Halloween's Sequel Addiction

Kitchen equipment was weird in the seventies

Note: This was originally published on the Ginger Nuts of Horror website in November 2022. Since then, I have seen Halloween Ends, and was indeed a dog turd. I've decided to present it as it was originally written, with some extra editing.

As of writing this, Halloween Ends opened on Friday. I had been planning on doing something about how awful Halloween Kills was as a follow-up to the write-up to my disappointing second viewing of Halloween (2018) for my personal blog. Then I started thinking — in fairness it’s been a thought that’s been rattling around for a while — that perhaps there shouldn’t be thirteen films with Michael Myers in them.

I’ll start by saying I haven’t seen Halloween Ends. I have gone ahead and waded into all kinds of spoilers, so I know what’s going on in with it. I will eventually watch it — since I’ve insanely committed myself to finishing this particular cycle of the films. I’m not hopeful about this one at all. Not that I’ll reveal any spoilers here, I just felt I needed to say this in a spirit of full disclosure. There will be spoilers for previous films, so watch out for that.

Why do I think that there shouldn’t have been so many films concerned with the Shatner mask-wearing knife enthusiast?

A question that has a cathartically long answer.

We’ll start by talking about the 1978 original. It’s a film I have seen many times since I was a kid and as such has been a major shaper in my tastes. I’m not alone in considering it a classic. From the mood, the pacing, music, and characters it’s as close to perfect as you can get. Even those little imperfections and movie-logic things add to the charm of the piece. Yes, I heart Halloween (1978).

What is it that makes Halloween such an effective horror film? That pacing is a big part of it. Even though it is a lean ninety-minute film it has a deliberateness that some might wish two hours to cultivate. The appearances of Michael Myers around Haddonfield after his escape from the mental hospital, set a brooding atmosphere. Once he’s in full murderful swing, Myers’s implacable pursuit and inhuman cunning, make him a particularly intimidating antagonist.

I'm going to say this Only Fans isn't going well.

The most fundamental thing about the events in Halloween was the fact that there was no neat explanation for Myers’s actions. It just happens, a bunch of kids are doing mundane stuff on Halloween and then they are murdered for no reason. The notion that the horror comes from his senselessness and the destruction of the idea of suburban safety isn’t a new one. I’m not bringing anything novel to the table by saying this, it is worth repeating, though.

You can’t discount the purposeful lack of background for the big bad in the mix. Michael Myers is a blank slate, in the years between his attack on his older sister and his spree murder there is nothing. He sits in his room and simply stares at the wall. Even writing that sentence gives a chill. The idea that he was on standby mode for fifteen years is terrifying. His sheer inscrutability builds on this: mute and wearing a neutral expression mask. He lurks in the shadows, and sometimes not-quite-so-shadows, waiting for his opportunity to attack. We don’t know what his motivations are, and we don’t know what his ultimate goal is. All we get is a hulking dude in a boiler suit and a mask, who is extremely keen on making people dead.

What backstory there is doesn’t offer anything, either. He comes from a happy, loving home (if it’s not the Rob Zombie take, at least — another one I haven’t seen and refuse to on account of how terrible I find Rob Zombie films), in a good, unremarkable neighbourhood. There’s nothing overtly supernatural, no years of animal abuse, or suggestion he was bullied, just a normal kid who decides to kill his big sister one day. I mean, being a little brother myself, I kind of understand that, but c’mon man, a bit of restraint.

This is why I think even one sequel was too many. John Carpenter has stated that he said everything he wanted to say with the original Halloween, and given how stripped-down the story is, I can believe it. It’s the reason he didn’t direct Halloween II (1981). However, Halloween II was made after all and then the rest — and ‘the rest’ is a lot. I still quite enjoy Halloween II, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as the original. Michael Myers just walking through a glass door like a Terminator is still hilarious, mind you, but I don’t think that’s what anyone involved in the production was going for.

To stretch out the story for another ninety minutes John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who were drawn back for writing duties, had to start expanding things. The idea of Samhain was the genesis of the original and never mentioned in it, but they had to make it explicit here and just this little bit of extra lore bloated this world and destroyed The Shape’s mystique. As soon as we were given even a vague motivation it imparted a sense of disappointment, after the initial moment of understanding.

"Oh no! Someone switched off night mode!"

The bloat didn’t stop there, with the further revelation that Laurie Strode was adopted and was in fact Michael’s sister. This connection was dropped for the 2018 Halloween, which was a good decision. The clunky familial tie dilutes the nihilistic meaninglessness of Michael Myers’s actions even more. This is something that was crammed into the US television cut of the original, with the clumsy expedience of the word ‘sister’ being scrawled in Michael’s abandoned cell. Not the most elegant solution and given his refusal to communicate, completely out of character — such as it was.

And I’d like to go on a tangent here about the level of gore in Halloween II in comparison with Halloween. The first film is almost bloodless, with literally only a few splashes here and there. My understanding is that for Halloween II, John Carpenter, having seen the much gorier Friday the 13^th insisted on having the blood spray more liberally. Because of this the Halloween films have the reputation of being grue-fests. While I’ve always been something of a gorehound, I think this does a major disservice to the restraint of the original. It also means that instead of an atmosphere of dread in the 2018 Halloween there was a heavy emphasis on brutality and gore, despite the statements by David Gordon-Green and Danny McBride saying they wanted something closer to the original.

The Cult of Thorn trilogy is the ultimate expression of story bloat and ties together Halloween IV-VI. Gone was the ambiguity of whether Michael Myers was supernatural, and in came a series of ever more ridiculous twists to keep the franchise alive, which included just a wee bit of incest, because everyone loves that. The franchise thankfully went dormant for a few years after this series of films.

Even though the most recent trilogy of films has stripped back most of the baggage of lore with respect to Michael Myers, they come with their own in the form of overblown character developments for the survivors. In some ways this is almost as damaging to the mystique of Myers; everyone even tangentially involved with the original has become obsessed with Michael Myers, distorting and destroying lives. I see what they are doing here, and how it fits the makers’ thesis on the nature of evil, but it feels forced and as clumsy as Laurie Strode and Michael Myers being siblings.

Michael Myers should always have been an enigmatic one-shot creation. His bizarre disappearance at the end of Halloween had power because we didn’t know where he was or if he was alive. The struggles and diminishing returns of the baker’s dozen of films reinforces my belief. I used to want Halloween sequels, but now I feel like that was a juvenile want, something to soothe the unease of Michael Myers stalking somewhere, ready to strike. That uneasiness was the original film’s greatest triumph, a culmination of beautifully combined elements, that has been eroded more and more in the forty-four years since it was released.

Halloween Ends won’t be the final outing for Michael Myers. No doubt in a few years’ time someone will think they can handle the material, a reboot or a different continuation of Myers’s mysterious quest. My hope is that this doesn’t happen, and that anyone who might want to tackle it takes a long consider and just puts it back on the shelf with a nice wistful pat. My preference would be that we had eleven original films in the intervening decades since 1978, but that’s an unfulfillable wish, and letting the old codger who is way too into sticking sharp metal things into squishy pink squealy things retire is a more achievable outcome.