Halloween Retrospective: Halloween Kills

Halloween Retrospective | #12 | Halloween Kills

There’s a saying that’s common amongst defenders of high budget, disposable Hollywood Blockbusters. They are often defended with the idea that they aren’t supposed to be “great” but rather “you’re supposed to turn off your brain and enjoy it.” For some time now this has rubbed me the wrong way. I think there’s a place for films that exist purely as means of entertainment and little else, and I think there’s value in trashy b-movies, but this has always come off like an excuse for a poor quality rather than a genuine defense to me. It really rubs me the wrong way to see Hollywood pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a lazy, brainless hack job without an ounce of creativity or passion in its entire runtime and wave it away with the excuse that it’s “not supposed to be good.” Still, despite all of that, I’m beginning to come to terms with the fact that there is a specific type of high budget trash that has a direct link to my brain’s off switch.

Apropos of nothing, let’s talk about Halloween Kills.

This retrospective series has been a long and grueling journey. I’ve seen some great films and some total trash and pretty much everything in between. Now, we finally arrive at its end, with this year’s Halloween Kills. Helmed once again by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, Halloween Kills is a direct sequel to 2018’s Halloween and the second part of a planned trilogy of Halloween films, to culminate with next year’s Halloween Ends. The story picks up directly after the events of the previous film, taking place over the same horrific night as a group of firefighters inadvertently free Michael Myers before he can burn to death and let him loose on the town. As the body count begins to rise, the townsfolk take notice, and the survivors of Michael’s past massacres rally the townsfolk to execute him once and for all, throwing the whole town into chaos.

This film was overall a critical failure and proved to be highly divisive amongst the Halloween fanbase, but if I’m being honest... it might just some of the most pure fun I’ve had with this series yet. It’s loud, huge, gory and dumb, but it’s trying so, so hard to be good that I just can’t help but enjoy the ride. Throughout the entire film I was glued to my seat, my brain fully switched off and just having fun. It was only when I was done that I was even able to parse through its many, many flaws.

The beginning of the film very much feels like the same kind of retcon that so many unnecessary horror sequels get when the conclusive ending of one is overwritten by the capitalist need to create more profit, to the extent that it genuinely does feel like an unplanned sequel created in the wake of its predecessor’s success. The interesting thing is that this isn’t really true. From the beginning there were at least two parts planned to be shot back to back, but the 2018 Halloween was wrapped up with a conclusive ending and produced and released on its own so that the creative team could see how it would be received. After it was received well, two sequels were greenlit, and the ending was retconned.

Despite initially being planned to be shot back to back and taking place on the same night as its predecessor, Halloween Kills is a very different beast from the 2018 film. It is the Halloween II (1981) to that film’s Halloween (1978). In one of the film’s worst decisions, Laurie Strode is left confined to a hospital from her wounds for the entirety of the film while Michael storms through town elsewhere. This is one of the main points of criticisms for this film and it’s one I ultimately agree with; I think it would have been more interesting if she had been able to take more direct part in the story.

That being said, I really don’t think the film is a total disaster as is. It introduces quite a lot of new characters only to kill them off again, and it feels a little scatterbrained as a result, but the film isn’t about the Strode family in the same way that the 2018 film is. It is very pointedly a deviation from that expectation. This film is about the town of Haddonfield and its pent up rage and terror at the horrific force that has been tormenting them for 40 years. The characters might not be extremely well developed or interesting on their own, but they all function together as a larger societal unit that begins to grow more and more faceless as the town gives in to the same id that may or may not have produced Michael Myers in the first place.

Michael Myers himself is absolutely incredible in this film, and I don’t feel bad for saying so. It actually made me reconsider some of my qualms about the 2018 film. This trilogy is recontextualizing Michael and Laurie away from being direct foils to each other and back to how Michael Myers was originally; a faceless shape of pure evil whose true purposes and intentions are incomprehensible to anybody but himself. Any attempt at theorizing the why behind it is just a projection of the obsessions and insecurities of others onto a murderous blank slate. Personally, I think that’s a fascinating approach to take.

