Fear of the Shape: A HALLOWEEN Franchise Retrospective
Chad Collins
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Michael Myers matters. The perennial boogeyman, Myers has terrified audiences for the better part of more than four decades, starring in an unbelievable ten, soon to be twelve, features. Michael Myers has lived a long, long time, and he’s ostensibly died just as many. You cannot kill the boogeyman, though, at least not forever. You cannot kill evil.
There’s something enduring and distinct about Myers, a filmic slasher icon with the kind of legacy and prestige other slasher franchises simply cannot claim. For as badass as Jason Voorhees is– he was on Arsenio Hall, after all– or as quippy as Freddy Krueger can be while shoving co-eds into television sets, there’s simply no comparison to the granddaddy of knife-wielding, cinematic killers. Michael Myers is a marquee event, an A-list killer, in a way other slasher icons simply aren’t. That’s not to denigrate the other horror heavyweights, but an objective, blood-drenched observation that Myers resonates in a way that others of his ilk simply can’t.
He transcends other slasher icons, the apotheosis of evil and death, and is both firmly consistent in principle yet veritably flexible in interpretation– no two Halloween movies feel quite the same. Stylish and gloriously, gorily stylized, Michael Myers monastically matters. The closest thing the horror genre might have to a God, and to say otherwise is iconoclastic. Reverent and pious adherents of the Myers way understand this in such a profound, deeply personal sense, Michael’s dominion extends far beyond his screen time. Michael Myers has killed 121 people on-screen, and he’s only getting started.
Halloween Kills, poised to release this coming October, recently launched its first full-length trailer online, and in the spirit of all the Halloween hoopla– the best kind of damned hoopla there is– I thought it fitting (necessary) to revisit Michael’s legacy. With appearances across ten movies, eight different directors, four timelines, and over $640 million in worldwide grosses– the top-ranking among slasher franchises– Michael Myers is unambiguously unmatched. As Laurie Strode said, “the more he kills, the more he transcends.”
Halloween (1978). Dir: John Carpenter. Michael Myers: Nick Castle
There is little I can say about John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s (this is as much her movie as it is Carpenter’s) seminal slasher masterpiece that hasn’t been said already. Put simply, Halloween manifested the perfect horror boogeyman in Michael Myers, an incarnation that is otherwise unmatched in both film and literature. The boogeyman had always been an elusive, mythic being, one– like our darkest, most primal fears– is easy to understand yet exceptionally difficult to conceptualize. Carpenter and Hill, however, did conceptualize. With a modest budget and JC Penny wardrobe, the boogeyman was born. Credited simply as The Shape, Nick Castle’s Michael Myers is the original, the apotheosis of understated slasher acting. Fluid and concealed, a deadly shadow in suburbia, Michael Myers simply is. Liminal in genesis, the Michael Myers mythos are born, with a dense, lettered mythology that includes Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), his time at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, and the adolescent murder of his sister, Judith. The boogeyman, for the first time, had a face (a William Shatner face).
Halloween II (1981). Dir: Rick Rosenthal. Michael Myers: Dick Warlock
Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill had originally planned to have Michael Myers track Laurie Strode to her new high-rise apartment building after his enigmatic escape at the end of the first. Wisely abandoned (no one needed Halloween by way of Poltergeist III), the setting instead shifted to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, conceived as a direct follow-up to the first, largely taking place across the same night.
Drawing more inspiration from the Halloween season itself, Halloween II is steeped in seasonal lore, including references to Samhain, bobbing for apples, and razorblade laced candy bars (sorry, Pirate Gary). It is also considerably more violent, upping the body count from five to nine. Director Rosenthal, too, contends that both he and Carpenter conceived of Halloween II as bloodier than the first, owing to what they describe as the “inflation of violence” between this film and the first.
Halloween II is perhaps, however, most distinct for its inclusion of the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers sibling relationship– they are brother and sister. A franchise legacy, it was only successfully retconned in David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot, Carpenter conceived of the idea “purely as a function of having decided to become involved in the sequel to the movie where I didn’t think there was really much of a story left,” later remarking that it was both “foolish” and “silly.” After all, it was just something “people made up to make themselves feel better.”
Halloween II, though, like all entries in the franchise, is still a worthwhile slasher enterprise. Though Haddonfield Memorial Hospital is likely the most derelict, understaffed hospital this side of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, Laurie gets one hell of a chase scene, the violence is unpredictable, and it ushered in The Chordettes’ Mr. Sandman as the de-facto bubblegum pop anthem of the series. It is, too, the first point at which the series starts to diverge into competing, non-canonical timelines.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace. Michael Myers: None!
Tommy Lee Wallace previously declined to direct Halloween II, though he returned for the third entry, a standalone horror movie about conspiracy, pagan rituals, and Halloween masks (that, yes, feature prominently in both the 2018 reboot and trailers for Kills). Michael Myers, though, is not present, having been killed in the hospital explosion in Halloween II. Carpenter and Hill produce, though both were adamant that their involvement was contingent on Halloween III not being related to either antecedent entry.
Venerated critic Roger Ebert described Halloween III as an “identikit,” a movie assembled exclusively out of parts of other, better movies. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, remarked, “Halloween III manages the not easy feat of being anti-children, anti-capitalism, anti-television and anti-Irish all at the same time.”
Fans were not happy about the lack of Michael Myers, though in retrospect, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is considerablybetter than its reception at the time suggests. More than anything, it is indicative of both the franchise’s commitment to seasonal chills writ large and the universal clamoring for Myers himself. Without Myers, there is no franchise.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). Dir: Dwight H. Little. Michael Myers: George P. Wilbur (and others)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was a long-gestating return to form for the franchise. An oft-delayed sequel, it features the series’ best opening scene, three different Michael Myers (both Tom Morga and Erik Preston portray Michael in uncredited scenes), and the best child performance this side of Haley Joel Osment talking to The O.C. cast members. Danielle Harris, a franchise stalwart not unlike Jamie Lee Curtis, is perhaps sometimes too overzealous in her desire to return to the franchise (it’s never going to happen), but her role as Jamie is the best thing the first Halloween timeline has going for it.
Simultaneously resourceful and sympathetic, yet never grating (a curse for child actors), Jamie Lloyd was an unconventional, dangerous, and thrilling shift in the series’ trajectory. Having Michael stalk his adolescent niece was a bold choice, but it pays dividends in both resurrecting the series and adding new wrinkles (some welcome, some not) to the ever-expanding Michael Myers Mythos ™. With Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie killed off-screen before the start of the movie, Jamie is more than capable of taking the final girl mantle.
Reception, of course, was still mixed, and mixed is perhaps too generous. Caryn James of The New York Times contended, “suspense and psychological horror have given way to superhuman strength and resilience” (wait until they see Zombie’s remake), while Kim Newman of Empire, in absolutely ruthless fashion, said, “it’s incredible that a film could be so closely patterned on Carpenter’s still-thrilling original movie and yet be so stupid, unscary and plodding as Halloween 4 is.” Contemporary critics, though, have been kinder, with IGN lauding it as the second-best in the franchise and DVD Talk labeling it one of the best slashers of the 1980s.
And, well, it is. Halloween 4 is far from perfect, but Michael remains no less terrifying in his third filmic outing (he gets one truly stellar nightmare sequence here), and his steadfast grip on the town of Haddonfield, Illinois is piercingly explored here, an early augur for what Kills looks to deliver on. The Michael Myers featured in Halloween 4 is a legacy. Michael was slowly curating the distinct kind of abiding goodwill he currently has, and if nothing else, it brought Myers back to the cineplex after a six year wait. Michael Myers was back, baby.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989). Dir: Dominique Othenin-Girard. Michael Myers: Don Shanks
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is where things get sticky for the franchise. I mean really, really sticky. Carnival candy apple sticky. Parallel with the decision to retroactively induce a sibling bond, Halloween 5 is the inception of The Cult of Thorn, a still divisive filmic thread amongst fans of the franchise. For what it’s worth, I think it’s beyond silly, an unnecessary attempt to explain away evil and psychoanalyze a boogeyman with druid cults and pagan rituals.
