After burning through the entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, I originally planned to take a break from horror films, especially long franchises. Then I realized Halloween Ends was coming out, and someone asked me what I thought about H20, a movie I had never seen. Rather than being sensible and planning on tackling the Halloween series next year, I decided to watch every one of these stupid fucking movies in one week. And I did it, but I’m not writing a full article on each film. Instead, I decided to break it down into segments:
Halloween and Halloween II - The Originals
Halloween III: Season of the Witch - The Outlier
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers - The Thorn Trilogy
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Halloween: Resurrection - The Copycats
Halloween and Halloween II - The Zombie Movies
Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends - The New Trilogy
I learned from writing about the Massacre movies that there were going to be entries in this series that I just didn’t have much to say about, but thankfully the series is easily broken up, aside from the third movie. But before I get into the first two films, I wanted to comment on the series as a whole a bit.
This series isn’t sacred to me, so I’m not going to dwell on what a Michael Myers movie should be or anything like that. This is all going to be about my personal enjoyment of these movies, even if I might consider the vast majority of them to be technically “bad” movies. Even though I hadn’t seen a lot of this series before I started this, I still knew these were going to be easy watches (aside from the Zombie movies) because I find the slasher genre to be almost relaxing at this point. In other words, these articles are just my personal ramblings, and I’m going to be way too forgiving of some of these films, and I might be too harsh on others, but it’s all going to be my honest response based on what I want from these movies. Enough vague nonsense, here are my thoughts on the first two movies.
After watching all of these movies, I can safely consider myself a fan of the Halloween series, but before that, I truly did not care for these movies. And that goes for the sacred first film, as well. I kind of viewed it the same way I think about Citizen Kane, acknowledging that this was a groundbreaking film that changed future films for decades, but I personally wasn’t all that impressed with it.
So this has always been a movie I knew I should love, but just didn’t. On top of that, I’ve become a huge John Carpenter fan over the years. How could I not love his most famous film? Because of this, I have watched the first film many times, and I’ve always just thought it was okay.
This time around, I appreciated how easy it was to rewatch this movie, and how creepy it is without being gory or going for cheap scares. I learned that I fucking love seeing Michael Myers in daylight. It’s so much creepier to see him standing behind some sheets or by a hedge than it is to see his face appear in the dark. It’s not that seeing his face in the dark is not scary, it’s just expected. Slashers are typically nighttime monsters. You might think seeing them during the day would lessen the effect or, worse, make them look downright goofy. But it works for Myers, and this is one of the main reasons why I’m not crazy about the second film, which takes place entirely at night.
More than seeing a daytime monster, the original Halloween, and the series as a whole, is defined by its music. Carpenter’s score is iconic, at this point, and it still works. Usually, an effective score shouldn’t be noticed, but that’s not the case here as I find the score to be the star of the film. It does such an amazing job of taking what could be boring, long scenes and turning them into extremely tense moments.
Appreciating the atmosphere and pace of the film this time around also made me realize something that opened up my enjoyment of the entire series: I don’t give a fuck about Michael Myers. Don’t get me wrong, the outfit and ever-changing mask is synonymous with slasher films, but The Shape is really just a shell of a character. Later films, starting with the second, would attempt to expand on this character, and it’s been downhill ever since.
I don’t care who’s under that mask. I’m fine with Loomis just telling me he’s pure evil at this point and must be stopped. Good enough for me. I need no motivation. There’s a killer out there, and he must be stopped. That’s the fucking movie.
In defense of the films that followed, what else could they do? You can’t just have this dead-eyed fucker showing up for no fucking reason other than its Halloween and the local insane asylum has atrocious security and transport personnel.
I’m not naive enough to say they should have stopped after the first film, but they truly had nowhere else to go with Myers as a character, which is why they added the Laurie-is-his-secret-sister element. Once I accepted that I would never like The Shape more than I did in the first film, it was easy to accept the increasingly goofy sequels.
Speaking of sequels, the first sequel, Halloween II, is…okay. I already mentioned that I don’t dig the constant night of the movie, and the sister reveal isn’t great, but the story had to go somewhere. Aside from that, there’s another pet peeve I have with the setting: the abandoned hospital. Maybe things were different in the late ‘70s, but in my experience, hospitals are constantly well-lit and populated by more than three people. But maybe the ‘70s were different. Anyway, I just don’t like the setting of the sequel.
Beside that, Michael gets some fun kills (the crazy hot sauna comes to mind) and Loomis gets to run around spouting off cryptic nonsense (“You don’t know what death is!”), so it has its moments.
By having Michael survive and seem fine soon after the events of the first film, Halloween II also reveals Michael to be so evil that he’s supernatural and possibly cannot be killed. I’m actually fine with this. If you don’t make these slasher villains supernatural, then these movies get too dumb. Because, come on, what normal guy can walk through a hospital door like Michael does at the end?
This brings up one of the common problems with this franchise: is Michael supernatural or just a really strong, evil fucker? The first film made it seem like it was the latter. Yes, he survived some seeming unsurvivable shit, but for all we knew, he was crawling in some bushes, barely alive after he disappeared. Halloween II, however, presents Michael as completely fine. In fact, he’s stronger now. Even though they do try to make it clear that he dies at the end, his ability to bounce back from his injuries in the first film make it clear that he is supernatural.
This isn’t a problem in general, but the series either went too goofy explaining that he was supernatural (hello, Thorn trilogy), or he’s simply supernaturally strong because slasher villains are supposed to be (H20, Halloween: Resurrection). It’s just uneven. And this applies to the new trilogy, as well, with Michael going from man to supernatural evil killing machine back to man (which I’m actually okay with, as I’ll explain when I get to those movies). This is why I’m a bigger fan of the Friday the 13th series, which finally said, “Fuck it, just Frankenstein Jason’s ass and make him unkillable. Hell, make his evil into a butt worm that travels from person to person, who cares? Just keep making these fucking things!” The Halloween franchise never had that definitive moment because of the messy timelines and multiple reboots, making Michael Myers the most inconsistent villain in slasherdom.
I still kind of love these movies, which is a testament to the first film. Perhaps that’s the problem; the first film was too good to live up to, and the harder filmmakers tried to one-up the original, the more it became apparent that that was impossible. This is why John Carpenter was right about this series all along. After reluctantly writing the script for the second film, he decided the series should move on from Michael Myers all together. Season of the Witch is coming up next.
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