REVIEW: Halloween Kills Is Melting
Although far from perfect, Halloween Kills is the film that finally delivers on the promise of the 1978 original’s iconic ending.
by val Loughcrewe
The Shape is a God.
John Carpenter and Deborah Hill knew this without realizing it when, at the end of Halloween (1978), they made it so that after being shot six times by the frantic Doctor Loomis and falling out of the second storey of a suburban home, Michael Myers vanished. Michael Myers survived, and the Shape survived with him.
They knew this when they made it so that The Shape could be anywhere, that he was everywhere. They made it so that nowhere was safe. They made it so that a teenage me went to sleep with a knife under her pillow and a fire iron at her bedside locker after watching it for the first time.
In those closing moments, Halloween went from an effective, pulse-quickening thrill ride to a gut-twisting nightmare. The credits rolled but the movie never ended. Not even the pathetic sequels that tried and failed again and again, and again, and again, to capitalize on those final moments could ever plaster enough mediocrity over the truth: Laurie will die, screaming. Loomis is doomed. The boogeyman is coming and once he runs out of stock sequel victims, once the embers of the franchise die out, he will find you.
A direct sequel to 2018’s Halloween, Halloween Kills—likewise directed by David Gordon Green—follows Myers on a continuing murder spree following his modern-day escape from a psychiatric hospital, 40 years after the events of the original film. Like Green’s previous entry in the series, Halloween Kills follows a variety of characters from the original film as they variously pursue, flee from, and fall victim to the enigmatic masked killer.
There are moments in this film where a pair of cunning characters (one of them being Kyle Richards, skillfully reprising her childhood role of Lindsay Wallace) rip Michael’s mask off and cause him to lose his cool. He interrupts his murders-in-progress to get his face back—because without that skein of mottled white plastic between him and the world, he’s just an old, one-eyed man. Mortal, defeatable, empty. It’s an interesting weakness, one that partly makes up for the dodgy mythologizing that the previous film in the franchise (2018’s Halloween) conjured up with his iconic mask (especially considering how that film’s dishonest marketing positioned it as a movie about victim empowerment and the demystification of a serial killer).
There is no victim empowerment in this film. The Evil strips both Michael and his prey of their humanity. One becomes the fire and one becomes its fuel, and everything must burn. Except when Michael is unmasked—Lindsay manages to get away, after all. (At least until her inevitable demise comes around in Halloween 13).
The Evil strips both Michael and his prey of their humanity. One becomes the fire and one becomes its fuel, and everything must burn.
Aforementioned moments of pyrrhic triumph aside, the characters in this film are always making the wrong choices. They hesitate, they stop to speak their reverence unto The Shape before letting him murder them. This element is a point of frustration to some, comedy to others. It comes off as a contrivance, as an accident.
And the bizarre, dreamlike tone does seem accidental, a product of tired brains and tired bodies forced to the breaking point during a brutally short shoot in the midst of a pandemic. This was a crew stalked by an invisible killer trying in a fevered haze to create something they could hurry into theatres for October. The making of this film was a trance-dance, and it gives the final product an ineffable, subconscious quality.
A nightmarish quality—dare I say it, a liminal one. Halloween Kills is a dark place between places, where The Shape is everywhere, is anywhere, and where a bad hollywood studio horror sequel, Halloween part fucking twelve no less, can transcend into something more than just the sum of its parts. Something that feels less like a calculated construction than some kind of ragged, abominable organism.
Funny, isn’t it, how that word is explicitly used to describe what Michael becomes over the course of the movie: transcends. As above, so below. During the opening scene—as two cops creep cautiously through the decaying Myers house—a panel in the wall of our theatre we swung open, seemingly of its own volition, obscuring the screen. It added to the decrepit haunted house atmosphere of the film, and part of me wondered if some usher dressed in a Shatner mask was about to pop out for a William Castle-esque gag. A deeper part of me nervously anticipated a butcher’s knife piercing through my skull from behind.
I wonder what caused that panel to open by itself.