It also blatantly contradicts the esteemed intentions of director Dominique Othenin-Girard. He intended to have audiences relate to evil in Halloween 5, stating, “Again, to humanize him [Michael Myers], to give him a tear. If evil or in this case our boogeyman knows pain, or love or demonstrate a feeling of regrets; he becomes even more scary to me if he pursues his malefic action.” All of that sounds wonderful, and it’s a well Rob Zombie would later revisit for his remake– as Ebert noted, the franchise is perhaps strictly an identikit of only itself– yet it’s undermined and rendered as supernatural phooey here. Michael didn’t need an explanation for his evil– he just was.
Halloween 5, in its defense, had been backed into a corner. At the conclusion of 4, Jamie Lloyd, seemingly manifesting the same capacity for violence as Michael, ostensibly murders her mother. This is retconned, with her foster mother surviving and Jamie rendered mute (and psychically connected to Michael) on account of her persisting psychological trauma.
Late franchise producer Moustapha Akkad nixed the idea of an evil Jamie Lloyd in favor of a Halloween 4 retread. Truly, the title might as well have been Halloween 5: The Retread of Michael Myers. The beats are exceptionally similar to those of the last one. Michael returns, no one believes anyone until it’s too late, Michael is ostensibly incapacitated, only for him to not be.
Halloween 5 at least has the decency to deliver some shocking kills (see: Halloween 4 co-protagonist Rachel’s death), some tense set pieces (the laundry chute), and a bombastic ending that, while ridiculous, at least temporarily promised more exciting things to come (in theory, not actuality, as we’ll see six years later). Michael is successfully taken into custody. Jamie is assured that Michael will die in prison, to which she blankly responds that he will “never die.” Simultaneously, a mysterious man in black blows up the police station and slaughters several cops, freeing Michael. Jamie breaks down at the realization that Michael is free to kill again.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). Dir: Joe Chappelle. Michael Myers: George P. Wilbur/ A. Michael Lerner in reshoots)
Who is this mysterious man in black? Why did he free Michael Myers from prison? Why did it take six years to find out? Don’t ask questions you aren’t prepared to hear the answers to.
The man in black is Dr. Terence Wynn, a Smith’s Grove doctor who cursed Michael– per the instructions of the Cult of Thorn– and made him the mass murderer he is. Wynn freed Michael so that Michael could kill later Jamie’s son, Stephen, completing the ritual and passing the curse onto Danny Strode. It took six years after a series of internal conflicts between Akkad and other series creators and external legal battles, including Miramax’s purchase of the series rights.
Several people worked on concepts and scripts for the complicated sixth entry, including fan Daniel Farrands and Quentin Tarantino himself whose script was an early Natural Born Killers template with Michael and Wynn traveling on a cross-country killing spree. Farrand’s script doubled down on the supernatural, mythic elements, an exhausting endeavor of making sense of a thorny (ha) timeline and occult lineage, one that had jeopardized Michael’s simple terror as The Shape. Farrands, in later interviews, would remark that the finished product is something of a Chimera, with entire segments and threads not written by him, suppositionally introduced by Dimension Films executives.
Infamously, following a disastrous test-screening, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was reshot and edited extensively, resulting in a “more confusing” movie, per Farrands himself, that endeavored for a brisker, flashier pace while sacrificing continuity and both internal and franchise logic. Known colloquially as the producer’s cut, the ending is radically different than the theatrical cut (it leans heavily into its Pagan influences), and it wouldn’t see an official release until Anchor Bay Media and Scream Factory released it on Blu-ray in 2014.
Neither version of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is particularly good. It clashes with itself at every turn, punctuating scenes with some pretty stellar Fall iconography while simultaneously sabotaging itself with inconsistent characterization, poor pacing, a creepy Paul Rudd performance as returning babysat resident Tommy Doyle, and lackluster kills save for one pretty gnarly head explosion. Jamie Lloyd is killed in the prologue, not played by original actress Danielle Harris after contract disputes, and the torrent of occult symbolism and diegetic mythology overcomplicates what, at its core, is a movie about a maniac killing teens.
