Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Halloween Kills’

Written by Joel T. Lewis

As Halloween Kills began, I began to worry as the film started to commit the cardinal sin of the Halloween sequels, it felt as if they were going to explain away Michael Myers. But I endured and as the first of our flashbacks faded away, I settled in and rapidly discovered that this was a very different film than an “explain-away” sequel. It’s also very different from a Return, a Revenge, a Curse, an H20, or a Season of the Witch sequel. Somehow, and I’m not sure how David Gordon Green pulled this off but, Halloween Kills is all of those: the mother of all slasher sequels
 
Halloween Kills is, in essence, Halloween II plot-wise, though technically with our newest canon shakeup we’re into the 3rd film in the series (and that concludes my final attempt at translating where we are in the series into prose). Laurie and her family are rushed to the hospital following their harrowing encounter with Myers, and a frenzy is sparked in the historically traumatized people of Haddonfield, Illinois. When it is discovered that Myers has returned and is still at large, survivors of his first murderous spree are spurred into a vicious mob led by self-appointed poster child Tommy Doyle, who Laurie defended on that night back in 1978. Through flashbacks and open-mic night confessionals we round out our understanding of the depth of the trauma experienced by Haddonfield’s citizens: guilt, fear, and mindless rage. 
 
This is the main focus of the film, the sheer force of generations impacted by brutal inexplicable violence and how that frenzy, that fear can make monsters of us all. We identify with and are thus repulsed by the violence and mindless obedience of this mob to the crude slogan “Evil Dies Tonight.” The film cuts between this mob’s wild fruitless pursuit of the Shape, flashbacks of the first Halloween, and the survivors of the Strode family who are all trying to navigate their new, horrifying reality. The heart of the film, and our champions are 3 generations of women who all understand that Myers must end, and they have 3 very different ideas about how that should come about. 
 
As much as this film and its predecessors have attempted to reason out what motivates the Shape, it is in its restraint and loyalty to that primary characteristic of the monster as enigma that this sequel avoids devolving into the camp it so joyfully incorporates this time around. Myers is a void, he’s not excited, or spurred to act out of 40 years of seething, thinking only of the survivor girl who got away. He’s an automaton, a force. Wind him up and watch him go. And boy does he go in this film. 
 
Michael Myers did not die in the blazing inferno of rightfully paranoid Laurie Stroud’s compound basement. He escapes. He escapes like Nic Cage at the end of Mandy... look there are a dizzying number of references, Easter eggs, and self-parodies going on in this movie. I’m not going to lie: it’s a lot. But the mystique of the Shape and its brutality rises above the ashes of tropes, camp, emulation, mockery, tribute, and homage and after all these years, Halloween continues to Kill.

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