From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, after two failed marriages, a daughter (now estranged), and a granddaughter. Instead of a complex study in the lingering after-effects of trauma, however, Green’s Halloween gives us simple, unalloyed rage. A fitting Halloween, perhaps, for our own anger-filled post-Trump moment.
Here’s the trailer:
Green’s Halloween is best when it’s offering clever visual call-backs to the original film. Some of the most striking are those designed to emphasize the connection between Michael Myers and Laurie, a connection suggested in the original but one that has (in Green’s film) strengthened over the years. The two journalists with whom the film opens, interested in writing Laurie’s story, articulate this connection quite directly, but Green shows it. The original over-the-shoulder shot of Michael looking through the screen door of his abandoned house at Laurie and Tommy Doyle is repeated in an over-the-shoulder shot of Laurie looking at the two journalists. And then, later, the point-of-view shot of Michael across the street as Laurie sits in class is repeated as Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) looks out her classroom and sees not Michael but Laurie herself. Later still, the famous ending of the original—in which Michael is shot and falls out the window—is repeated as Laurie too falls out a window; like Michael before her, her body suddenly vanishes. None of the connections that are drawn in Green’s Halloween between Michael and Laurie serve to humanize Michael, who is as implacably inhuman as he is in the original. Instead, they serve to pull Laurie herself into the realm of the inhuman. Her violent encounter with Michael Myers as a teenager has served mostly to dehumanize her.
Michael watching Laurie and Tommy Laurie looking at Michael from her classroom (Halloween, 1978)
To the extent that the film explores Laurie’s trauma, which it does not do in much depth, it shows her as having become . . .well . . .full of rage. Her rage leads her to barricade herself off from everyone, even her own family members. Laurie’s relationships are virtually nonexistent; her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) in particular had to cut her mother off almost entirely to save herself from her corrosive paranoia. Laurie has something of a relationship with her granddaughter, but it seems mostly to consist, as it did with her daughter, in ensuring her safety. Laurie’s experience of trauma has turned her into a single-minded, angry, gun-collecting doomsday prepper.
Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) at her compound
Indeed, Laurie welcomes Michael’s inevitable return to Haddonfield–and she’s quite explicit about her satisfaction. She wants only to kill him. One of the disturbing aspects of this film is the fact that Laurie actively wants that which wreaks destruction in Haddonfield –again. Yes, she gets to confront her nemesis, justifying her years of preparation, but it comes at a high cost in human life.
It’s not just Laurie who is full of rage: the film itself it. Green’s Halloween is punctuated by a careless and random violence that the original, more restrained Halloween eschewed. In Carpenter’s Halloween, for instance, the murder that alerted Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) to the fact that Michael was on his way was committed off screen; we get a glimpse of the truck driver’s body as the scene is mostly filled with a train screeching past, representing Michael’s relentless journey back to Haddonfield.
You can check out this short scene from 1978’s Halloween here:
In the new Halloween, we get a prolonged and gratuitous scene of the destruction of two journalists’ bodies in a gas station bathroom. In fact, there’s nothing subtle or restrained about our 2018 Halloween. The dread that Carpenter expertly built is replaced by the regular bloody destruction of bodies everywhere. The obviousness of Green’s film is evident not least in the many times Michael is pretty much fully in the frame, in contrast to the way in which he was for the most part only ever partially at the edges of the frame in Carpenter’s original.
2018’s Michael Myers
The politics of glorified violence in Green’s Halloween is made pretty clear in one of the visual call-backs to the original Halloween. In a clear reference to Michael’s murder of Annie (Nancy Kyes) in her car in the garage, Green’s Michael strangles a vulnerable young boy in a car—a boy whose only sin was trying to help the victims of the bus crash engineered by Michael. It may or may not be accidental that this murdered boy loved dance, even as his dad forced him to go hunting—which is what they had been doing when they had the misfortune to run into Michael Myers. What does it mean when a boy who loves to dance and hates hunting is slaughtered in a film that is awash with guns? Indeed, there are so many guns in this film, it nudged the film to the edges of horror territory and into something else. After all, Carol Clover famously defined the slasher by its featuring primitive, personal weapons, arguing that guns hardly ever made an appearance in the slasher.*
But there are guns galore in this 2018 iteration of our most famous slasher, and there have already been the familiar bifurcated political commentaries focused on these guns. The National Review claims its “Right-Wing Halloween,” arguing that the film clearly demonstrates that we all need guns to protect us from the coming apocalypse, and that evil should be shot not understood. In a countervailing political reading about “maternal warrior women” in Vox, the guns cement a progressive agenda in which women exact a cathartic retribution and all the men in the film are incompetent or evil. Both readings can claim strong support in the film itself–and both show how far we are from the nuanced artistry of the original Halloween.
Laurie confronts Michael
I can’t leave this review without adding that Green’s Halloween also suffers from some seriously bad writing at times. Karen’s husband Ray (Toby Huss) is a joke, who suffers a well-earned fate when he’s just hanging out unarmed in the yard, knowing that Michael Myers is on his way. At an earlier moment, Laurie fails to convince her daughter that Michael is coming because, well, she fails to actually tell her that Michael was on the bus that crashed. There’s a completely dumb and pointless sub-plot with Allyson and her boyfriend—and then Allyson disappears from the main narrative and is just wandering in the woods to no apparent end. And the plot with the doctor is more than ridiculous and just serves to drive home the point of this film that violence serves all emotional needs.
So, you can enjoy this film for affirming the Second Amendment or for showing women kicking ass. But in the end, it’s just not a very good film.
*Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 31-32.
You can stream the 1978 Halloween on Amazon:
