Saturday Evening Movie Thread [10/17/2024]

Halloween

The Halloween franchise is a mess, a complete and total mess. It resets to one degree or another five separate times. It has a serious identity crisis from almost the beginning. It doesn't know what to do with its main draw, its central monster. Out of the three major slasher franchises of the 80s, it's the least cohesive and, arguably, the worst through that heyday. For all of the faults of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and their sequels, they at least understood what they were at a level that Halloween never did.

It started the best of them, though. John Carpenter's original is a wonderful example of Hitchcockian suspense updated to the late 70s milieu without feeling like an over-the-top homage like was de Palma's wont (not that I dislike de Palma's 70s output, or anything). Carpenter had a sense of cinematic craft that people like Steve Miner and Wes Craven were never able to get close to replicating. However, what Halloween started, it never defined, falling behind the curve when it came to the slasher genre almost immediately.

So, what to make of this franchise, run by a man who ended up having almost nothing else cinematically but this franchise, the producer Moustapha Akkad, and seemingly no idea how to run it? This franchise started by one of the premiere genre craftsmen of his time (Carpenter), given over to lesser talents for decades, resurrected in different forms over and over again, and finally given to the curious pair of an indie darling filmmaker (David Gordon Green) and comedian (Danny McBride)? Well, I see three main things that jump out at me. The first is the constant resets. The second is the dueling influences on the franchise's approach to horror. The third is the treatment of Michael Myers himself.

Continuity

The Halloween franchise could be treated as a choose your own adventure exercise. You can pick out individual entries, combine them together into your own choice of how things progress, and you wouldn't be wrong. By my count, you can easily do the franchise seven different ways.

Halloween alone. Halloween and Halloween II together. Halloween III alone. Halloween, Halloween II, and Halloween Part 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween Part 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween, Halloween II and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Halloween Resurrection. Rob Zombie's Halloween and Halloween II alone. The original Halloween and the 2018 sequel trilogy made up of Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends together.

You could probably throw in some other variations like having Halloween Resurrection follow Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, as well. That's how loose and kind of stupid trying to string all of these movies is.

For all the faults of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, one entry actually followed another. Jason is left at the bottom of Crystal Lake at the end of the sixth entry, so at the start of the seventh, he has to be dragged out of it somehow (it involves psychic powers,...it's dumb). Freddy gets fully killed in his second entry, so to bring him back, a hellhound must piss fire on his body. It's not that these moves are genius, but that there's at least some effort to have the franchises makes some kind of sense from one entry to the next. When John Carpenter insisted that III be its own, independent entry about Halloween masks being the plot of Celtic gods, or something (honestly, it's a creepy thing and works decently), the franchise broke. When Akkad pushed the franchise back to Michael Myers and his killings with the fourth entry, he lost the plot almost immediately, relying entirely on a drunken idea from Carpenter and Debra Hill in the second entry of Myers and Laurie Strode being siblings to drive everything afterwards, following in the tradition of Friday the 13th of finding increasingly stupid reasons to bring the guy back (it works best with a wink and a nod like in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives).

But, the specific rabbit hole that Akkad and his writers went down came to a dead end with the cult in the sixth entry, forcing a complete reset to bring back Jamie Lee Curtis who hadn't been in one of these since the second entry for the seventh, H20 that cast aside everything since II and even tried to bring back Carpenter (he demanded too much money because of his perception that he'd been underpaid since the first film's surprise success, so he was replaced by Steve Miner, the director of the first Friday the 13th). This lasted for two films, through Resurrection until the death of Akkad at the hands of terrorists in Jordan when his son, Malek, worked with the Weinsteins at Miramax to bring on Rob Zombie for his pair of films, a reboot and its sequel that stand completely apart from everything that came before.

The franchise being too valuable to languish forever, the rights eventually passed to Jason Blum of Blumhouse where he hired David Gordon Green and Danny McBride to make their trilogy that cast off everything since the very first entry, making sequels to that specifically.

What is this franchise? It's a mess, that's what it is.

Influence


The first American slasher is usually regarded as either Black Christmas or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 with roots dating back to Psycho in 1960, but if there's a singular influence on the genre as a whole, it would be Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood from 1971. Where Psycho broke through the Hays Office's strictures and showed America a killer with a knife as the primary character in a film, it was Bava's tale of a group of teenagers showing up to an Italian lake to have a fun weekend, getting murdered by a masked villain, and all of it being for esoteric land-related reasons that obviously spawned the conventions that defined the slasher genre through the 80s.

Halloween ended up caught in between that major driver of the genre and its own origins. Carpenter's first film was very much in the tradition of Hitchcock and suspense. It's a slow, steady film where the first real kill doesn't happen until about an hour in, more about building this sense of unease over the bulk of its runtime than delivering exploitation-laden thrills. However, that was not to last because the derivative (admittedly so from the film's producer, Sean Cunningham) Friday the 13th went in that Bava direction immediately. Yes, it replicates the idea of teenagers dying at the hands of a masked (well, sort of, hidden in the first one is closer to the truth) killer in a film with a named day of the year, but it's about teenagers at a lake environment, the kills happen much more frequently and earlier, and there's a hidden motive from the killer (not about land, though). The impetus for the film was Halloween, but the inspiration was all A Bay of Blood.

And in between the release of the first Halloween and the second, Friday the 13th released...as well as Friday the 13th Part 2. The genre that Halloween was never really part of but became entrapped in had moved beyond Hitchcockian suspense and into Bava-esque exploitation. This manifested during the production of Halloween II with Carpenter, as writer, wanting to push the film in the Bava direction to keep up with trends while the director, Rick Rosenthal, wanted to keep with Carpenter's original in terms of suspense. Carpenter even directed some reshoots to push the film more in the Friday the 13th direction.

