In the David Gordon Green followup to the 1978 horror movie hit Halloween,  the story of Halloween (2018) centres around second time mental hospital escapee and serial Halloween night masked murderer Mike Myers. 

Myers returns to the town he once terrorised forty Halloween nights ago, to wreak more havoc. He’s especially set on getting to Laurie Strode, the then teenage girl – now grandmother who once narrowly escaped from Myers. Knowing that they would one day meet again, Strode has spent the past four decades preparing to kill him.

Myers, of course, kills many others while en route to Strode, and we end up seeing a mixture of scary, impressive, not-so-scary or impressive and sometimes quite unconvincing moments in Gordon Green’s film. I watched the 1978 movie when I was just 17, so maybe I’ll find it less impressive now, but I do vaguely recall liking it more compared to my feelings about this new film.

I found some of the Halloween (2018) special effects makeup to be less convincing than expected. A key example being a scene closer to the end when an adult face gets stepped on hard by Myers, and said face seems to fall apart almost like something resembling a large peeled grapefruit. I’m no scientist, so I could be wrong, but surely for someone’s skull to be crushed like that, I’m almost certain that greater force is required than what’s shown in the aforementioned moment. After that particular disappointment, my mind went to… ‘Isn’t it 2018? surely horror film special effects have come quite a way by now? No?’

Overall, Halloween isn’t as thrilling, scary and impressive as it could have been. I found myself needing to know more about Myers. I needed more than the psychiatrists description of him as something like ‘pure evil’. I’m sure the fact that we don’t ever get to see Myers’s face had a negative effect on how much I was able believe the darkness that’s supposed to exist within him. I think I needed to believe in the darkness more in order for me to really be scared. Otherwise all I essentially have is a not particularly horrifying figure who wears a creepy mask and somehow never seems to run. 

As a non regular viewer of scary movies, what I enjoyed most about Halloween is the parts where we learn about and see how the trauma of that fateful Halloween night forty years prior affected Strode and her family. I also enjoyed Andi Matichak’s portrayal of Laurie’s granddaughter – especially before I realised that Jamie Lee Curtis as the young Laurie has a far better horror movie scream.

Other thoughts that crossed my mind as the movie played include:

‘He’s so annoying and a total a******. Of course he’s going to die.’ 

‘I wish that the scene where the granddaughter finally gets separated from her phone didn’t ring quite as false as it does.’

I just couldn’t help thinking that there’s definitely a better way that could have been done. It sucks when lazy plot devices so obviously feel like lazy and contrived plot devices.

Watch it if you’re so curious enough.

Happy Film Loving,

G