Spoiler alert for Halloween Kills. Content warning for suicide and murder.
One of my favorite sagas of all time is the Twin Peaks saga, starting with the original TV series, continuing with Fire Walk With Me, and concluding (for now) with The Return. Twin Peaks is, when you boil it down, a story about the way that evil spreads like a disease, and how a single act of unspeakable evil in a small town creates a rotting void that eats away at the community over the course of decades.
Twin Peaks: The Return isn't an easy series to watch, but if you've been following the theme of the series, it's phenomenal. Picking up with the town of Twin Peaks 25 years after the death of Laura Palmer, the quirky, lovable town we know from the original series is almost unrecognizable. Characters we got to know over the course of two seasons now feel like strangers weighed down by an oppressive sense of dread. Strange, sinister supernatural occurrences (like a disturbing, zombie-like illness that's barely touched upon) just happen, and everybody seems to exhausted to do anything about it. Our hero from season 1, Agent Cooper, spends most of The Return in a sort of dementia, his mind destroyed by his decades in the Red Room.
And at the conclusion of The Return, even though the villain is cartoonishly defeated by a man with an unstoppable punch, we travel to a sort of alternate timeline Twin Peaks, and we see that even if you have to open up a portal through time and space to see it, the evil never really leaves. It remains, even if it's hidden in a dimension incomprehensible to the human mind. Twin Peaks will never be free of the evil, and it will never fully recover. You can slow the decay, but you can never stop it. Entropy is, after all, the natural state of things.
Twin Peaks is an epic of incredible scope and depth. David Lynch and Mark Frost spend hours upon hours showing you a community that you grow to know and love, and then make you watch as that same community falls to the inescapable horror at its core. The Return felt terrifyingly relevant in 2017 and continues to feel terrifyingly relevant to today, when America's sins all seem to be catching up to it at once: racism, wealth inequality, environmental destruction, imperialism, neglect...they're all crashing in on us at once and communities that once felt safe and familiar now feel alien and hostile.
Anyway, that's what I think Halloween Kills is trying to be. And it fails pretty miserably.
What if Mebbe We The Reel Monstrs?
So Halloween Kills barely has a plot to speak of. It is just the immediate aftermath of the 2018 Halloween (which I'll call Hallow18 from here on out), and it expects you to have studied that movie religiously. Characters who showed up for a few minutes in Hallow18 have extensive dialogue in Kills. Deaths from Hallow18 are still fresh in the mind of our heroes in Kills, even though most of us in the audience have completely forgotten them. We stumble across the dead bodies from Hallow18 that we only sort of remember.
The idea of examining the aftermath of a slasher movie is a really interesting one, and could be an exploration of communal trauma in the wake of a tragedy. But all that really happens in the movie is...a bunch of people try to kill Michael Myers, then get killed instead. Furthermore, Halloween Kills doesn't do a millionth of the work that Frost and Lynch did to make the town of Haddonfield feel like a place that we know. Kills introduces a slew of characters who I guess we're supposed to find compelling on their own, but mostly just feel like extras who stood a little too close to the boom mic and accidentally got their fake dialogue on the track.
Kills takes this germ of an idea -- a town reacting to a tragedy -- and instead of exploring it in a meaningful way, decides to take a shortcut directly to the old well of "WHAT IF WE, THE PEOPLE BEING MURDERED BY A PSYCHO KILLER IN A MASK, ARE THE REEEEEEAL MONSTER!?!?!!?!!?" In what I found to be a bit of a surprise, one of the biggest plot points comes when a mob of Haddonfield residents (who are all gathered in the lobby of a hospital, I don't remember why) spot an escaped mental patient and immediately start chasing him, believing him to be Michael Myers. Of course, he's not. And the townspeople are idiots, because the guy they're chasing is short, pudgy, and most importantly does not wear a mask or a black jumpsuit and does not immediately stab them as soon as they get close. It's an incredibly dumb plot point in a movie that barely has a plot.
