michael escapes the transfer bus, and begins killing in earnest, he again becomes The Shape (the name originally applied to the character) heading back to Haddonfield to ... to what? To kill is obvious, but to revisit his previous kill sites? To kill Laurie? We never really know, but we don't have to. It all culminates with the two confronting each other, and Laurie makes sure of it. This time Justice will be Served.

I cannot stress enough how tight this movie was. Sure, there was supporting plot, side stories of Laurie's family and their friends, but it does so well at focusing on (and I cannot use any other word) the dread that The Shape generates. There is no cat & mouse, no false starts and fake-outs. There is just a deadly path from escape to confrontation. And a satisfying, but ultimately (as no one can forget the tropes that these franchises created) open ending.