He’s also absolutely brutal in this one. Halloween Kills ups the gore and kill count to such an extent that it’s nearly as brutal as Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, and has a much higher body count than even that. The melodrama that fills this story is constantly punctuated by horrific bloodletting, gruesome dismemberment, viscious stabbings and a particularly nasty eye gouging. If you’re invested in the more base, purely grosteque side of slasher films, this is entirely the film for you.

There is, of course, quite a lot to criticize here. It suffers from a lot of the hallmarks of being a second chapter in a planned trilogy. There’s no real beginning or end, and a lot of it is just moving pieces across a board in ways that may or may not feel impactful in the moment but don’t really lead anywhere that changes the status quo. So much of the dialogue and thematic exposition is really, really hamfisted, and so many of the characters’ decisions are just completely and utterly baffling. If the social commentary undertones were weird and half-baked in the 2018 film than they’re practically nonsensical here. Trying to figure out what this film is trying to say about anything – vigilante mobs, the nature of fear, policing as an institution, the death penalty and extra-judicial violence, etc – is like trying to understand a fever dream. And that ending – my god the ending is terrible in some key ways. Whereas Halloween 2018 was good in that it stripped almost all of the complicating, conflicting mythologies away from Michael Myers and rendered him as he was in the original film – simultaneously an unknowable force of evil but also just a man with a knife – the ending of Halloween Kills makes him literally, explicitly immortal.

But the more I think of it, the more I wonder if there’s something to this. There’s a very specific feeling that American society has these days. Tensions everywhere are reaching boiling points, and nobody seems to know precisely what is wrong (I have some ideas, but that’s not the point of this review). We see boogeymen everywhere, lurking in the shadows, but nobody can agree on who they are and what we can do about them, and the more that increases, the more the body count piles up, the more frenzied the mob becomes, until they’re willing to tear down whoever is set in front of them. As Halloween Kills reaches its fever pitch, as the town of Haddonfield descends into depravity, even the messages of the film itself, the ideas it’s trying to convey, turn into a nonsensical slurry of rage and terror, lashing out at anything and everything in showers of blood. Nobody can stop it; not even those who set it in motion in the first place. And at the center of it all is the boogeyman himself; Michael Myers.

In terms of direct canon, this incarnation of Michael hasn’t really been offed that much. But in the context of the series as a whole, I think this ending says something really interesting. Just how many times have the writers and directors behind this franchise tried to end it? Just how many times have they failed? Michael Myers has been stabbed, burned alive, shot to death multiple times, shot in the eyes, hung by a noose, even blown up in an explosion, and still, every time, he’s back on our screens killing more innocents eventually. I know that in reality, the mechanisms of Hollywood capitalism and producers like Moustapha and Malek Akkad are the ones really keeping him alive, but in the context of the legacy this has created for Michael Myers, the ending of Halloween Kills seems oddly appropriate. How can you just kill Michael Myers? In what way could he be killed my mere brute force that would feel even remotely earned or appropriate after all of that? Especially when we know he’ll be back for more in a year’s time anyway.

I don’t mean to say that Halloween Kills is an underappreciated masterpiece, and there are probably a million holes you could poke in my analysis, not the least of which is the fact that this is probably completely insufferable to most other people. It is, in many ways, a bad film. But it’s bad in such specific ways and yet feels so committed to the bit that it creates an experience that directly shut down my mind for me, and enveloped me into the experience on screen.

In other words, it is the exact kind of horror film that I consider a “guilty pleasure.”

This movie almost definitely shouldn’t exist. Halloween really should have ended a long time ago, and I hope that when Halloween Ends comes out next year, it’ll close the book on this played out story for good (unlikely, I know, but a girl can dream). At the same time, though, it’s too late to stop Halloween Kills from existing, and as it exists now, I had a pretty damn fun time with it.