‘Halloween Kills’ Is The Slasher Equivalent Of ‘Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom’

There’s a lot to chew over in David Gordon Green’s sequel to his Halloween reboot — a film released in 2018 that I liked a lot because I read it as an allegory for trauma. Specifically, that there are no good mechanisms in our culture for women to assimilate and recover from trauma, just as the perpetrators of that trauma for the most part go unpunished. In that construct, the boogeyman Michael Myers is the metaphor for all men who enact violence on women: stalking them, menacing them, murdering them … and worse. There are no safe places for women. Green’s 2018 film is the kind of retelling that works because its subtext remained subtext without also just reiterating the subtext of the original film, already rich with ideas about the world of the punished and the privileged. Green’s Halloween Kills is, like Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, a sequel to his specific reboot and not a remake of Rick Rosenthal’s underrated Halloween 2 – it can all get confusing, but the instinct to declare a Hollywood synecdoche to be devoid of new ideas overlooks the fact that certain tropes deserve reconsideration. Cautionary tales are retold because the dangers they warn about never abate.

Green’s Halloween Kills is grim to the point of nihilistic; it’s ugly, sadistic, mean. There’s not a thing that’s conventionally enjoyable about it, and its most horrifying scene’s closest analogue is Fritz Lang’s angry mob melodrama Fury. It doesn’t have the spark of hope of Green’s first film, that faintest suggestion that a woman’s trauma might be overcome by being believed and through the support of loved ones. In its place is a firm statement that there is no good in the world that is not an illusion; no hope for deliverance from the hell of ourselves and others; and the past is not only inescapable, but both a life (and death) sentence. In its way, it reminds me a lot of David Fincher’s Alien 3 and that film’s heroine’s declaration to the monster that shadows her that it’s been in her life for so long she can’t remember anything else. All of the characters in Halloween Kills are attached to the murders that happened there in 1978: the gang of middle-aged survivors, now vigilantes, led by broken down Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall in a role originated by Brian Andrews) and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards); the three generations of Strode women led by the near-mortally wounded Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis); and the Haddenfield Police force, decimated and humiliated, with their nominal leader (Will Patton) completely incapacitated. It’s a processional of bit players and ancillary characters from John Carpenter’s original film down to even the digital phantom of Donald Pleasance’s Loomis, and rather than offer them the kind of send-off that the Raiders franchise gave its characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it annihilates all hope… even from the original picture. In Carpenter’s Halloween, the children were off limits. In Halloween Kills, the children have grown.

Green’s film is entirely unsentimental towards its characters, entirely unforgiving about any nostalgia anyone might have harbored for those characters, and doesn’t have very much good to say about people in general. For all intents and purposes, Halloween Kills is one of the most incisive films about the United States ever made. Everyone in it is traumatized and insane, bloodthirsty and bellicose, driven by vengeance for wrongs both real and imagined. They are bolstered by their own sense of being some kind of heroic avenger, when the reality is that a life of relative ease has made them soft and ineffectual. The third of three completely vile and despairing murder sequences sees a gay couple (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald), after terrorizing some neighborhood kids for playing a disturbing prank on them, arm themselves ridiculously with little knives they’ve used to prepare a charcuterie plate. It’s a coarse joke about masculinity and exactly the kind of regressive gag you’d expect from the creators of Your Highness. Their deaths, like an earlier stalking and vivisection of an older couple (Diva Tyler and Lenny Clarke), and like the late murder of teen hero Cameron (Dylan Arnold), are marked by not just the intimate savagery of them, but by how Green is careful to have the people who love them the most bear witness to the desecrations of their bodies. It’s the slasher Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

“In John Carpenter’s Halloween, the children were off limits. In David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills, the children have grown.”

Halloween Kills is sociopathic. It’s an odd film to defend, but Halloween Kills is not wrong about who we are. If the last five or six years hasn’t taught us that there’s no clean way to get out of this — that 40% of our neighbors at any time are either actively okay with your death or passively okay with it — nothing will. It’s not a warning, and it’s not subtle about it, either, with an extended Laurie voiceover at the end telling us that Michael is the manifestation of the tensions that divide us. What Halloween Kills is, though, is a merciless probing of our tolerance for atrocities: for how long and how many of these people we’ll watch get butchered, dressed like hogs, before we have a physical response to it. Will we kick when it’s the interracial couple? The Black couple? The gay guys? How about the kids who all seem to be out of central casting for The Wild Bunch — all sniggering bullies and their feckless victims? How many people have to die, drowning in their own fluids as the people who love them watch, before we change our behaviors? I don’t like the answer the film provides, but I like the answer the United States provides even less. Halloween Kills is a sledgehammer memoir of our sickness. All these movies about the pandemic and the gun lobby and our political divide, and it’s the horror movie with the “good” guys driving a mentally ill man to suicide that tells the tale. It made me sick.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Halloween Kills on Peacock