'Halloween Kills' Challenges What We Think We Know About the Franchise

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Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – There’s no way around it, horror is one of the most difficult film genres to work within. It constantly needs to be evolving in order to keep up with the ever-growing terror that is living in the 21st century. In a time where you can get taken out by a plague, or simply get shot based on the color of your skin, horror draws the short straw in that it has to come up with something much scarier than real life. For some filmmakers, like Jordan Peele, that means crafting something that plays off of those real-world fears. For others, like David Gordon Green, it takes the shape of better defining a known monster in man’s clothing.

Halloween Kills continues right after the events of the previous film. There’s a cookout happening and Michael Myers is what was supposed to be on the menu, but at this point, we should know better than to think a house fire could take him out. Aside from a little damage to his outstretched William Shatner mask, Myers, AKA The Shape (which I will be referring to him as since it sounds much cooler), makes his way back through Haddonfield, stopping for a couple of murders along the way. Meanwhile, the Strode women take matriarch and consummate survivor Laurie to the hospital to tend to her severe wound, while also waiting for retaliation from The Shape. That’s when we get our first update to the lore and one of the best surprises in the franchise.

Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Trying to define what makes something ‘evil’ is the first step in the process of making something much less scary. When you can identify it, you can prepare against it, meaning the terror you feel towards it decreases as your understanding of it increases. The latest entry in the Halloween canon aims to give reason to the seemingly reasonless but does this first by dispelling an apparent misconception about The Shape: it isn’t after Laurie. Sure, it does try to kill her at every opportunity, but turns out it’s only because she’s been in his way, or has been conveniently close enough to make The Shape think, “What the hell, I’ll just cross her off of my to-do list while I’m here.” By removing, and slightly retconning, the one thing that we thought to be true about our boogeyman, it gives the franchise a chance to expand out of the final girl genre and rebrand The Shape to something more suitably horrifying for today’s more socially/politically aware audiences.

Director David Gordon Green teams up once again with co-writer Danny McBride to continue their journey on what is turning out to be their version of “Making a Murder: Micheal Myers Edition.” To get greater context, we are taken to the past and see new characters and familiar ones providing insight on what actually happened the night The Shape went after Laurie Strode. Aside from absolutely nailing the aesthetic and attitude of that time period, there are crumbs of information we pick up but will likely not be able to do anything with until the final entry in this trilogy comes out next year. Whether the final payoff will be worth it remains to be seen, but there is plenty still to enjoy in this film. One thing I always find hard to suspend disbelief for is how people, knowing there is a monster that has killed and continues to murder residents of their town, don’t just get together and hunt down the monster. Especially in the case of The Shape, who has iconically been a solitary hunter that targets isolated prey by appearing out of the shadows. Green and McBride have finally given us an answer to this, and let’s just say the results do not go as expected.

Photo credit: Universal Pictures

We get to explore mob mentality, all led by the Michael Myers survivors club that includes some familiar characters and even more familiar faces. They take a group of angry, semi-drunk residents on what turns out to be a witch hunt as they chant “evil dies tonight” in what can only be described as that one scene in “Beauty and the Beast” where the villagers storm the castle, leaving us also question, “Who is the REAL monster?” We don’t ponder that for long because while these people are behaving monstrously, the big bad is still clearly The Shape. You may be wondering like I was, how can it possibly be fair to set a mob against a killer who has at most taken on two people at once? If your guess was to give The Shape some John Wick-like abilities, literally how did you come up with that because it’s true. There are at least 2 fight sequences where he takes on a group of at least a dozen armed people which simultaneously feels ridiculous yet completely acceptable.

Aside from the return of our favorite final girl, Jamie Lee Curtis, we see the return of the cast from the previous film. If you didn’t see them die, expect for them to be alive. Horror icon Anthony Michael Hall joins the cast as one of the many people affected by The Shape’s initial killing spree. Although a bit too-camp with the constant group chanting and the heavy-handed attempt at forcing some emotional center to this tale, there is still a great exploration on how unresolved trauma can manifest as anger. This paints The Shape as an everlasting catalyst of sorts whose evil actions bring out the evil in others. A real “hurt people hurt people” situation that not only brings mental health into the equation but also raises just how much of a terrifying threat The Shape is when you find out that his actions are done more out of indifference than true, emotional malice. Fans of the franchise will undoubtedly love this film because it is equal part nostalgia, brutality, and social introspection. Those may be the exact things about it that another person might hate. While it doesn’t reinvent the genre, Halloween Kills is a solid entry that leaves me cautiously optimistic on how they will continue to contribute to the mythos.

By JON ESPINO Film & Television Show Critic HollywoodChicago.com jon@hollywoodchicago.com