Still, there’s something curiously endearing about The Curse of Michael Myers. Perhaps it’s the fact that something so odd and almost aggressively bizarre was theatrically released by a major studio. Perhaps it’s the grimy, ugly undertones (it is suggested that Michael is Stephen Lloyd’s father). Perhaps it’s the frank weirdness of it all. And make no mistake, The Curse of Michael Myers is a weird damn movie. It’s got strange Kim Darby deaths, a Michael Myers whose body is in constant flux on account of recasting. It looks great, probably the closest a Halloween movie has come to emulating my own Mid-Atlantic Halloweens celebrations, and the score is synth-pop thrilling. It’s also more Michael Myers, and that alone is enough to save it. Perhaps most importantly, it concludes the first of four Halloween timelines. Dr. Loomis is killed, Michael lives on, and the rest remains unknown.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998). Dir: Steve Miner. Michael Myers: Chris Durand
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (terrible title I still can’t pronounce. Is it H-20? H-2-oh? Water? Who knows) inaugurates the second Halloween series timeline, completely retconning everything after the second to refocus on the trials and tribulations of none other than series icon Laurie Strode. Relocated to a boarding school in Summer Glen, California, Laurie is still reeling from her trauma, self-medicating with alcohol and an exceptionally contentious relationship with her son, Josh Hartnett (who, alongside Courtney Cox in Scream 3, deserves a dishonorable mention for his bangs here). It’s a thematic through line that audiences and critics curiously forgot when the 2018 reboot premiered (a lot of its pathos are directed lifted from H20).
After a sensational opening sequence with series regular Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Halloween H20 settles into a groove whose rhythms and motions aren’t unlike the original’s. Michael slowly makes his way to Laurie, having pilfered information from a file in Dr. Loomis’s home. The tension is creeping and slow, and with uncredited rewrites from Scream scribe Kevin Williamson, the teenage verve is second only to Debra Hill’s seventies teenage zingers. The cast is inspired, with cameos from Janet Leigh and a hefty early role for Michelle Williams, though the scares themselves are perhaps too beholden to the post-Scream late nineties template, with little blood and digital smoothing rendering most of the death scenes pretty flat and uninspired.
Still, it’s a great deal of fun, and little in the series has matched the sheer pleasure of watching Laurie hack Michael’s head off with an axe, a move that, while retconned in the next entry, was nonetheless a thrilling end to an enduring, two-decade-long feud. It also, more than anything, reinvented Michael. Retconning is almost quotidian in this franchise, but Michael’s rebirth allowed him to comfortably move into the next century. The Michael of Thorn was too dense and too beholden to sundry creative impulses to last. The Michael of H20, conversely, was a back-to-basics killer. He was quick, methodical, inspired, and most of all, scary again.
Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Dir: Rick Rosenthal. Michael Myers: Brad Loree
None of what I just said lasted. Returning director Rick Rosenthal has the distinct honor of helming both the best and worst Halloween sequel. Resurrection is violently dumb. Scream scribe Kevin Williamson might be responsible for the worst move of all– a body swap akin to Curtis’s own Freaky Friday reboot years later.
Rather than killing Michael, it is outlined at the start of Resurrection that Michael swapped places with a paramedic before the final confrontation, having crushed his larynx, thereby preventing him from telling Laurie what the hell was going on. Never mind the fact that he, well, attacked Laurie in the van and uncannily mimicked Michael’s gait and movement, it wasn’t really Michael.
Jamie Lee Curtis herself only agreed to appear in Resurrection if she could finally be killed off, alleging to be firmly done with the franchise (yeah, right). The title changed repeatedly, known as Halloween: Homecoming, Halloween H2K, and Halloween: MichaelMyers.com at various points during filming, an effort to let audiences know that Michael wasn’t really dead, before ultimately settling on Resurrection, which, yeah, works, but little is resurrected here– Michael was never dead.
Laurie Strode is killed in the first ten minutes, having been committed to Grace Andersen Sanitarium (the same sanitarium used in Final Destination 2). Michael arrives, chases her to the rooftop, and unceremoniously stabs her after Laurie is too hesitant to deal the final blow, unsure (ludicrously) that the man behind the mask is really Michael. It’s dumb. It’s really, really dumb.
Michael then decides to return home, a serendipitous venture since Dangertainment, a digital reality television show, is preparing to cull a bunch of horny coeds into Michael’s childhood home for a Halloween night webcast. The cast includes Bianca Kajlich, whose screams had to be dubbed in post-production, Busta Rhymes (he fist fights Michael at one point), and Tyra Banks, who is there to make cappuccinos and then simply isn’t anymore.
