The Media Tourist

New ‘Halloween’ Marks Fresh, Frightfully Fun Return to Franchise

Halloween
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer & Andi Matichak
Directed by David Gordon Green
R

Trick or treat!

It’s that time of year—and Halloween is that kind of movie.

It’s certainly a treat seeing Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode, slasher cinema’s most celebrated scream queen, in the role she created back in 1978.

And it’s a bit of a trick what this movie does with its own franchise, a hefty collection of 10 reboots, sequels and revisions by various directors, dozens of other actors and wildly divergent plot lines. This Halloween basically pulls a disappearing act on all of them, except the original, wiping the movie slate clean and operating as if all the events that came before, in all those other films, never happened.

Poof! They’ve vanished.

All orange and a-glow with fresh, new thrills, chills and edge-of-your-seat jolts, this frisky, frightfully fun return to the franchise is full of tense, taut, pulse-pounding scares, enough slashing, stabbing, skull-smashing and impaling to provide some gristle for the gore-hounds happy, and terrific nods to the movie that started it all. (The original’s director, John Carpenter, is one of the executive producers, along with Curtis.)

The new one picks up where the first left off, in Haddonfield, Ill., 40 years after masked, mute Michael Myers went on the horrific Halloween-night killing spree that came to be known as the “babysitter murders.” One resourceful sitter, Laurie Stroud, escaped—but grew up forever traumatized by the experience.

Michael was locked away in a looney bin for endless psychiatric probing. And Laurie became Haddonfield’s local paranoid crackpot, living in a fortified compound with an arsenal of weapons, floodlights on her roof, multiple locks on her doors—and the certainty that Michael would come back to hunt, and haunt her again someday…or some night.

Maybe Halloween?

And she’d vowed she’d be ready for him, even if everyone else thought she was crazy.

Judy Greer (left) with Jamie Lee Curtis

Laurie’s obsession has alienated her now-grown daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), despite the entreaties of Karen’s own teenage daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), a high school senior who begs her grandmother to let go of Michael “and get over it!”

Of course, Michael (played by James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle, reprising his role from 1978) does escape, he does come back to Haddonfield and he does zero in on Laurie. The body count again rises as he blends in, hiding in mostly plain sight among the costumed ghouls and goblins on the sidewalks and streets on Halloween night. But another “trick” of the movie is how it sets up three Stroud women this time to ultimately confront him. Now, 40 years later, the world has changed in many ways, and the boogeyman meets a #MeToo generation with more than one score to settle.

Andi Matichak

Director David Gordon Green collaborated on the screenplay with Danny McBride—and that’s another trick. The pair is much better known for their rollicking, ribald comedy team-ups for TV’s Vice Principals and Eastbound and Down, in which McBride also starred. But give them a masked killer, some sharp knives, a fireplace poker or a tire tool and a shotgun and they can certainly deliver the goods. The opening credits sequence—a reverse time-lapse of a rotten jack-o’-lantern coming back to its original, freshly carved state—sets the stage for their agile horror romp that deeply honors its hallowed roots, “reversing” the outright awfulness of some of its other so-called sequels, while notching its own crisp, definitive design into the iconic tale.

Gas station bathrooms…yuck!

A couple of scenes are consummate, tip-the-hat homages to the original, and others are smart, stylish new additions to the horror-film canon, blending tension, dark humor and shocking crimson splashes, spatters and smears of blood. Some gas-station bathrooms are yucky enough already, but you may never want to go inside another stall after…well, it’s never good when someone leans over the door and drops someone else’s teeth on the floor. And I’ve always thought those motion-activated backyard security lights were a bit creepy; kudos to the filmmakers for finally exploiting their horror potential.

The movie dabbles a bit in predator-vs.-prey psychology, and whether Laurie might actually “need” Michael, live her life for him, around the idea of him—and look forward to confronting him again.

“He waited for this night,” she says. “He waited for me. I waited for him.”

Just like this is a movie that Halloween fans have been waiting for—like kids anxiously wait for Halloween itself, its candy, its costumes and its frightful fun.

Trick or treat!

In theaters Oct. 19, 2018