Less Halloween Than The Last

Growing up in South Africa and being immersed in film from an early age, I’ve always harboured a voyeuristic envy for that bastion of idiosyncratic American holidays: Halloween.  In my experience, local attempts to emulate this peculiar cultural phenomenon have resulted in rather depressing Trick-or-Treat facsimiles,only making us yearn more fervently for the ghost and goblin infestations of quaint suburban America.  The idea of embracing the macabre so wholesomely always struck me as a particularly apt manifestation of Americana.  And it was John Carpenter’s 1978 horror opus Halloween that always stood as the totemic evocation of the holiday’s duelling drives: terror and fun. 

            The granddaddy of the slasher genre has got to be Alfred Hitchcock.  His 1927 silent feature The Lodger laid bare his obsession with the darker recesses of the human mind.  That fixation was immortalised in the 1960 classic Psycho, which proved that audiences were more than willing to get their kicks through calculated slaughter: Schadenfreude had become big business.  But it was John Carpenter who organized the tropes of the genre for modern filmmakers to emulate.  The killer was a tabula rasa of unadulterated evil, never exceeding a steady neutral in the single-minded pursuit of his victims.  Sexual promiscuity was taboo in a world that abided by puritanical undertows and women in the genre were subsequently consigned to performing the dual role of perpetual victim and avenging heroine.  Feminist critiques rightfully point to the misogynistic impulses that have come to define the genre; though those arguments are oft complicated by women being the eventual conquerors of the evil threat (Linda Williams’s pioneering work on the ‘Final Girl’ syndrome is a useful starting point for examining the paradoxes of female representation in the horror genre).     

Carpenter’s genius was in identifying Halloween as the one day of the year where absolute anonymity was actively encouraged.  Michael Myers stalked the streets like a shark in a feeding frenzy, followed hypnotically by Carpenter’s omniscient camera.  His own percussive score was perfectly mimetic of Michael’s robotic modus operandi.  Like his contemporary Brian de Palma, Carpenter’s roving camera and POV bloodletting elevated the material from b-movie hokum to auterist savagery.  Jamie Lee Curtis’ turn as Laurie Stroud captured the minds of audiences who could easily identify with her inherent strength.  So when I heard that David Gordon Green had signed up to do a straight sequel to Carpenter’s classic, I was in.  Better to forget the swathe of inferior sequels and reboots: Rob Zombie’s sledgehammer approach to understanding the mythic undercurrents of Michael Myers was akin to watching Michael Bay try his hand at a Jane Austen adaptation.

            It is with a heavy heart that I have to report that Halloween’s latest incarnation is a joyless bastardization of Carpenter’s classic.  David Gordon Green’s magnificent dissection of rural ennui, George Washington, hinted at a voice that could channel all the complexities and contradictions of a community.  Joe played out as a post-modern fable, detailing the ghosts that haunt the disenfranchised American working class.  Yet Gordon Green fails miserably at imbuing the fictional city of Haddonfield with one iota of personality.  In fact, the movie feels less Halloween and more Prom Night, with a hopelessly misjudged teenage love angle that jars painfully with film’s more sinister motifs. 

            The most frustrating thing is that there are about ten minutes of great moviemaking moored in this self-referential rehashing of Halloween’s past.  A scene involving a babysitter and her wisecracking young charge sparkles with the spontaneity and effervescence that made George Washington so memorable.  There is also one brilliant single-take that captures Myers’s predatory prowling in shocking fluidity as he moves between houses with a dispassionate purpose that seems chillingly topical in this global climate of rampant domestic terrorism.  But these segues are cruelly abandoned in favour of the mythical Stroud-Myers celebrity death-match (yawn).  This film not only implores us to discount the events of Halloween H20, it wants us to believe that movie never existed.

            The film is dramatically inert and suffers from a lack of Carpenter’s most treasured gift: suspense.  In that sense, David Gordon Green makes for a slightly off-kilter choice.  The likes of Jeremy Saulnier and Sean Byrne have displayed mastery in slowly cranking that organ grinder of suspense.  Byrne’s handling of incipient domestic terror in The Devil’s Candy is textbook slow-burn Carpenter.  Perhaps more damning is Danny McBride’s involvement as co-writer and executive producer.  I’ve always found his blunderbuss approach to comedy somewhat nauseating and his influence is painfully obvious here.  The banal comedy renders any latent suspense impotent. The scene with two cops debating the relative machismo of their snack options does not belong in this film; it really doesn’t belong in any film. 

            Of course, Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her star-making role as Laurie Stroud.  Stroud is now a mother and grandmother – a miracle when you consider the psychological state she is in 40 years later – and has committed herself to a hermetic, off-the-grid existence, wholly devoted to the future destruction of Michael Myers.  Here is the rub: David Gordon Green and his co-writers have clearly been caught up in the Me-Too zeitgeist.  Men are enemy number one in this film.  Laurie’s daughter is married to a painfully emasculated jack-ass whose eventual death barely registers a 0.2 on his family’s emotional Richter scale.  The male heartthrob during the 90210 portion of the film turns out to be a philandering weakling, while the comic relief best friend ultimately gives in to his baser male instincts and clumsily attempts to seduce Laurie’s emotionally vulnerable granddaughter.   

            Let’s not forget ‘New Loomis’ (in perhaps the film’s most pointless plot development) who turns out to be facilitating Myers’s wanton carnage.  And then there’s the big man himself: Michael Myers.  He’s the living embodiment of toxic misogyny, propelled forward by forces beyond comprehension and armed with his trustee phallic substitute – the good old kitchen knife.  So there’s clearly a meta-narrative at work here that is perhaps seeking to provide a historical corrective to the slasher genre’s admittedly primitive gender politics.  But by making Laurie Stroud a hysterical slave to her trauma, the filmmakers have actually turned her into the eternal victim.  She has allowed her existence to be fully defined by a psychopathic man, allowing that trauma to permeate and destroy her family life.  A shot from the perspective of Myers towards the end of the film tells us that it is Laurie Stroud who has become the omnipotent, hulking mass, lurking in the shadows with bloodlust on her mind. 

            This film’s self-parodic pandering towards earlier Halloween moments seems reductive in an age of horror film-making defined by Jordan Peele’s socially conscious terror and Ari Aster’s intelligent psychodramas.  Even the slasher film has moved on to pastures new.  Just look at the way that It Follows ingeniously reworked the promiscuity principle of slasher lore, with the sexual act itself transformed into a confluence of self-preservation and murder.  High Tension entered the psycho-sphere, with a woman’s repressed lesbian desire (perhaps problematically) leading to the mental projection of a hyper-macho boogeyman.  You’re Next was a savage indictment of the corrosive power of greed featuring a Ripley-style heroine for the ages.  Halloween is an empty piece of fan worship made by people lacking the stomach and wit to elevate this nasty business.  It also manages to rip the Halloween out of Halloween, which is perhaps even more tragic than its narrative missteps and tonal dissonance.  Let’s just pray that Tyler Perry isn’t tasked with a revisionist Hellraiser anytime soon.  Madea’s Cenobite Reunion, anyone?