This mob chase goes on forever, and we keep cutting to Laurie Strode and Karen Strode trying to stop the mob by yelling "HE'S NOT MICHAEL" over and over again. The chase scene culminates in Not-Michael tearfully falling from the top floor of the hospital in a failed attempt to escape onto a ledge. A crowd gathers around the dead body and stares in shock, realizing they have caused the death of an innocent man. How dare we!?!?
But the thing is...okay, Jesus, first off, this guy is so obviously not Michael it's insane that they would chase him for this long.
But leaving that aside...usually in a scene like this -- where a mob pursues somebody who does not deserve the punishment they want to exact upon him -- there's a hidden prejudice, an ulterior motive for the mob chasing the chase-ee. The supposed crime they want to enact justice for is usually just an excuse for them to let loose their violent instincts on somebody they just inherently dislike. In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston's mob might claim to be rescuing Belle, or protecting the town, or whatever, but in the end their true motivation is a hatred of the other. In The Mist, when the mass of survivors grab Jessup and offer him as a sacrifice to the monsters in the mist, it's not really because they think a sacrifice will do anything; Jessup's just not conforming to the small, religious society that Ms. Carmody is forming, and as a result he's not one of them. Mob scenes should be about something. Mobs aren't rational, especially mobs that are chasing down a defenseless person. They're prejudiced, and they only need the slimmest of reasons to act on that prejudice.
But this mob really, really seems to think -- *sigh* as stupid as it is -- that this guy is Michael Myers. And this mob is formed during a Michael Myers rampage that has already taken many lives, including the lives of children. We never get a sense that this mob has some kind of deeper prejudice against Mini-Myers. It's not like there's a racial or gender-based or sexual discrimination going on that makes these people more than just a bunch of folks who are scared shitless. This mob sequence wants so badly to show us how the ordinary people of Haddonfield are, when you get right down to it, as bad as Michael Myers. But it doesn't work because these are extremely specific circumstances where, if this group of people really think (for whatever goddamn reason, I can't believe how stupid this is) that they're chasing Michael Myers, they're 100% morally justified in doing so. This is a guy who has just been GOING AROUND MURDERING PEOPLE FOR NO REASON, FOR DECAAAAADES.
So yeah, this sequence not only makes no sense, it says nothing other than "Hey, when people are scared, they sometimes make mistakes." Which...no shit. That doesn't really earn you the message that's repeated, through tears, over and over again by Judy Greer that "We're the REEEEEEEAL MONSTERS." This isn't, as the writers desperately want it to be, evidence that Michael Myers has somehow corrupted the town and made it just as evil as he is. This is a bunch of people who are scared shitless because their friends and family were murdered by an immortal serial killer mere hours ago. And the movie, as stupid as it is, gives us no reason to believe they are anything but completely convinced that this guy is that serial killer. It's one of the most insultingly stupid plotlines I've ever seen, and I saw Rise of Skywalker.
Okay, the movie says, Well, it is kind of stupid, but isn't it tragic that this town you've come to know sooooooo well has fallen into this kind of chaos!?!?!?!?
No.
Haddonfield iss a Smol Town Were Nuthing Happun!?!?
Haddonfield is not a real place. I don't mean that in the literal sense that it's fictional; I mean that Haddonfield never even remotely felt like a place that we were supposed to care about.
The original Halloween was such a revolutionary film because it really made you feel like your idyllic suburban community was no longer safe. Haddonfield wasn't supposed to be a specific place, like Twin Peaks, or Salem's Lot, or Castle Rock. Haddonfield was supposed to be just as generic a suburb as any of the millions of other suburbs that millions of Americans lived in. Haddonfield isn't a town you get to know, it's supposed to feel like your town. Halloween is scary because you can project the town that you know onto the fairly generic suburb that is Haddonfield. Michael Myers isn't invading Haddonfield; he's invading your town.
Halloween Kills does not understand this. It does not understand that nobody cares or has ever cared about Haddonfield. I'm pretty sure the word "Haddonfield" is said more times in this movie than it's ever been said throughout the entire series. The tragic ending of the film is supposed to evoke the downfall of the once-beloved town of Haddonfield, and the descent into mob violence is supposed to show how Myers has spread his evil to our favorite town ever, Haddonfield.
