Halloween Kills is good, actually
Sorry for the double post, but I felt compelled to write about this movie
SPOILERS FOR HALLOWEEN KILLS BELOW!
One of my favorite episodes of LOST is “Exposé,” in which we meet Nikki and Paulo, two characters on the show’s periphery. The conceit of the episode is that these two characters have always been there - existing among the show’s stars - but we just never noticed them because they weren’t the focus of the story.
Except here’s the thing: to Nikki and Paulo, they always were the main characters of their story and it was Jack and Kate and Sawyer and the gang who were on the periphery. In the end, Nikki and Paulo meet undignified ends to match their relative insignificance to the story. LOST was never about them and nothing they did could change that.
HALLOWEEN KILLS is a feature-length slasher film version of “Exposé” - in which Michael Myers and Laurie Strode are the side characters and the film’s focus is put on the residents of Haddonfield, Illinois - a community that has lived under the shadow of fear for forty years. The community of Haddonfield is like so many other communities - an economically, socially, and racially diverse hodgepodge of souls who cling together by whatever tenuous bond they can grasp. But, while some communities are linked by their shared hatred of the raccoons that get into the neighborhood trash cans and other communities are forged in the fires of NextDoor app posts about kids smoking weed in the park after dark, Haddonfield shares a unique trauma - the masked boogeyman that shows up every few years and kills babysitters.
The residents of Haddonfield let this trauma define their lives and their relationships. They marinated in the trauma decade after decade, letting it seep into their very souls. And then, forty years later, the boogeyman finally returned, and the town of Haddonfield was given a chance to stand up to their trauma and face their fear.
Except here’s the thing: It was never their story. Michael Myers never had a grudge or an agenda or a reason for killing other than that is what he did. He wasn’t chasing a long-lost sister or following the direction of a cult - he was just a force of nature and the residents of Haddonfield have the same chance at stopping Michael Myers as they would forming a mob to confront a hurricane.
HALLOWEEN KILLS is a movie that has a ton of gnarly kills but the gnarliest element is just how willing it is to explore the neverending and unstoppable ripple effect of violence. It’s a nihilistic, bleak, and sad-as-shit horror film about how we are all insignificant and our death is ultimately meaningless to the larger story - and I love it! The film basks in the repercussions of violence. It’s a film in which people die in an instant - the briefest of moments and life is over - but the camera lingers on the aftermath every single time. We see shot after shot of people reacting to the discovery of their loved one’s dead body, we hear the tortured screams of people knowing the end is at hand, we even go back and see the corpses of the people who died in the last film.
HALLOWEEN KILLS was written and directed with the knowledge that there would be a sequel - a “final” HALLOWEEN film, so we have been promised - to follow. With that in mind, it’s obvious - if maybe unsatisfying for some viewers - that HALLOWEEN KILLS was made to service a larger narrative. It is a rebuttal of Laurie Strode’s whole motivation in 2018’s HALLOWEEN - in which we learn that the perky young babysitter has seemingly wasted her entire life and every relationship in service of preparing for the return of the monster who traumatized her as a teen. And then she’s proven right when Myers returns to finish the job. In HALLOWEEN (2018), it was seemingly personal but in HALLOWEEN KILLS, it’s proven - without a shadow of a doubt - that there was never anything personal. In fact, a town’s hubris results in a mob of angry bat- and iron-wielding vigilantes being torn apart by an unstoppable killing force.
I’m really excited to see where we find Laurie Strode in HALLOWEEN ENDS. Will she have learned the lesson or, with Myers’ murder of her daughter, will Laurie dig even deeper into her misguided belief that this was always about her?
We all like to think we’re the main characters of the story and that whatever happens in the world is happening to affect us and us alone. This line of thinking means that - when tested - we will prevail. But what happens when we’re not the main characters? What happens when we’re just an angry mob?
Halloween kills, that’s what happens.