So I'll give you all a moment to recover from that shock before I go on.
You're good? Good.
But yes, I'm a big fan of the Halloween franchise. While a lot of people have a greater fondness of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchise, and while I do like those franchises (I've highlighted them on this blog, too, after all), Halloween has always held a special place in my heart. It was my first real horror franchise, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't try to defend even some of the bad ones to some extent.
Not the Rob Zombie ones, though.
I will never defend those. Ever.
Spoilers follow on from this point. If you haven't watched the trailer yet, I have provided it up above.
But with the fortieth anniversary of the original film on the horizon and the thirtieth having been wedged firmly between a bad remake and the bad sequel to the bad remake with absolutely no fanfare, it's finally time for Michael Myers to grace the silver screen once again! And how you might ask?
Well, that's easy. Does it follow the continuity of films 4, 5, and 6 to finally give us an explanation and perhaps a conclusion to the Cult of the Thorn saga? Nope.
Does it follow the continuity of H20 and Resurrection where it follows on from Laurie Strode's faking of her death at the end of Halloween II, and might provide a means to close up the story of her son John with a returning Josh Hartnett? Nope.
Well, then. Clearly they are going to just go on from the continuity so well-established by Halloween and Halloween II, right? After all, all the sequels have acknowledged that those two films happened across both of the continuities set by the original film.
NOPE!
No, for the first time since the production of Halloween II in 1981...a sequel is only acknowledging the first movie as having happened. This changes a lot more than you think, particularly Laurie and Michael being brother and sister, which very much changes the dynamic between the two of them...or does it?
While we don't have the poetic beauty that H20 was trying to communicate with how Michael became such a monster in Laurie's mind and how their familial connection interwove their destinies together...we might have something just as powerful: victims of happenstance. If you take only the first film into account, then Laurie Strode survived a horrific night where three of her friends were brutally murdered that would be enough to make anyone...a little crazy, don't you think?
Picture it! Smith's Grove (we presume) in 2018. A man and a woman recap the first movie - complete with Loomis' multiple shots to subdue Michael at the end of the first Halloween. They add on that he has spent the last forty years in captivity. Going out into what looks like a prisoner yard, the man pulls out a familiar white William Shatner mask. The other patients in the yard begin to react in a very manic manner, and dogs bark.
I'm only recapping the entire scene because it's absolutely chilling and well done. It almost effectively unpersons Michael, making him more of a creature that brings madness along with the destruction in his wake. Very Lovecraftian. Helped also by how Michael does not turn around to face the camera at any point, keeping his face hidden to keep up the feeling of "The Shape" being a thing more than a human being...just as Doctor Loomis once described him on that Halloween night forty years ago.
Laurie Strode, meanwhile, still has that scar from the attack on her life forty years ago and she's been - in her own words - waiting forty years for the chance to kill Michael Myers herself. Quite a different portrayal than how she appeared in H20, where she was simply trying to hide from Michael and succeeded for the better part of twenty years. No, this Laurie is going full on fighter, training with guns against mannequin to hone herself for the battle to come.
She's basically become Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.
Still, it honestly works in my mind. Jamie Lee Curtis is absolutely awesome as Laurie Strode in pretty much any capacity and this feels like a natural progression of the character. PTSD can manifest in many different ways, and if Laurie never did fully recover from that tragic experience, I'd say that how she appears here is very believable. A bit of a polar opposite from H20, but not a bad change. After all, Sarah Connor was pretty awesome in T2.
But the rest of the trailer plays out the same, as I'm sure you saw above. We have quite a bit of atmosphere and John Carpenter's phenomenal scoring work that has been iconic in so many of his movies - and yes, the man himself is back as an Executive Producer as well as a composer for the film. Nice to see him back in and not just to collect a paycheck.
With this in place, I can honestly say I'm feeling very positive about the movie overall. Trailers can be misleading, certainly, but there's nothing in this one that makes me raise an eyebrow or worry about a certain aspect. It all looks really, really good. And, like I said, seems to be focusing more on making the unstoppable force of nature - of pure evil - that he was in the original films...rather than just simply being a killer who can never really die.
Which was apparently the intention of writers Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, and writer-director David Gordon Green intended.
So, yes. I'm looking forward to this one. It looks more like it's going back to the roots of the original film and if that's not something we need in this day and age of reboots and remakes, then I don't know what is.
Halloween is due to be released in theaters from Blumhouse Productions, Miramax, Trancas International Films, and Universal Pictures on October 19, 2018.
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