But Haddonfield is not a real town and it was never supposed to be. It's not like it's occupied by characters we've grown to love. It's not like there's a popular hangout where everyone in Haddonfield goes on a Friday night. It's not like there's a local sports team that everyone gets to root for. It's not like we ever get a sense of the actual geography of Haddonfield beyond the street where Laurie lives. Haddonfield appears to be either a small city or a single house in the middle of the woods, depending on what the plot calls for.
So the writers of Kills are presented with a stumper: "We want this movie to be about how a community is defined by and corrupted by this one monster, but nobody gives a rat's ass about this community. This franchise is decades old and we still have no real sense of Haddonfield as a place. How are we going to play catch-up here?"
Well, this task was pretty much impossible and I would give up on it right away, but to their credit, they tried. Not so much to their credit, they really don't do a good job. Here's how they try to endear us to old Haddonfield:
Fun Bar!
Now, if your goal was to make your town the main subject of your theme, you'd probably start thinking of places and parts of that town to show off. Unfortunately, the bulk of Kills' plot occurs in either the hospital, a bar, the Myers house, or an empty void with a single swingset (this is not counting the houses where murders take place, because those scenes are either in the Myers house or have nothing to do with the plot at all). So what's the next option? Populate your town with colorful characters!
So we meet most of (and by most of, I mean maybe 10 of the 2600 characters the movie wants us to be invested in) our kooky townsfolk at some kind of Halloween talent show/costume party at a bar, where we see some people in mermaid costumes singing karaoke, a ventriloquist act, and a pretty depressing speech about the triple homicide that happened in this town a few decades ago. This feels like it's trying to set up the Haddonfield cast of characters, introducing us to such colorful goofballs as "guy in doctor's costume" and "guy in doctor's costume's wife." But the party is so chaotic and poorly shot that none of these characters really stand out or show any kind of internal life beyond "is at a costume party." Honestly, beyond doctor guy and doctor guy's wife, I'm not sure I remember ANYBODY in this scene getting actual dialogue. It might have happened, but I don't remember it. But to get back to that depressing speech about the triple homicide, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to give us a sense of the key characters of Haddonfield: the survivors of the first Myers massacre. See, the speech is given by Anthony Michael Hall, who is actually Tommy Doyle, the kid Laurie was taking care of in the original movie (not to be confused with Tommy Jarvis, a different precocious kid who grows up to be a traumatized monster hunter). He's the kind of de facto leader of the Myers survivors and seems like he has kind of a Captain Ahab thing going on with Michael Myers, which is hilarious because I'm not sure he ever even shares the screen with Michael in Halloween and yet he's so intense.
He introduces us to three other key members of the community: Lindsey, whose main character trait is that she survived the first Halloween, Marion, whose main character trait is that she survived the first Halloween, and Lonnie, whose main character trait is that he survived a flashback to the first Halloween. (That third guy gets an entire cold open showing his encounter with Michael in the 70s, which you would think means he's important, but he mostly just hangs out and then gets killed offscreen. He is also played by Robert Longstreet from The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, who is way too good for this shit.)
You would think that this group of survivors would be a core part of the town of Haddonfield, the major players whose different methods of coping with their trauma has shaped the town of Haddonfield over the course of the years. They should serve the same purpose as the returning cast members in Twin Peaks: The Return: the "after" photos that show us the toll that one evil event has taken on the members of this community. Unfortunately, these survivors don't really have any personality or anything that makes them interesting. I'm not even sure what they do for a living or why the hell they stayed in the town that traumatized them so deeply. They're just there to get killed off, like most of the characters, but the writers try to take a shortcut to characterization by giving them a slight connection to the original movie. Of the survivors, Tommy Doyle is the only one with anything remotely resembling a character, but his character basically boils down to "Hates Michael Myers, is probably into QAnon."