The coeds are slaughtered methodically, and in a surprising feat, the kills manage to be even more boring than those in H20. They’re by-the-numbers murders, unembellished and uninspired. They’re Halloween store window dressing, a requirement without any verve. Yet, curiously, I’ve probably seen Resurrection at least ten times. It’s sleazy trash– Kate Sackhoff’s YouTube channel has some upsetting insights into how the production exploited her no nudity clause– but it’s Michael Myers, and that’s often enough for me.
Loree doesn’t make for the most exciting Michael Myers, but any Michael Myers is still better than the sundry come-and-gone slasher icons of the early 2000s. The score is good, Bianca Kajlich is a capable final girl, and I’m a sucker for multiple endings (Resurrection has four) and Y2K technobabble. It’s a curious end to the second Halloween timeline, one so sordid and out of whack, only a reboot could save it.
Halloween (2007). Dir: Rob Zombie. Michael Myers: Tyler Mane
Rob Zombie’s Halloween is an objectively scary movie. Clearly beholden to the French splatpack trappings of the late 2000s, Zombie’s Halloween is a relentless, brutal, pulse-quickening slasher enterprise, one so unabashed in its savagery, it’s never really been repeated in a wide-release slasher movie since. It’s also, in my opinion, terrible. A bad, scary movie.
Frankly, I find Rob Zombie’s Halloween to be repulsive. Zombie is a talented filmmaker– The Lords of Salem is a modern classic– but Haddonfield was the wrong setting for his trailer park, claptrap genre sensibilities. I disliked it in 2007 and I dislike it even more now. It represents the worst of what the genre has to offer. Whatever merits it might have are lost under a sea of relentless violence against women. It’s a gross, misogynistic pattern that even blockbuster tentpoles aren’t immune to. Two of the central set pieces here have men quickly dispatched followed by protracted sequences of naked women savagely beaten and killed. Three stalk and slash scenes feature topless women. Why is that? I don’t know, and I really don’t care to find out. It’s gendered in such a sloppy way, it’s hard to ignore or defend.
Fans of Zombie’s reboot often point toward Michael’s extended coming-of-age story, an ostensibly human angle that endeavors to outline how Michael became Michael. Only, it doesn’t. Sheri Moon Zombie is heartbreaking in the prologue, yes, but Zombie himself, after all the set-up, simply concludes that Michael is evil, abusive stepfather be damned.
That, too, is shallow and ugly. Trauma-informed this is not. There’s not a behavioral scientist alive who could identity anything, beyond maybe Michael’s mistreatment of animals, that remotely resembles reality. It’s a cacophony of competing abuse, with parents, peers, and siblings all competing in some menagerie of racism, homophobia, and violent abuse, as if Zombie was simply tossing the worst impulses of humanity at the screen to see which might stick with audiences. None of them do, though. It’s simply a bad movie.
It’s also very scary. Tyler Mane makes for an inspired Michael Myers, one whose wrestler-physique lends Michael the kind of stature and intimidation that was sight unseen at the time. The jolts are shocking, the revamped score is electrifying, and Danielle Harris finally got to return to the franchise. Scout Taylor Compton, too, is a wildly different Laurie Strode, and if nothing else, it’s a welcome reconfiguration of an icon.
Despite that, Halloween is simply a bad prologue followed by a truncated (though considerably more violent and ugly) retread of the original’s beats. It doesn’t work, and it was almost enough for me to finally wish for Michael’s permanent death.
Halloween II (2009). Dir: Rob Zombie. Michael Myers: Tyler Mane
Zombie, you sly bastard. Halloween II is everything I’d hoped Zombie’s first remake would be. Granted, I could still do without the excessive violence– Oscar winner Octavia’s Spencer’s death isn’t fun, it’s cruel– and the misogyny (that strip club scene is literally mindless violence; Michael has one job, so why be there at all), but Zombie refined his behavioral angle, and Halloween II is refracted through a better-considered lens of trauma and post-traumatic stress than his predecessor.
