31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 31 (Halloween [2018])

Boo.

At last. We're here. Spooky night itself. I just have to finish this and then I'm free! Free from spooky analysis, at least. We've even got a really good movie that I just finished not 5 minutes ago. I watched it in the dark and everything. Honestly surprised at how few kids interrupted movie time for me to give them their treats, but that's just how it be with small town life. We're even going out on a really high note! It's that Halloween movie that came out exactly a year ago today! I had to watch goddamned Halloween 4 instead of going out to see this and writing about it last year. Not so this time. Now we're here for real, and I've finally seen the thing. Wow. It's one hell of a movie. I'm gonna talk about what I liked about it for an amount of time, and then this whole wild Halloween marathon adventure will be over. Hop on in, it's the train to SPOOKYTOWN!


It's another one of those Godzilla 1984-like situations here, where the people in charge just go "right, fuck all this other shit, only the first movie happened and we're building on that for the anniversary.". Rather surprisingly for me, this also includes throwing out Halloween 2. It's been two years, but I'm pretty sure Halloween H20 counted Halloweens 1 and 2 as canon. Here, though? Nope, we're just following up on the 1978 original. No Laurie Strode as Michael's sister, Dr. Loomis lived past that Halloween night, just... a sequel to the first. They even lampshade it which got a chuckle out of me. Okay, movie, I'll let that one slide. There are a lot of little cute callbacks to the original, some of which have a point beyond just whooshing a nostalgic chuckle out of you. (Okay, their variation on the bedsheet ghost is a good twist that has you laughing in a morbid moment of tense anticipation. Which is exactly on tonal point with the scene from the original it's referencing.) I like the cinematography and editing a lot, too: there are some fun cuts, and a lot of cute tricks like continuous shots, both tracking and static. It's a very slick and put-together movie, but I'm not one for pointing out cool film school tricks. No, I'm here to be the passing-grade English student that I am and point out thematic resonance and stuff. So. The ballad of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, 40 years later. Let's get into that for a bit.


Oddly enough, the theme I got from this is that Michael Myers exudes a sort of aura around him, which manifests itself in quite a few different ways. Notably, the aura of fascination over him and his crimes. This shows in the opening moments with the British true crime podcast duo, who are an effective device the movie uses in several ways; exposition to get us up to speed with the current status quos of both Michael and Laurie, and then as fresh bodies for Michael to murder in a pretty fucked-up scene at a gas station bathroom. I was honestly surprised they got killed off so quickly, but I guess they'd served their narrative function and were used for the scares. More interesting is Dr. Sartain, this movie's version of Dr. Loomis (and Laurie even textually says this) who fills the same narrative function... to a point. Recall that Loomis spent time trying to understand Michael Myers before deciding he was evil incarnate and had to be locked away. Sartain has spent 40 years studying Michael, trying to understand him.... and it's both a fascination and obsession. It ends up making him turn heel and knife a sheriff to protect Michael, even going so far as to briefly don the mask. The fascination and obsession in understanding Michael turns Sartain into Michael. Last, but certainly not least, we have Laurie Strode, in this movie a paranoid recluse who's all but alienated her family from her anxieties over Michael coming back to finish the job. Her wounds are more psychological, of course, but in the end the movie is basically mirroring her with Michael in a strange way. She's obsessed and determined to kill him, just as he's obsessed and determined to just kill in general. At least two shots of the movie go out of their way to reference iconic shots from the 1978 movie, only with Laurie in the place of Michael. I see what you're up to there, movie. Very slick.


If I have a complaint here, it's that Laurie briefly falls into horror movie trope levels of letting her guard down during the climax where Michael is attacking her stronghold. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't want to be a naughty nitpicker and wagging my finger because OH NO THE TRAUMATIZED CHARACTER UNDER SEIGE BY HER NEMESIS ISN'T ACTING WITH FULL LOGICAL EFFICIENCY, DIIIING. On the other hand, Laurie has been preparing for this for 40 years. She should kind of be a step above basic tropes like "investigate the noises instead of staying in your bunker and waiting with your gun for Michael to come to you". On the other hand, she is traumatized as hell from all of this... It's a very tricky tightrope to walk! In the end, though, it all works out and this is a really great sequel to Halloween... but it's by no means the end. They've got sequels planned for 2020 and 2021. For the love of god. Okay. We'll see how those go, but as for me? I'm done. That's another Halloween marathon in the bag. Here's where I'd usually make a terrified joke about NaNoWriMo tomorrow, but honestly I'm relieved for that! It means I get to watch things that aren't spooky and write about totally different things! You have no idea how much of a mental breather that will be for me! Anyway, this is me, signing off. See you for... let's be real, unless something big pops up, it'll be the Games Of The Year list in December. Until then, y'all. Thanks for reading.