1963: In Haddonfield, IL, young Michael Myers kills his sister. He’s captured by police and sent to an institution.
1978. Myers escapes and returns to his home. Along the way, he murders a handful of people. The only person to survive Myers is Laurie Straud. Again, police capture Myers and he returns to the institution.
2018. Forty years later, Myers escapes again. He begins another killing rampage.
2021. The people of Haddonfield are finally done with this Michael Myers fellow. They gather together in a mob and murder him. At least they try to.
All right. Let’s talk about this.
The idea intrigued me. A mob of a dozen or so people get together with guns and other weapons, looking to hunt down the Boogeyman and kill him, once and for all. I like that idea. I like people getting together against evil.
Also, consider the world Myers exists in. His murder sprees must have been covered by the press. People know about him. People know he’s seemingly indestructable. This is not rumor or innuendo. There is a documented instance of Myers getting up and walking away from:
- Sewing needles through the eye,
- Multiple stab wounds,
- Six gun shots to the chest, and
- Falling two stories to the ground.
This isn’t your every day maniac. This guy is living (undead?) proof of the supernatural. There’s no doubt about it. You can be a skeptic but the guy demonstrates inhuman abilities—super strength, super endurance, super speed, super everything—on a minute-by-minute basis. So, when the people talk about him, they know what he is.
He’s an unstoppable monster.
But when you watch Halloween Kills (and the previous Halloween from 2018), you’d think nobody knows anything about anything. Because in the world of Halloween, PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID.
They say, “Let’s stick together” as they enter a darkened building knowing Myers is in there, and less than thirty seconds later, they split up.
They hear a strange sound—knowing that Myers has escaped from the institute and seeing a man’s bloody hand print on the inside of their open back door—and go looking in dark rooms with only a flashlight and a cheese knife.
They go looking for Michael in a dark park and split up. Fortunately, they’re smart enough to bring pistols. But when they see Myers, do they fire at him from range? NO! THEY CLOSE THE DISTANCE! You’ve got a firearm for Christ’s sake.
And when, at the end of the film, they finally corner Myers, do they all open fire on him and shoot him in the head a dozen times? No! They beat him up with 2x4s and baseball bats. Even though they all have firearms.
I call this Stupid People Syndrome™. Whenever I sit down for a horror film and I see SPS™, I’m out. I’m done.
There’s a reason Alien is so terrifying. It’s because the people in Alien are smart, and when they come up with a plan, you think to yourself, “That’s a good plan.” Then, when the plan fails and one of them dies, you think, “Well crap, I would have died, too.”
And that’s how you make the audience feel horror. Not with jump scares that last just a second and are gone. No, no, no. You want an audience trembling with every passing moment? Then, you make the people we’re rooting for smart, capable and convincing. Otherwise, it’s just Friday the 13th, and we’re all just waiting for the pretty, stupid people to die.
So, when I see SPS™, I check out. And I wasn’t the only one. There were about ten other people in the theater when the movie started. By the time it was over, I was the only one. Everyone else had gotten up and walked out.
Every five minutes, something else showed up to snap my disbelief suspenders™ against my chest.
Laurie gets serious surgery in the first five minutes of the movie. The kind of surgery that lasts 10 hours. But these doctors are magic: it takes them ten minutes. Also, after having her entire abdomen cut open and then stapled back together again, she’s laying on her side, sitting up, and WALKING.
There are no cops anywhere. I mean, you see them, but they do nothing.
There’s a gay couple who gets cut up. I felt very uncomfortable with that. I mean, if you want equal representation, then everyone should be equally—oh what the fuck am I saying??? No. That was wrong. Misguided at best. Two couples walked out of the theater after that. I should have. But no, I have to sit all the way to the end.
I lost count of all the cracked skulls and brain pools. The viscera in this film… So many heads open with brains spilling out all over the place.
John Carpenter didn’t need cracked skulls and pools of brains and blood.
John Carpenter didn’t need thumbs going through eyes and ripping out brains through the sockets.
John Carpenter didn’t need exploded bodies with limbs laying all over the place.
John Carpenter didn’t need any of that. There’s not a drop of blood in the original Halloween, and it scared the crap out of me. You know why?
Because back then, Carpenter knew what horror meant. A slow, creeping dread that something is sitting behind you now—right now—and will wait there, behind an awful pale white mask until you look.
That’s how you scare people. That’s how you make a horror movie. Not a gross out fest like this.
At the end, there’s a flash cut sequence of Myers murdering people in the most visceral, gross and awful ways with a trite five minutes of voice over exposition from Jaimie Lee Curtis that sounded like it was written by me in the 9th grade. I cringed the whole way through. And there was nobody else in the audience to share my pain. Sitting in the dark, when the final credits rolled, I got up and walked out, and never once felt the need to check over my shoulder.
I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. Just pissed off.
I hated this movie.