The franchise had already lost its identity, falling between influences and never really delivering on either (II has its fans, and I'm not here to slag on it, but it is kind of a hodgepodge of approaches). The only time it really went back to trying to be like Carpenter originally tried was in H20: Twenty Years Later and Rob Zombie's first reboot entry. Outside of that, the franchise feels like a Friday the 13th imitation, which is ironic since Halloween predates it.

The newest trilogy, though, represents a synthesis of a sorts. Returning to the original while discarding all of the sequels, David Gordon Green leans more heavily towards suspense than most of the sequels, but intermittently. Kills is more outrageous, especially with its opening of fire and water, and leans more heavily into the Bava influences that dominated the franchise for so long. Ends, though, is something in between. More of a character piece for a very long stretch of its running time, it does end up delivering outrageous kills (including a welder in someone's mouth), balancing the tension of a character piece watching a young man go bad with the kind of sensationalism that most fans want from the franchise (most fans rejected it as not really a Halloween movie at all).

Michael Myers


One of the best things about John Carpenter's original film is Michael Myers himself. As the character played by Donald Pleasance, Dr. Sam Loomis, says "I met him, 15 years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this... six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and... the blackest eyes - the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil."

There's nothing in there about wanting to get out to kill his unknown sister because of family, or something. It's just that Myers, listed as The Shape in the film's credits, is pure evil in human form. There's nothing else to him other than that he houses evil.

Well, what do you do with that in a follow up? Why does he come back? Why does he come back to attack the final girl in the previous film, Laurie, once more? Well, Carpenter and Hill, writing the script while getting drunk every night, decided on the familial connection because they couldn't come up with anything else, and I think it's been a massive mistake ever since.

Michael as The Shape, a vessel for evil, is scary and even interesting. He's not human. He's bigger than that. He's harder to understand. Michael out to kill his relatives (and never really keeping to it, especially in Revenge when he goes after a bunch of random teenagers throughout the bulk of the film, ignoring his niece for very long stretches) is closer to human as a motive. In fact, it's a motive. He's no longer just evil walking the streets of small-town USA, he's a guy with a specific grudge that thinly carries through most of the sequels. It makes him smaller and less interesting, forcing the need to fill out the films' running times with other nonsense like a cult. It was generally a mistake, I think. Freddy Krueger had a motive, but he also had personality. Jason had motive, but he was blunt and stupid. Myers was something else, and Akkad and Carpenter made him less.

And this is where David Gordon Green and Danny McBride really broke with the previous entries. I don't think they hated everything since the first film (the entry on influences should have made that clear), but it's obvious that they felt that motiveless Myers gave them something more interesting to do that to have another story of Myers pursuing Laurie because they're family. Instead, they went back to Myers being a random killing machine and vehicle of evil, finding ways to evolve that over their trilogy from mostly a repeat of the idea in the first, to the idea of trauma from that evil metastasizing across a community to create more damage and even strengthen the evil itself in Kills, to the Shape changing form in Ends. It's what you'd kind of expect from handing a slasher franchise off to the guy who made Undertow and Your Highness. Both more serious and sillier at the same time.

The Future


I'm sure the franchise will continue in some form at some point. Probably a complete reboot (...again) since Jamie Lee Curtis isn't going to be in another one of these, but what direction will it go? Have we reached the end of the gritty reboot? Will it be a television series on streaming? Will it go full gross out like the Terrifier franchise? No idea, but we will be getting a fourteenth entry at some point. These films are too cheap to make, too well known, and make too much money relative to their budgets to not be utilized.

That being said, the incoherence of the franchise as a whole never rises to anything like a positive attribute. Too much is too miserable like the Thorne Cycle (entries four, five, and six) and the Zombie films (the second, in particular, which has more in common with Funny Games than anything else) to recommend. It's the granddaddy of the three major slasher franchises of the 80s, and yet I feel like it's the least of the three. Nightmare is the most consistent and imaginative. Friday is the most self-aware of its own shortcomings. Halloween is just too uneven and random, though I have grown to greatly enjoy the Green trilogy over the past few years. So, it seems safe to say that out of the three franchises that all got reboots after their heyday, it's Halloween that probably came off best.

The whole thing, though? A mess.
Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Smile 2

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Halloween (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's weird that something so quiet and slow continues to get so much love, especially considering how the slasher franchise world developed after it." [Personal Collection]

Halloween II (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "It's mostly boring as we watch cannon fodder plod towards death." [Library]

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Does it have its own charms within the horror genre? For sure. Is it good? I wouldn't go that far, but it's far from worthless." [Library]

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "Take a break, Michael. You need a rest." [Library]

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "However, Miner and Akkad just didn't know when to quit, and we end up with still the second best entry in the franchise so far. I mean...it's a low bar, but it did clear it." [Library]

Halloween (2018 ) (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Not everything works all the time, but it's a solid entry and probably better than the franchise ever deserved." [Personal Collection]

Halloween Kills (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, it's something of a mess, but I find this throughline in the film that I latch onto pretty hard." [Library]

Halloween Ends (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Halloween Ends is easily the best sequel since the original film, the one that does the most to actually expand on the original ideas, the one with the best handle on the kind of horror that Carpenter originally strived for, and the one with the best overall approach to its character-based storytelling." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 11/9, and I'm not quite sure what it'll be yet. I'll come up with something.