So there you go. This townwide party that's supposed to introduce us to and endear us to the fine folks of Haddonfield basically tells us that there's four people who don't like Michael Myers very much, a guy in a doctor costume, and the girlfriend of that guy in the doctor's costume. Move over, Stephen King, there's a new small town filled with stories and trauma in...um...town.
2. Nothing ever happens here!
Well, our overwhelming cast of non-entities has failed to make Haddonfield feel like a real place, so let's have two cops look out at Haddonfield, sigh, and say (paraphrasing) "Haddonfield, a small town where nothing ever happens." Okay, in theory, that does give Haddonfield some personality. It's remote! It's got a small population! The people who live there are bored! The writers consider this line to be a key line, giving it lots of room to breathe when it's first said, and repeating it word-for-word in an ironic echo later on. (Get it? The town's not actually quiet or...well, it could still be small, I guess, but still...irony!")
The problem is, if the writers are trying to sell us on the idea that Haddonfield is a small, quiet town, they don't do anything to show that. They just have a character say it, and we're supposed to take that as read.
Based on what we see in Halloween, Hallow18, and Kills, though, Haddonfield really doesn't seem like a small town where nothing ever happens. For one thing, everybody in Haddonfield has a gorgeous house that the average millenial would have to sell both kidneys to afford. Seriously, every single kitchen has an island with a full knife set (because, you know, for stabbing), every living room is impeccably clean (because, probably, maid service), and seemingly every house is within walking distance of the school. This town may not have a very distinct personality, as I said before, but it's still really nice.
Besides that, the community is never anything short of bustling. That Halloween party is attended better than most graduations I've been to. Kids walk to school together and chat on the sidewalk. The hospital is fully staffed and ready to handle multiple stabbing victims. And quiet!?! This town forms a mob at the drop of a hat.
Haddonfield also -- despite its tragic past -- seems really healthy. There's no litter on the ground, no homeless population to speak of...the streets are safe enough for kids to just casually walk around all night, implying there's no rampant drug problem or crime besides Michael. Some might call that "quiet," but to me, this speaks to a healthy community that's well-connected and prosperous enough to support plenty of small businesses and big events. These cops, honestly, they probably never set foot outside their house when they're off-duty. They probably spend a lot of time on message boards complaining about women.
This is not to mention that there's a haunted house where an infamous sister-cide took place, a famous serial killer (who I'm shocked hasn't generated more merch for the town), and a very poorly secured insane asylum just a few miles away. So don't try to sell me on this "Haddonfield is just a small town where nothing ever happens" nonsense. I've spent SO MUCH of my life in actual small towns where nothing ever happens. Maybe it's different for us here in New England, but Haddonfield looks like the most exciting place I've never visited.
3. Big John and Little John
Okay, I've spent a lot of time slagging this movie, but I want to give credit where it's due. Big John and Little John are actually really successful as characters. There's lots of implied backstory to their relationship, like pictures of them on the walls, their very silly nicknames, the way they kind of play "Marco Polo" but say "Big John" and "Little John" when they're looking for murderers. They have clear, differentiating takes on how Halloween should be spent (Big John wants to get high and dance, Little John wants to dress like a pirate and watch a movie), but they very obviously love each other despite their differences.
They're not perfect. They scream and swear at kids who piss them off, and Big John in particular seems to have a bit of a temper. Little John seems to have trouble sticking up for himself (he also dresses like a pirate, even though it doesn't look like he and Big John plan on going anywhere). Also they're pretty dumb for living in the house that Michael Myers grew up in when they know Michael Myers is still alive and living in an asylum just a short drive away.
But this is what Halloween Kills needed more of if it wanted me to care about our little town of Grover's Cor...Haddonfield, because these two guys are the undisputed MVPs of Halloween Kills. They easily snatch that crown from Laurie Strode, Karen Strode, and Michael Myers, the characters who are supposed to be the main characters. They're fun to watch together, they have rapport, they have inner lives, and I found myself feeling genuinely scared for their safety, as well as sad when they got killed off horribly (in what is, unfortunately, following a trope with some pretty bad history; I'm not saying their death is problematic, but I do wish the only prominent gay characters in this series weren't killed off quite so horribly).
