Revisiting David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy
A rewatch reveals that they’re somehow both better & worse the second time around.
So Halloween Ends came out, and it was met with the usual measured response one can expect from Horror Twitter. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a movie that is so bad it’s like pissing on John Carpenter’s grave before he’s even dead, or a masterpiece that only very smart people who enjoy movies on a higher level will understand. It is, of course, neither of those things. It’s a competently made movie, and features a fully committed performance from Jamie Lee Curtis that ensures her presence will be missed in the inevitable franchise reboot five years from now (unless she changes her mind and makes a movie in which Michael Myers stalks Laurie Strode in a senior living community). It is, however, a baffling and frustrating movie, filled to bursting with ideas that could be interesting, if they were given more than a cursory attempt at developing.
The Halloween franchise as a whole has a long and rich history of offering up interesting ideas, and then proceeding to do nothing with them. It started with its very first sequel, which has a meant to be meaningful moment in which Dr. Loomis discovers that Michael Myers has written the word “Samhain1” on a chalkboard. I say “meant to be,” because it seems like it should be important to the plot, and then nothing more is said about it. There are those who would love to tell you it foreshadows Halloween: the Curse of Michael Myers, made fourteen years later, except that would suggest that this brief scene somehow carried over even after the franchise changed hands four times.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers suggests that Michael Myers’ young niece, Jamie, has inherited his taste for killing, and then in the very next movie, it’s dropped completely. An entirely separate article could be (and has been) written about how pulled out of someone’s ass the plot of The Curse of Michael Myers is. The redundantly titled Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, vaguely hints that there’s some significance to the number 17. Halloween: Resurrection reveals that the Myers house has an intricate series of tunnels and dungeons underneath it, but never mentions who built it, or how long it’s been there. The irony is that, other than the original and Season of the Witch, the only movies in the franchise that brought an idea fully to fruition was Rob Zombie’s two film run, which, like them or not, set out to tell a story both about how murderers aren’t born, they’re made, and the long-term effects of trauma, and did just that. You may not like how he did it, but he had a specific goal in mind, and followed through on it.
David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s stab at it has enough ideas to make six movies instead of just three. It’s just an endlessly unfurling scroll of ideas, positing at various times that Laurie’s PTSD make her almost (if not just) as dangerous as Michael, that Michael, like a Highlander, grows more powerful with every kill, that evil is transferable from one person to another, and that Haddonfield is a sort of Derry of the Midwest, and Michael is merely a symptom of it. None of these ideas are bad, and they all could have worked on an individual level, if they were given any time to cook. Instead, Green and McBride rated them on a scale of “great” to “great,” and decided they were all worth forcing into the plot like someone stuffing too many clothes into a suitcase. In the end, there’s simply not enough room (or genuine interest, it seems) to develop any of them, and it results in a muddled, disjointed mess, with jokes where they don’t belong, and a curiously self-serious conclusion.
For Kill by Kill’s Patreon, we’ve spent the past year doing commentary tracks for the Halloween franchise, and overall my opinion of it hasn’t changed much. The original is still a masterpiece, Season of the Witch is delightfully weird, and the rest of the movies range from “okay” to “unwatchable.” The Rob Zombie run was a first time watch for me, and while I didn’t care for the first one, I was surprised to find that the second, while gruesome, was empathetic, and seemed to truly “get” the anger and emotional instability trauma survivors experience. The Green-McBride run was somehow both better, and worse upon a second watch, and, if nothing else, more perplexing, because the seeds for good movies are present, but buried under a refusal to rein in one’s “genius.”
Of the three, Halloween 2018 remains the strongest, mostly because Green and McBride don’t fuck with the formula too much. The only new element is Laurie’s trauma driving a wedge between her and her family, and the fierceness in which she approaches protecting herself and those she loves. The best scene doesn’t involve anyone getting a knife driven into their skull, but a brief moment in which a pair of smug, condescending podcasters try to corner Laurie into speaking about her tragic personal life, and she gives them the business. Yes, the “Dr. Sartain” twist is really dumb (and is probably meant to hint at the fact that Michael’s brand of “evil” is contagious, which makes it dumber), and yes, the script has a huge tone issue, with jarring, clumsy shifts between comedy and horror sometimes within the space of just one or two lines of dialogue. But there’s a clear goal in mind, and they more or less accomplish it, with a little modern spit and polish.
Released two years later, Halloween Kills made it apparent that Green and McBride were just sort of winging it with each new script. Now, Laurie is barely a supporting character, spending virtually all of her limited screen time wandering grim-faced around a hospital. This is the first time the idea that there’s something wrong with the entire town of Haddonfield is floated, which would have been a great take on the lore of Halloween, had it been introduced in the 2018 film, and illustrated in any way other than the town’s middle school age children being obnoxious, bullying assholes.
