40 years on from the release of John Carpenter’s low-key sophomore effort ‘Halloween’, the famed masked assailant Michael Myers returns to wreak havoc on the dreamy Midwest town of Haddonfield.
The 1978 original was the spark that ignited the slasher craze, striking fear into contemporary hearts through calculated brutality, much like its deranged antagonist. Just as Myers ghosts from house to house dispatching victims with almost mechanistic character, the film’s methodical austerity grips the viewer – teasing an ethereal threat and then carrying it out in the final third without any let up or discursion. It runs barely over 100 minutes long, involving a small cast and taking place almost entirely on one street in a nondescript town.
In this aspect, the original Halloween is a mood piece, the plot itself almost immaterial; this being reflected in the trope-heavy slasher craze that it provoked and even John Carpenter’s original intention that the broader ‘Halloween’ franchise be an anthology of different stories rather than a series focused on Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. In this respect, the 2018 film is perhaps short-sighted, focusing heavily on plot and involving a wider scope. More characters are involved, Myers kills more people and the story trundles through a load of different locations. This means the original intimacy or sense of imminent threat is partly missing and it can at times feel more like an action movie than anything else.
At the same time, this new take on the old classic is unmistakeably aware of itself while admirably resistant to the temptation of recursion. A hollow fan-service bonanza that simply goes through the motions when it isn’t endlessly winking at the viewer (a la the new Star Wars and Jurassic Park movies) could have been an easy out for director David Gordon Green and writer Danny McBride. Instead, they set out to craft a film that stands on its own – that builds upon Halloween rather than takes advantage of it. Rather than a tired replay of the cat and mouse interplay of killer and victim, the film is about this dynamic and deconstructs it through plot. The spectral Michael Myers of this new Halloween is the furthest from human the character has ever been on screen – rather he is a set of symbols and rituals, a personification of Trauma itself. Never speaking or being witnessed with a visible face, he’s seen to deliberately hunt down and collect his iconic mask and boiler suit, preparing himself for confrontation in Haddonfield. His invincibility further extends this metaphor, denoting the inevitability, the necessity of his return.
Early on in the film an inquisitive journalist visits Laurie Strode, now living as a paranoiac in a fortified compound (literally imprisoned by the Trauma visited upon her in the first film), and asks her to meet Myers in captivity to try to get him to speak. He suggests that it’s only by confronting her trauma that she might be able to overcome it. The foreshadowing of this ultimate confrontation is accelerated with horrific consequences by Myer’s homicidal imperative – his predatorial drive and, in turn, Laurie’s defensive paranoia. It’s this interpellation between hunter and hunted and its clever subversion that makes the film. Several shots featured in the film are direct call-backs to the original, but they escape heavy-handedness through their thematic importance – each being a reversal, switching Laurie out for Myers, positioning Laurie as the predator.
Isolated and derided as a lunatic, Laurie manages to switch the script and face Michael Myers head on, in doing so tackling a trauma that has not only ruined her life but that of her family’s. Her self-emancipation is a much more vitalising resolution than what was offered in the original – and fitting in terms of the franchise’s historical place within the slasher genre, typically the domain of hyper-sexualised misogynist violence and senseless death. The new reboot isn’t just torture porn of the helpless victim being tormented by her past but the story of her struggle to move into the future. A story which doesn’t posit trauma as definitive but something that can be confronted and dealt with and moved on from – even if, as suggested in the final scene, it may never be escaped entirely.