The Halloween Films Ranked: #4 ‘Halloween Kills’ (2018)

#4 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

I’ve seen this once before, a couple of years ago, right after its release. I was somewhat mixed on the film, but I just did not understand the vitriol some were throwing at it. Yeah, the repetitions of “Evil Dies Tonight” got old and there was some obviously, hit you over the head moralizing, but I didn’t hate it. It was obvious that David Gordon Green was trying to do something about trauma infecting a community, and I appreciated that. Upon this revisit, though, I’m even more on board with it. I think this film has been deeply misunderstood. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. It’s got weird moments and a subplot that just feels like more of a distraction than a contribution, but I think the central ideas work quite well.

Immediately following the events of the previous film, we pick up with Cameron (Dylan Arnold) finding sheriff’s deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) on the ground, barely alive after he had been stabbed in the neck. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) speed towards the hospital. Meanwhile, Michael Myers escapes from his hellfire to kill a dozen first responders and start his march back to somewhere. Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) leads a toast to the dead from 40 years ago in a bar (definitely bringing the mood down), and this is where the film introduces its central idea.

The idea is that trauma grows if you let it. There’s a lot going on in this film, but what it ultimately comes down to is that the trauma that these people let fester ends up strengthening Michael Myers. Why? Because Michael Myers is not a man. Michael Myers is fear personified. The more attention he gets, the more powerful he grows. Now, that is something interesting, a twist on the whole Myers mythos that no sequel has touched on. What they have touched on is a series of theories about why Myers kills, and the film makes its dismissal of all of that rather explicit, especially with Laurie insisting it’s all about her while convalescing next to Frank who tells her that it’s not about her at all.

So, if it’s not about Laurie, who is it about? Well, Laurie isn’t the only Michael Myers victim. That’s the point of bringing up as many of the characters from the first film as possible. Tommy, Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), Lindsey (Kyle Richards), and Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) all had encounters with the boogeyman, and they carry those scars. And then Tommy spreads it. He forces it upon the rest of the town, a situation made all the worse by the actual reappearance of Michael Myers, driving everyone into a frenzy.

And so, we get people getting in cars, arming up, and looking to take out Michael because the law has failed. Is this a celebration of mob justice? Not that I’d mind it entirely, but it’s not. Is it an admonition against mob justice? Yes, but within the context of the actual system of legal force having already failed. The evil isn’t normal. It’s manifest of fear. What’s the solution? What can kill Michael Myers? The scary answer? Nothing. Nothing can kill him. Myers is a natural force.

How does that manifest dramatically? Well, mostly with Michael cutting his way through people in tensely built sequences. Green has this desire to make the victims in these movies individuals with memorable moments, so when he introduces an older couple who are going to get murdered in a couple of minutes, he gives them a minute to play with a drone and talk about how Cheese-Its go great with a nice wine. The moment ends up sticking out because it’s this weirdly comic moment where we introduce two characters right before they get fluorescent tubes shoved into their throats, so I end up of two minds about stuff like this. I like that Green is providing the care for characters to feel unique and, to some degree, real or, at least, not just meat for a knife. However, they really do stick out.

The real center of that kind of thing is Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), a couple who live in the old Myers house. Myers never gets a motive beyond, “kill and return home” (which I am very fine with, it doesn’t explain anything). And so, it’s a pathway there while the town kind of flails about trying to figure things out. The two are, of course, distinctive from the rest, given time to establish themselves as characters, and they’re also destined for death. I appreciate these characters more than the old couple because they are in the film for longer, but they never connect with anyone else beyond some kids briefly. It feels like they should be more tragic than comic.

The one subplot that really just doesn’t work is the other escaped mental patient. I get it. I think it works thematically (the people’s rage builds and builds until it will lash out at whatever), but it’s placed at a weird spot in the film (essentially at the start of the third act which then moves on to smaller scale action), no one really seems to learn anything from it. Not that I demand arcs in this stuff, but the central characters involved in the riot just move on to do some more violence minutes later. It’s also a lot of business in an overstuffed movie, and it seems to be more of a side-point than feeding the central one about fear, though they’re obviously related.

So, the film definitely has ideas. I think they’re fairly well presented, but overstuffing everything didn’t help matters. Where’s the story though? It’s actually a story of chaos, of not knowing where to go or what to do to stay safe. It’s about a community reacting to tragedy in a variety of ways, and not being able to actually win. That gets dispersed across a lot of characters (Laurie convalescing in the hospital, Frank holding onto his guilt from 40 years earlier, Tommy trying to be protective in a way that he hadn’t been able to as a child, Allyson acting like she’s going to end this family curse), and that introduces a lot of little subplots (Cameron starts the film on the outs with Allyson, but it just gets forgotten rather than addressed).

So, it’s something of a mess, but I find this throughline in the film that I latch onto pretty hard. It’s an intelligent way to address the idea of Michael Myers, expand it while keeping it within the bounds of what Green and co had reclaimed in their remake, while Green fills it with…unique characters. Not everything works, and the whole “Evil dies tonight,” stuff ends up a distraction and far less of an asset (justifying the memefication of the film a bit). However, Green was approaching these films not as just slashers but as explorations of fear. I think it actually ends up working, even if the final package is a bit jankier than it should be.

Originally published here