A simple change – having the adults of the town turn on each other rather than engage in that truly absurd hospital riot – could have potentially saved Kills, but instead, upon a second watch, the holes in that particular twist are even bigger, and the tonal shifts are even more jarring. It’s not scary, but it’s also not a fun watch either. The kills are drawn out and extra sadistic, in a way that feels unearned – it’s unclear whether you’re supposed to be horrified when someone is murdered for their hubris in trying to stop Michael Myers, or amused, and that’s a serious problem.
Upon a second viewing of Halloween Ends (albeit not even three weeks after the first time I saw it), I can say this: at least the tonal shift problem has been solved. It’s serious to the point of dour, and the parts that might possibly be intended as comic relief – the high school band geek bullies and Corey’s horrible, Mrs. Bates-like mother – are too unpleasant to be funny. Now, Green and McBride are picking up the “the whole town is cursed” ball and running with it, suggesting that everyone in Haddonfield has been touched in some way by the evil of Michael Myers. But, again, this is exhibited mostly in shitty kids, and the fact that many of the townspeople decided, at some point during the past three years since the earlier films took place, that Laurie is somehow responsible for what happened. Twice she is accused of “teasing” Michael Myers, a baffling claim that is never explained, or resolved. Laurie, who not too long ago would just as soon greet someone at her doorstep with a loaded shotgun in their face, meekly accepts this abuse, as if it’s valid and justifiable.
There’s also, of course, the more controversial decision of adding Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), an entirely new character, as a protagonist in the last film of a trilogy. Well, really he turns out to be an antagonist, but because the bulk of the film’s overlong runtime is devoted to him, he’s the protagonist as well. Corey starts out as another town pariah along with Laurie (instead of a babysitter who survives an attempted murder, he’s a babysitter who accidentally kills his charge), then becomes an instant love interest for Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson, then is the heir to Michael’s evil nature, which, we now learn, can be passed onto someone else simply by grabbing them and looking meaningfully into their eyes. Then, it switches from a Halloween movie into Natural Born Killers, but it’s not Allyson who’s the Mallory to Corey’s Mickey Knox, but Michael, as he’s alternately under Corey’s control and working as his partner in mayhem.
Again, this isn’t a situation like Halloweens 4 and 5, which were essentially the same movie, or Resurrection, which wants to be less a Michael Myers movie and more another tiresome take on the found footage genre. Each of Green and McBride’s movies want very much to say something, but do it with so little finesse that it’s impossible to hear it. As with the “the whole town is bad” angle, an easy fix for the Corey problem would have been to introduce him in the original 2018 movie. He could have just been a minor character at that point, without dropping him into the proceedings three movies in like an alien falling out of a spaceship. That’s all it would have taken to diminish the amount of people who greeted Corey’s introduction with “Who the fuck is this guy?” and their dislike of how much of the movie is devoted to him and his weird symbiotic relationship with Michael Myers, while Laurie is given little else to do but stand by with a worried frown on her face.
Now, I get that all of this is intended as an homage to Season of the Witch, the third movie in the original franchise. Both movies take an abrupt turn, and in no way resemble their predecessors, except for taking place on and around Halloween. Except Halloween Kills does, ultimately, because Michael Myers, tired of some 120 pound weenie ordering him around, takes back control of the situation and kills Corey, returning the film at the last ten minutes to the traditional Michael-Laurie showdown, which was what both the audience expected to see, and what the trailers promoted. So it all feels like both a waste of the audience’s time, and yet another idea that Green and McBride kicked around and decided to go with without seeing how it would play out.
On the upside, the first time around I missed the homages to Christine (perhaps John Carpenter’s most underrated film), and as often as that can feel forced and precious, it works pretty well here. At the risk of repeating myself, if the idea that Haddonfield has gone sour from its shared trauma, not to mention that Evil can be passed around (meaning that it can never truly die, not tonight or any other night), had been introduced sooner, and developed beyond anything but the most surface amount (Ends handles Allyson, a character you’d originally think was going to end up the new Final Girl, so poorly it’s not even worth talking about), the trilogy would not only feel more cohesive, but could have been second to the original in quality. All three movies look good. The actors are committed (whatever problems Corey’s journey from sad boy to scary boy has, Campbell’s performance isn’t one of them). Clearly, Green and McBride went into all three movies intending to put their own unique stamp on them.
Where they fail is in execution, dropping too many plot crumbs without any follow through, and leaving too many characters flailing in the background with nothing to do (the promises that Kyle Richards would have more to do in Ends than she did in Kills were evidently forgotten as soon as filming began). While Halloween Kills, which, let me remind you, features a woman showing up for a lynch mob bearing a clothes iron, remains the worst of the three, Ends is far more disappointing. It’s a self-important exercise in failed potential, that wants to say a lot about the nature of evil, and says it in the emptiest way possible.
It wasn’t until Season of the Witch that we learned how “Samhain” is actually pronounced.