Scout Taylor-Compton’s Laurie Strode is living with surviving friend, Annie Brackett (yes, more Danielle Harris) and her father, Sheriff Lee Brackett (an exceptional Brad Dourif), and all three are grappling with their trauma differently. Laurie is handling it worst of all, sharing her unalloyed rage and grief with therapist, Dr. Collier (Margot Kidder), unaware that Michael, having laid low for two years, has reawakened, driven by an ethereal image of his mother and a white horse back to Laurie.
It’s a little goofy, but Zombie’s trademark visual finesse shines through (something his first remake didn’t have nearly enough of). His Laurie Strode, too, is permitted to have violent outburst, swear, and drink herself into a stupor, exhibiting the kind of response to trauma that the previous two Halloween timelines never permitted. Laurie Strode was virtue incarnate; this Laurie gets to be real.
Zombie’s Halloween II istethered to its time of release. It worked on account of post-war anxiety; it was mean and violently cathartic. It’s also an entirely new Michael, one who grunts, refuses to cut his hair, and wanders maskless through woods and fields. It’s still not altogether great, and even in an uneven canon, remains one of the weaker entries, but it’s distinct enough to resurrect Michael for a new age. I’m not sure if Zombie’s approach was unequivocally unworkable, or if it simply faltered here, but I’m inclined to believe that Zombie’s output was the best this story was going to get, and I mean that as a compliment. Michael Myers mattered again.
Halloween (2018). Dir: David Gordon Green. Michael Myers: James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle (in cameo)
Halloween is a well-made a film. Despite mixed critical reception, it is undeniable that the film– from the blocking, the lighting, and the mise-en-scene– looks and sounds incredible. David Gordon Green and the troupe at Blumhouse not only made Michael Myers scary again– they made him look perhaps the best he ever has.
The legacy is undeniable. The filmmakers took a forty-year-old horror villain and reinvented him for an entirely new audience (that 76mil opening is still staggering to me). Before it was announced, it seemed like Michael was gone for good. This past year has shown us collectively how tenuous so many things are, and how lucky we are to have what he have, and whether someone is a fan or not, it’s beyond incredible that we not only got more Michael Myers in 2018, but that we’re poised for more this year and next. There are few consistencies in life, few enduring pleasures, yet Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise has defied the odds.
A definite first act to the forthcoming second and third in a trilogy, Halloween was an old-school slasher with new-age sensibilities, including a survivalist Laurie Strode, more retconning (Halloween follows only the first, ignoring even the second, hospital-set Halloween II), and a trauma-informed revival that, while copy-pasted from H20, is still welcome in the franchise.
After numerous delays on Halloween 3D, including back-and-forth commitments from new franchise star Scout Taylor-Compton, the franchise seemed DOA. There were plans to film in Serbia, a mockumentary, and even a found-footage Halloween, though in December 2015, Dimension lost the rights to the franchise, with them returned to Miramax, and Halloween was done for.
That is, of course, until Universal Pictures announced a new Halloween movie, one they tentatively planned to release through Blumhouse. In February 2017, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride were announced as co-writers for the new film, with the former directing, after John Carpenter and Jason Blum were both impressed with the pair’s pitch. Halloween (2018) was born.
Though too funny and self-aware at times for its own good, including a protracted Halloween 5 easter egg and the savviest movie kid this side of Kevin McCallister, Halloween made Michael Myers scary again. The third in the franchise simply titled Halloween, it truly appears that the third time’s the charm.
Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends
Halloween Kills, delayed on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, is poised to release in October of this year, with Halloween Ends releasing in October 2022. The trailer for the former, released online a few days ago, looks sensational, like everything the filmmakers promised. “The ultimate slasher movie” per John Carpenter himself, “next level” per star Andi Matichak, with writer Scott Teems describing it as “the first one on steroids.” If the trailer is any indication, those qualifiers are spot-on. With a returning ensemble of familiar faces, including Kyle Richards as Lindsey Wallace and Nancy Stephens (again) as Nurse Marion, Halloween Kills looks like the ultimate Halloween movie, one forty-three years in the making.
Horror movies are curative and comforting, and Michael Myers, for at least the next two years, remains the enduring, glorious face of the genre. It’s an incredible time to be a slasher fan, and an even better time to be a horror fan in general. Michael Myers lives. In October of this year and next, we are all staggeringly luck to bear witness to another night he comes home.
Categorized:Editorials News