But they're it. Nobody else gets a chance to show what their life is like without Michael because the movie starts with everyone getting together to hunt down Michael; there's really nothing else going on except in the Johns' house (well, and in the house of an older couple that messes around with a drone and then gets killed, but they get like, half a scene of development).
So yeah, Halloween Kills for a few brief minutes actually succeeds in bringing exactly one household in this town to life.
4. This guy
Okay, I just have to talk about this guy, because the camera constantly focuses on him and his concerned face, as if we're supposed to recognize him and go "Oh, well, if he's concerned, we should be too." Except I don't think he has a single line of dialogue for the entire movie. I mean, he's onscreen maybe longer than Jamie Lee Curtis, but he doesn't say or do anything. And yes, by his costume and his name in the credits, I know this is supposed to be the sheriff, but I'm not entirely convinced that he is. He doesn't do anything related to law enforcement. In fact, almost every other character seems to have more sway over the police than this guy. There are like, three other people I could have sworn were the sheriff. But boy, does the camera have a lot of significant shots of this dude, like "Just you wait, the Sheriff's gonna do something desperate." Jesus, I'm not sure anyone even notices he's there; I don't remember anyone going to him and saying "Hey Sheriff, any ideas?" He might be a ghost for all I know. I think he's a ghost who stole a cowboy costume.
I mean, this guy is emblematic of the movie's biggest problem, which is that nobody in this town seems to really have a relationship other than "Well, I know what you do, and I know your name." This movie is so bad at giving this town a personality that they can't even have the sheriff involve himself in a manhunt for a serial killer.
(Note: I later found out that this guy was a more prominent character in Hallow18. I wish that the creators of this film had realized that Hallow18, while a pretty solid movie, is also pretty easy to forget.)
Michael Kneads tu Dye, an I Knead to Kill himb?!?!
Okay. So.
This movie wants to be about how Michael Myers is so evil that he completely corrupts this town, leaving nothing but trauma in his wake. So far, the only corruption they've really shown is the town thinking a short, pudgy man is Michael Myers and chasing him around a hospital, Scooby-Doo style. The only town they've shown us is a bar, a hospital, and Big and Little John.
Okay, but maybe the movie still explores trauma in interesting ways?
Nah. Not really.
So the movie's exploration of trauma pretty much begins and ends with Laurie. Sure, there are the four survivors we meet in the bar, but like I said, they barely do anything and then they get killed (one of them might not get killed; I honestly don't know and don't care). Tommy Doyle almost has a sort of war veteran PTSD thing going on, but honestly, if you told me he wasn't around when Michael Myers killed everyone and he's just an angry Dad who drank a little too much, I don't think it would change the movie even slightly. Laurie's daughter, Karen, and granddaughter, Some Girl, grapple a little with the death of Karen's husband, but I mean, that's like saying The Wrath of Khan explores trauma because people are sad when Spock dies.
So really, the exploration of the trauma that is wreaked upon Haddonfield really only comes through Laurie, and boy...Jamie Lee Curtis is a great actor, like really great, but she does not have any sort of a take on playing a person with PTSD. Laurie really just yells a lot (mostly "WE HAVE TO FIND HIM" I mean girl, what do you think we're trying to do?) and looks stressed out -- not nervous or anxious, like, stressed, like her car is getting towed, and she's worried about making it to her kid's piano recital at 7. She also spends 98% of her screentime in the same hospital room, so it's not like she really gets to react to anything that's going on with the plot.
But here's a consistent thing about Kills: it wants to explore interesting ideas, but only takes the lightest of jabs at those ideas. About halfway through the movie, Frank Hawkins, the cop who is sharing Laurie's hospital room (and I'm just finding out now he wasn't also a sheriff) makes a pretty potent observation. While Laurie is on rant #67 about how Michael has to die (NO SHIT) and she has to kill him (WHY), Frank says something along the lines of, "Look, Michael's rampage has nothing to do with you. You're not responsible for him. He's a little kid in a psychopath's body."
