Author: Josh Spiegel / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains spoilers for Halloween]
There’s no mincing words in the new Halloween when it comes to the franchise in which the film exists. Early on, one character asks the granddaughter of Laurie Strode if it’s true that Laurie and the famed serial killer Michael Myers were sister and brother; the granddaughter replies with a disdainful “No,” clarifying that it’s just “a silly rumor” people made up as they built up the legend of Michael Myers as much as the man and his murders ever could.
That surprise was built into the 1981 sequel Halloween II, one of the many films in the series that is roundly (and smartly) ignored in this latest revival, which carves out a new space to occupy and flourish.For the purposes of this new film, directed and co-written by David Gordon Green, with John Carpenter on board as executive producers, all that matters is the first Halloween. The new film is a direct sequel to the 1978 classic; in that film, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, of course) was an innocent teenager whose babysitting job on Halloween turned into a fight for survival against an implacable, hard-to-kill murderer who was hell-bent on making her evening a nightmare. In this slow-burn follow-up, Laurie has spent 40 years suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder while concurrently planning her revenge against the infamous monster. When Michael Myers is set to be transferred to a maximum-security facility on — of course — Halloween, he manages to escape and head back to Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak more bloody carnage and face off with his surviving victim.
The hallmarks of the first Halloween are very much on display in the new one, from the obvious to the more esoteric and fan-service-y. Of course, Carpenter’s chilling theme makes its return (the iconic director co-composed the score), and there are a number of long takes meant to evince the sense of an off-screen perpetrator watching and stalking its prey. Some of the references and in-jokes are direct reversals or deliberate echoes of what happened in the first film. As in the 1978 film,…
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