Adventures in Horror Franchises, Halloween Edition

Halloween 12, a sequel to the fourth reboot of the Halloween franchise, actually called Halloween Kills, since most of the numbers have been used several times, releases (probably) on October 15, 2021. I’m fully prepared, having just wrapped up a review—out of order and over a stretch of time—of the franchise by rewatching Halloween (2018), that is to say, Halloween 11, yesterday. This last movie—rebooting the franchise again, after Rob Zombie’s two-film series in the aughts, was directed by indie-darling turned horror-remake journeyman, David Gordon Green, and co-written with his old friend, comic actor Danny McBride (and Jeff Fradley). It’s hard to know who did what in a multi-person writing collab like that, but much of the dialogue is vintage McBride-style aggressively awkward dork comedy, which is as hilarious as it is incongruous with the tone.

The movie is well-directed, though a strange fit for Green, who has always been at his best focussed on the clumsy interactions of his soulfully awkward characters. He certainly “gets” Halloween, though, and his Halloween is arguably the best one since John Carpenter’s original, from a certain point of view. That is, if you are interested in the Halloween sequels because you want to see Michael Myers kill people, it’s a fun installment.

From another point of view—that of the badfilm enthusiast panning for camp gold—Green’s reboot is deliberately, rather than accidentally, funny, somewhat miscast, and doesn’t quite follow through on its best/worst ideas. (For example, the tone of a scene in which two cops bicker hilariously about banh mi sandwiches could have been much more pronounced throughout the film. One senses the desire to do this as well as a conflicting desire to turn away from a comic posture back to slasher basics.) The campiest aspect is one of the bolder retcons in the series, which sweeps the entire franchise into the trash, declaring itself a direct sequel to the original, and the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as a Sarah-Connor-in-T2 survivalist upgrade of her chaste, conscientious babysitter from 1978.

Here is a helpful diagram from Wikipedia, by Will Locatelli, charting the Halloween franchise continuity:

By Will Locatelli - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79920884

As you can see, two reboots sprung directly from Halloween II (1981)’s storyline, the essential element of which is the revelation that Laurie Strode (Curtis) was actually Michael’s sister. (Interestingly, Zombie retained that plotline for his otherwise clean-slate reboot/remake series.) Both of these reboots on the Halloween II (1981) spur ignore Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the only Halloween movie without Michael Myers. III is also badfilm heaven, a soaringly ridiculous storyline about killer mask technology derived from supernatural Irish pseudo-mythology involving, maybe, witches? and Wall-Street-business-suit-wearing killer robots. Easily my second favorite Halloween movie; it’s a technophobic 1980s schlock classic.

At first the franchise seemed to have righted itself, with the well-regarded Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, featuring strong performances from Donald Pleasence (in his third of five outings as Dr. Loomis) and child actor Danielle Harris (who returns to the franchise as an adult, playing a different character, in Zombie’s series), in a generic, but occasionally tense, straight sequel. The next two outings, Revenge and Curse of Michael Myers, respectively, naturally go down hill, particularly Curse, which dives into the frankly stupid retcon (about a cult who wants to capture the essence of Mike’s evil or something) that gives this three-film arc its unofficial “Thorn Trilogy” nickname. Even so, the series remains canon—the child is supposed to be the child of Laurie Strode who is supposed to be dead (in a car accident) by this point. Probably not a coincidence, Jamie Lee Curtis’s career was arguably peaking around the same time, with A Fish Called Wanda, Blue Steel and, a few years later, True Lies coming down the pike.

She was coming off that ride in time to probably get paid a truckload of money for Halloween 7, called Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, which, as you can see from the chart, ignores the third through sixth movies. Yes, Laurie is still Mike’s sister, but she never had a baby girl and certainly was never killed in a car wreck. She faked her death and took on a new identity, at some point having a boy baby and becoming the headmaster at an elaborately gated private high school in Northern California. It’s clear during the opening credits that the budget had swelled—by more than 10 million over the previous installment, according to Wikipedia. That baby boy is played by Josh Hartnett, hot off The Faculty and about to costar in The Virgin Suicides; hot child actor Joseph-Gordon Levitt started his transition to adult roles in a funny cameo; Little Man Tate and Ice Storm star, Adam Hann-Byrd is one of the doomed teens with Nash Bridges star, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe; Adam Arkin is on hand as a love interest for Jamie Lee (she could do better, obviously); and Dawson’s Creek standout and future ubiquitous indie-to-mainstream superstar, Michelle Williams, is the final-but-one girl. As if that weren’t a crazy-enough cast for the seventh Halloween movie, LL Cool J plays an heroic security guard; and ur-slasher-victim and Jamie Lee’s real mom, Janet Leigh, plays a pesky secretary. (Don’t worry, she doesn’t get killed by Michael; instead, she graciously exists the film driving a 1957 Ford Sedan to a musical snippet of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. Her character is named Norma.)

The money spent on this installment paid off at the box office and Jamie Lee gets to have a lot of fun with her character. She ultimately decapitates Michael, which ends his reign of terror once and for all (no, it doesn’t). The reason that seemingly definitive finale isn’t? Halloween 8, Halloween: Resurrection, tells us that Mike had actually swapped clothes with an EMT and Laurie had de-headed the wrong man. The similarly-budgeted 8 follows 7 by wrapping up Laurie Strode’s story forever (no, of course not) by having Michael toss her from a roof. I’ve written elsewhere what a messy missed opportunity this film is. The less said the better—but it spelled the end of the Halloween II (1981) spur (for now).

Rob Zombie made a couple of interesting remake movies, completely disregarding all previous films. I don’t want to suggest that they’re good, but they’re interesting. He delves into a picture of Michael’s childhood (which no one really wanted) in the first one; in the second, he gets gonzo and has more fun making less sense. I hate Zombie’s filthy aesthetic but I admire his old-school slasher horror instincts.

After Zombie’s versions, Dimension lost the rights by not coming out with more crap sequels soon enough, wrestling the series out of the Weinstein’s dirty hands. Then, the final reboot (definitely this time). We’re getting two films more, following up from Green’s 2018 reset. That one was a mega-hit, making the most of any Halloween movie to date, in raw numbers; in adjusted dollars, John Carpenter’s original 1978 film is still the champ. Of course it is. It cost $600 grand and grossed $70M worldwide. It spawned not only a number of mediocre sequels and reboots (10 to date) but was immediately copied by thousands of filmmakers looking for a break. Official sequels to Halloween are irrelevant; all post-1978 slasher films are sequels to Halloween.

But franchises can take on a life of their own—much like a serial killer who can’t be killed. The whole monstrosity becomes an object in its own right. In this sense, Friday the 13th is a much better franchise than Halloween. It’s not that any individual F13 movie is even remotely as good as the best film of the Halloween franchise (the first one, obviously). They most definitely are not. But the F13 gestalt is crazier, funnier, more outrageous and even scarier than the whole Halloween experience.

At least until the next reboot.