That's a pretty interesting idea to examine on a psychological level. It's easy to respond to a huge traumatic event by recontextualizing it so that it's about you. You hear stories about people who just barely avoided getting on Flight 93 and credit God and divine intervention for keeping them from becoming one of the victims of 9/11. It's an easy train of thought to slip into: you're entire life has been bent by this thing that happened, so the thing that happened is somehow connected to you and your existence.
And this also says something about pop culture franchises and how they contribute to this type of thinking. Rey can't just be a cool new person with force powers, she has to have a familial connection to the characters from the original trilogy. It can't just be a brilliant new fighter pilot who is in charge of combatting the alien invasion, it has to be the son of Will Smith's character in the first movie. And a new movie about Michael Myers can't possibly revolve around anybody but Laurie Strode; we can't explore the emotional fallout of other people who suffer due to Myers, it always has to come back to Laurie.
Except, for a second, this movie challenges that type of solipsistic thinking. What if the things that destroyed your life aren't really about you? What if Laurie or Rey or Young Will realized that they didn't have to be defined by extraordinary events that happened outside of their control? Even more importantly, maybe pop culture is conditioning us, the audience, to see our own lives as vital pieces of a larger narrative, and that's why we take the injustices of the world so personally. Maybe that's why our reaction to 9/11 was to double down on our patriotism and go whole hog on a pair of useless, never-ending wars: we just couldn't accept that this terrible thing that happened was not about us as individuals. Maybe pop culture is conditioning us to react to trauma with solipsism. What Frank is suggesting, in this brief bit of dialogue, is that maybe there's a healthy middle ground between caring about these traumatic events while not making ourselves the focal point of those events. You can be hurt and grieve what was lost in the event, but you can also recognize that your very existence didn't somehow make the event happen.
Well, that whole idea gets thrown out the window pretty quickly, because this movie has so much reverence for the original movie that it can't make Michael into anything less than a god and a metaphor for every evil that has ever existed and the apotheosis of evil that only Laurie can stop. The movie ends by cutting between Michael and Laurie again and again. These are the characters this movie cares about, not the people of Haddonfield. Lauries's trauma isn't a serious thing worth examining; it's just her motivation for continuing the franchise.
So yeah, once again we have a pretty interesting idea picked up for half a second before being dropped down a flight of stairs so we can go "Oooooo, they figured out how to composite Donald Pleasance into the new footage!"
So Who Cares?
All right, you might think, you clearly didn't love the movie. Why write a huge blog post about it?
Well, as much as I've talked smack about Halloween Kills, I can't help but give it credit: it's trying to be about something. It's failing, because it's an overstuffed hodgepodge of half-baked ideas edited haphazardly together into something that barely resembles a narrative, but it's trying to be about something, and I think that deserves some praise. Audiences don't expect much from a Michael Myers movie; it's yet another sequel to a movie that was pretty much perfect the first time around that once again fails to capture the magic of the original. They could have just made a straightforward slasher, but they tried to take a slasher formula and elevate it to grand tragedy.
And really, they deserve some credit for trying. I've wanted for a long time to see somebody make a Friday the 13th movie that really had something new and interesting to say, and, well, Halloween's not a franchise I'm as jazzed about, but I can't say they didn't try to deliver something I'd be excited to see. Of course, the Fear Street movies and Slasher: Flesh and Blood already beat it to the character-driven, socially conscious slasher punch, but a new entry into one of the definitive slasher franchises that really goes for broke and tries to say something new? That's something worth trying. And also to its credit, Kills is actually pretty scary at some points. There are sequences that really evoked the dread I feel when I think somebody might have broken into the house, and some jump scares that I saw coming but still jumped at. It's clear that the talent behind the camera knows how to make a good horror movie, but they just tried to do too many things at once and ended up with a big pile of nothing.
So overall, I wouldn't recommend Halloween Kills, but I can't say it was a complete waste of time. A failed attempt to be thought-provoking can still provoke some interesting thoughts.
But seriously, watch the Fear Street movies first. They're way better.