“Halloween” (2018) is the official sequel to the original “Halloween” film from 1978. Unsurprisingly, the film takes place 40 years after the original film, and it follows a paranoid Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she anticipates, once again, facing off against a newly escaped Michael Myers (Nick Castle). The movie also introduces some new characters who are completely forgettable and not interesting at all (except for one insanely beautiful babysitter played by Virginia Gardner). The movie is pretty fun with a decent amount of suspense and genuine scares, but also a decent number of lazy jump scares too.
As it says in the tagline for this article, “Halloween” (2018) is the official sequel to the 1978 slasher movie, which was also called “Halloween.” This means that all of those terrible sequels that came afterwards are no longer canon in the “Halloween” cinematic universe. I have never seen any of the “Halloween” sequels, but I am well aware that they are all supposed to be horrible. Therefore, I think it was creatively beneficial to make this movie the direct and official sequel to the original “Halloween.” Not only does it make for a more fitting sequel to the original movie, but it also doesn’t have to burden itself with having to acknowledge and mention all of the other times that Myers escaped and terrorized people. In fact, within the context of this movie, the fact that Myers had only killed five people, albeit very brutally, makes him out to be an even more terrifying character. It doesn’t just feel like another “here we go again” scenario. You can feel the fear in the voices of those who know about his story, especially that of Curtis, whose acting is impeccable.
The movie starts out by dropping information about what happened in the original “Halloween” film to inform audience members who may not have seen the original one and to set up the atmosphere of the film. This dialogue felt a little forced and out of place, but ultimately, it didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the movie.
“Halloween” is fairly cheesy and predictable at times, yet this doesn’t get in the way of it being a likeable movie. While I doubt this was intentional, it contains a lot of the bad teenage acting that was in the original movie, but that almost makes it feel authentic in a retro sort of way. The movie almost felt like it was self aware of its origins, and it played on that.
The one thing that anyone hopes to see in a slasher movie are some great deaths, and “Halloween” didn’t disappoint. It didn’t go for the cliche gruesome deaths that aren’t so much scary as they are gross to see. Instead, a decent number of the deaths in this movie actually occur off screen, which I found to be scarier than actually showing them happening.
Other than Myers, Strode and the police chief of Haddonfield, all of the characters in “Halloween” are pretty forgettable and are really only there to serve a singular purpose, which is usually to be killed by Myers. There is a new psychologist character who says he was a pupil of Samuel Loomis (Myer’s psychiatrist from the first movie), and his purpose is to basically be the new Loomis. This character had a purpose early on in the movie, but near the end, the film does something really stupid with him that almost ruined the movie for me.
A great deal of the film focuses on Strode’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). She’s only there so teenagers can relate to her and have someone their own age for whom they can cheer; she’s uninteresting, stereotypical and forgettable. While I understand that another reason that she’s in the movie is for Myers to kill her teenage friends, I never felt like she herself was in any real danger, largely due to the fact that the screenwriters are going to want to keep her around for potential sequels.
A huge part of this movie that I did not anticipate was the humor. There were a ton of jokes in here, and unlike “The Last Jedi,” they weren’t out of place and were actually funny! There is one exchange between a babysitter and the kid she’s babysitting that was genuinely funny and could have been in a comedy film. Other than that, a couple of the deaths were pretty outlandish and therefore humorous as well. It was almost like the movie became a parody of itself while also giving the audience a “wink wink.”
“Halloween” explores a couple themes, but they were not presented so obviously that they were immediately recognizable. I doubt that anyone who is going to see “Halloween” is going to look for them either. This is not a movie to find some sort of profound intellectual meaning within the story. It is a movie that you should see if you are in the mood to be scared and turn your brain off for a couple of hours.
“Halloween” pales in comparison to the genuine terror of the original, but as a horror movie sequel it’s a lot of fun! If you’re a fan of the “Halloween” franchise or slasher movies in general, I recommend seeing “Halloween.” You’re in a for a movie that takes itself seriously, but also has a bit of fun with the material that it’s handling. While it was stupid at times, ultimately it’s a good movie for the Halloween season . 3/5