A lot of people hate Halloween Kills with a visceral intensity. The backlash to this movie is astounding, especially considering the placid, beaming praise heaped upon the previous effort, in all its triteness. Big name horror media “journalists” who will go to bat any day of the week for the latest bit of studio pablum—if the pay is right, anyway—are coming out and saying with tremors in their voice that this one, this one is too much for them. This is where they draw the line. This of all things is The Hollow Thing with no redeeming value. The Empty Thing. The Shape.
This movie about chaos and confusion is too chaotic and confusing, this movie about a merciless murderer is too merciless and has too many murders. There are hundreds of people out there who genuinely want to see the film censored because they don’t condone violence against firefighters. That doesn’t seem like a lot in this “10,000 followers or you’re literally nobody” world, but it is more than enough to start an angry mob on a Halloween night with.
I laughed at a lot of this movie. I smiled through all of this movie. And, at times, I was genuinely stirred to discomfort by the brutality of it.
Now, do I believe that everyone who disliked this movie came out of it hating it simply because it rocked a bit too hard for them? God, no. In the light of day, this is ultimately just another piece of studio pablum. There are moments that don’t land, lines that come out forced, and one particular line in the film—when Hawkins at the very end of the film laments, “If we only knew then what we know now!”—is just so baffling that I can see how people might simply laugh at it. I laughed at a lot of this movie. I smiled through all of this movie. And, at times, I was genuinely stirred to discomfort by the brutality of it.
And that’s why I kind of love Halloween Kills, especially in comparison to David Gordon Green’s previous effort.
It’s strange, actually. The vehement outpouring of hatred for this movie mirrors my own hatred for 2018’s Halloween. Criticisms of this movie as confused, miserable, and bland echo my exact issues with its predecessor. I almost wonder if some people are projecting a hatred and disappointment they didn’t want to accept that they felt about ‘18 onto its follow-up. At the time, that film felt like nothing but a joyless exercise in brand recognition, something that desperately wanted to say something but was terrified to speak up about anything. I stand by my feelings on that film, but Kills has given me a strange sort of fondness for it in retrospect—because that film was David Gordon Green’s initiation into the Order of The Shape. Even if the third part of the trilogy, Halloween Ends, turns out to be a disaster, it won’t matter. That and ‘18 will be the cocoon that incubated Kills.
Halloween Kills is the shape coming home. Halloween Kills, to me, is the Shape’s home. From scene one, through the film’s imagery and dialogue, Michael is given a compelling new motivation. He just wants to go home and stand in his sister’s bedroom—to contemplate his reflection in the window, the lights of the town visible through the transparent image of his mask. He will kill on the way there, and he will kill when something snaps him from his reverie, and all around him will be death and confusion and chaos.
This is the film promised by the closing moments of the 1978 original. It’s not perfect—it is made by the people who made the previous Halloween, after all, but this sense of culmination was evident to me before I was even aware of the pseudo-shamanic process through which the film had been made. I could feel that the movie was wounded somehow, melted at the edges, and that some purer darkness was leaking through the cracks. The same darkness that made the characters sabotage themselves, that puppeteered the blank flesh puppet known as Michael Myers through the cold October night from murder to bloody murder. The same darkness that drove a mob to cause a mentally-impaired man crying out for help to commit suicide right in front of them, in a scene that felt for all the world like something Carpenter himself would have cooked up in his heyday.
It’s fascinating to see the media turn against this film so vehemently, to see people begging to censor it. To see people who are otherwise professional shills for whatever mediua is being crowbarred into theatres at any given moment trying to dismiss it. It’s bad folks. Don’t go see it. Don’t stare into the abyss, we promise, it’s not worth it—there’s nothing there but the blackest eyes. The devil’s eyes, daring you to return your averted gaze and stare back with a gorehound’s grin.
Hell, you might even catch a glimpse of Lucio Fulci’s ghost grinning back at you.
Halloween kills, and kills, and kills, and then leaves us with the shape triumphant in his place of power, contemplating the darkness that drives him, a deity enthroned. There’s no need to sleep with a knife under your pillow any more. The shape has a whole town of victims to cruelly slaughter & corrupt before he’ll ever get to you.
God help you, though, when Halloween Ends.
val is a bog-dwelling Irish horror writer and game designer who makes dark industrial electro under the name Surgeryhead.
