Rating: C+
In a world where we sit at the precipice of ecological collapse, where religious strife and rising political tensions threaten to rip our culture apart, where a deadly pandemic kills thousands of fellow citizens a day, where financial uncertainty looms on an ever approaching horizon, and where old rich men play games with our lives, the slasher feels almost quaint.
Once considered the apex of the horror genre, slashers have moved in and out of fashion over the years. Back in the heyday of the 1980s and early 1990s, studios churned out various sequels to various franchises at an absurd rate, finding any excuse to throw groups of teens at various homicidal monsters and, along the way, muddying the waters of their respective canons.
None, perhaps, quite as convoluted as Halloween, which now has 3 separate and distinct timelines (4, if you include the Rob Zombie remakes, and 5, if you include the narratively unrelated Halloween III: Season of the Witch) with various canons to follow. It’s not difficult to keep track of so much as it is not worth the effort. After all, the general quality of the series after Halloween II (1981) doesn’t particularly warrant having to think too hard about it.
Which is absolutely why director/co-writer David Gordon Green dispensed with most of the established canon(s) for his 2018 sequel/reboot Halloween. Taking the nuclear approach to canon seemed to work well enough, given audience and critical reactions to that film, and it naturally kicked off a whole new trilogy, the second of which, Halloween Kills, is out today.
It is, on balance, a perfectly fine slasher movie that delivers everything fans have come to expect of the genre. Green, former mastermind behind late-00’s early 10’s stone comedies, for sure understands what made John Carpenter’s Halloween (a formula setting masterpiece of the slasher) so memorable and he does what he can to capture that feeling. That being said, it’s hard to separate that from the fact that all of this has been done so endlessly before.
There can be no argument that Green’s reverence for both Halloween and the slasher genre in general makes for a movie that’s infinitely better made than its forebears. The problem stems from one of purpose. There isn’t much here we haven’t seen and it’s difficult to grasp what purpose is being filled by Michael Myers in a world so full of horrors.
Halloween Kills picks up seconds following the conclusion of Halloween. When last we saw them, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), had left Michael Myers to burn to death in the compound Laurie had built up in the decades following the babysitter massacre of 1978. That obviously didn’t go as plan. Unleashed again in Haddenfield, the survivors of the original killings, led by Laurie’s former babysitting charge Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), organize a lynch mob to end Michael’s reign of blood.
This of course leads to those age old horror tropes of “evil begets evil” and “what if people are the real monsters,” both of which are so well-trod that even in the context of a slasher (a genre not known for subtlety) there isn’t much to do with the take. Any and every attempt at adding nuance to the formula still feels like a scaffolding to hold things up enough to get to the next jump scare or next kill.
Which is fine. That’s a slasher movie and fans of slasher movies have definitely sat through worse films to get to less inspired carnage than what is presented here. For a slasher movie, especially considering how far slashers devolved, Halloween Kills ain’t half bad. Instead, however, it becomes a question of the purpose of the slasher movie in these days of elevated horror and real world terror.
To his credit, Green’s attempts at adding to the thematic weight of the slasher genre does reflect an ability to try and reflect modern fears. It’s difficult not to notice real world parallels of a charismatic leader directing citizens to carnage with a few well placed buzz phrases. And yet it’s still just jump scares and gore. And the cold hard truth is that Michael Myers just isn’t as scary as he used to be. The kills themselves hold little beyond shock, with so few of the murders having anything to do with the narrative or its characters. They exist simply as audience service, simply because it’s expected.
Creative as they might be with that approach, it’s difficult to care. The original Halloween was frightening not because of the carnage but because we cared about Laurie. Here it’s murder for murder’s sake, which can be fun for fans of horror but doesn’t necessarily lend itself to anything memorable.
Which, ultimately, is the problem with Halloween Kills, Halloween 2018, and the slasher in general these days. They exist simply because studios know they can make money off of them, and nobody has really bothered trying to adjust the formula. Beneath Green’s creative construction is a monster doing exactly what we’ve seen him do countless times before. I suppose there’s a kind of comfort in that but is that really what horror should be striving to provide? I’d argue no. And yet this is a film that knows exactly where the sweet spots of the genre lay, and it never manages to be anything beyond terribly familiar. Which, for all the veneer of shiny and new, is still just a lazy repackaging of ideas that, on balance, just aren’t as scary as they used to be.
Halloween Kills is now playing in theaters and is available to stream on Peacock.
