Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween Kills/Halloween Ends)

Here we are! The spooky night itself, when the kids run around in the dark in masks and want candy from us folks who are staying in and throwing on spooky media. Like this double bill. Actually, to be truthful, I am writing this part the day before because I watched the first movie the night before. I'm a SPOOKY SPECTRE OF THE RECENT PAST OOOOOOO. Basically I knew I was going to cover this film, but I did not realize the finale of this modern Halloween trilogy was also like, available on streaming stuff? So I can just watch both of them and put a cap in the trilogy. You get a double treat tonight, a metaphorical full size Snickers bar from my house. Let's hop on back to Haddonfield, Illinois, and encounter that Michael Myers again starting with...

HALLOWEEN KILLS

Boo.

...a fucking trainwreck apparently. I probably should have rewatched the 2018 Halloween film before diving right back into this one, but oh well. Helpfully, my past self wrote about it back then. I liked the movie, noting at the time that its take on the canon was a Godzilla 1984-like situation where only the first movie happened, and it was a sequel to that. I noted some other stuff, but we'll get to that. These movies, therefore, take place in a Haddonfield where the 1981 film Halloween 2 never happened. Free from that gravity, the 2018 movie struck its own bold path of Michael returning. Where does Kills go from there?

It goes back to Halloween 2. This is a major problem for me for several reasons. For one is the sheer lack of originality. Having decided to play in a world without that movie, the first thing they jump to for a sequel to this particular branch of canon is to play off of that movie. The cold open of the film is basically playing in that negative space, a lengthy glimpse of Halloween night in 1978 and what happened after the original film. You know, like how Halloween 2 did. It threw me for a loop because I forgot that Halloween 2 didn't happen in this canon, so it was a shock when Michael was apprehended at the end and I remembered "oh yeah". Lest you think that's the only invocation... the basic plot beats are just Halloween 2. Laurie Strode, critically injured from her encounter with Michael Myers, is rushed to a hospital whilst Michael Myers survives the end of the previous movie and goes on a new and improved killing spree throughout Haddonfield.

This leads me nicely into the film's other major problem: it's just miserable. I have not reviewed Halloween 2 on this blog, and maybe one day I will. The short version is that I really don't like it. In a post-Friday the 13th world, Halloween 2 takes the totemic power and restraint of the original and tosses it out the window for a misery-inducing bleak boilerplate slasher with more death and the type of gruesome violence you'd expect from a post-Friday the 13th horror film. Halloween Kills, horrifically, also copies this in invoking Halloween 2. We are introduced to no less than three couples in this movie whose only purpose is to be briefly sympathized with before they are brutally murdered by Michael, just because. One of those couples are a pair of gay men living in the old Myers house, by the way, if you needed to amp up the misery quotient. It's not a fun slasher, and it's not saying anything poignant about anything. It's just fucking bleak to watch old people and a gay couple get their throats hurt while they gurgle furtively.

There's almost a point, of sorts, when it comes to the folks of Haddonfield rallying together as a vigilante mob to get that Michael Myers. They're all riled up by just about every legacy character the movie could cram in here. All the kids from the original are now middle-aged and out for Myers blood, BUT OOPS NONE OF THEM CAN KILL HIM AND THEY ALL DIE HORRIBLY. At first I thought the film might be saying something about the town fighting back against the corruptive evil of Myers, but this vigilante mob is framed as bad and something that we are shown to be wrong. In my writeup of 2018, I said that Michael Myers exuded an aura of fascination. Here, he exudes an aura of monstrosity, warping the town around him in his own image. There is no catharsis and no salvation to be had. All of these legacy characters come back to face Michael, and it fucking kills them. More violence is done to the new generation, for the sake of it. 

At best, there's a half-hearted something about vigilante justice in this movie. At worst? It's a bleak and joyless slasher from a series that's proven it can be innovative, thrilling, terrifying, and even a little bloody as long as it's got a purpose. This film has no purpose beyond being miserable. Forget Michael Myers exuding an aura. Halloween 2, from 1981, is exerting an aura of misery upon this movie. A well of inescapable gravity that this new generation of Halloween makers couldn't break from. What a goddamned shame. What a miserable use of my time. 

HALLOWEEN ENDS

Okay, now it's Halloween and I'm writing this up. I have experienced Halloween Ends, and I really shouldn't stall because I could say a lot about this movie. In many ways, it's the perfect capstone to this spooky movie marathon. If it is not a great film, it is almost certainly a good film that is daring and subversive and transgressive against what came before. It has misery rooted in the previous film, but this time it feels like there is a point to that misery beyond a legacy slasher owning everyone and cutting all their throats. See, that aura of monstrosity analogy I made up above? That's the entire point of this movie. Michael's aura has warped Haddonfield itself, and it almost deserves what happens next.

Boo 2.

And yet, it all begins so tragically. A babysitter on Halloween who accidentally causes the death of the child he's babysitting. Three years later, that man is ostracized by Haddonfield. With Michael Myers gone, that mob mentality whipped up in the last film needed a new target, and poor young Corey Cunningham becomes the new town pariah. You really feel bad for him, and loathe the folk of Haddonfield who treat him like utter shit. They're venomous hypocrites who couldn't get their vengeance on Michael, and so moved on to the next tragedy, the next target to hate. The key moment that embodies this hateful hypocrisy is when Corey is accosted by your typical slasher movie teens. They bully him, ballying about the accusation that he is a child murderer. That the child didn't fall off the stairwell in an accident, but in a deliberate murderous shove by Corey. There is an altercation, and the main teen pushes Corey away, down off of a bridge and onto the ground where he lays motionless after his fall. The teen them says to his friends that HE TOTALLY FELL, OKAY? I DIDN'T PUSH HIM, I DIDN'T, YOU ALL SAW IT SO BELIEVE ME AND LET'S GET OUT OF HERE.

The utter hypocrisy and lack of empathy. This teen finds himself in the same situation that Corey was in three years prior, for a brief moment able to understand the truth of the matter... before shrugging it off because he's innocent, unlike that fucker Corey. This shove does more than wound Corey. It sets him down a dark path that leads him to Michael Myers, who spares Corey. Corey is accosted by a bum trying to stab him, saving himself in self-defense but killing the bum. Slowly but surely, we begin to lose Corey to the darkness. If Haddonfield wants to prejudge him, to brand him a monster... then fuck it. He will become that monster, and at the very least get his blood-soaked vengeance for what this town has done to him.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are Laurie Strode and her granddaughter Alison, the latter getting romantically involved with Corey over the movie's runtime and falling for him, even as he descends deeper into darkness. The evil has exuded outwards and infected him, creating a new generation of Michael Myers' particular madness. At first they kill in tandem, but then he wrestles the mask free to take it from Michael before luring his bullies from earlier in the film into a death trap. Again, the hypocrisy. Corey vandalized their car and they follow him, for sure to beat him within an inch of his life. If Corey, bloodied and beaten from their curbstomping, begged for mercy... would they give it? No, they would not. They would kick the obvious guilty child murderer's teeth in. And so, when Corey goes on his killing spree... it's odd. We hate him for becoming a monster, but pity him for the tragedy that led to it... and that infection creeps forward. You almost begin to think the Haddonfielders deserve their grisly fates. They created this monster, despite his pleas of innocence. Now they can plead to no avail against a monster who prejudges them, finds them guilty, and goes a step beyond in declaring their lives forfeit. 

It truly shows how far Corey has fallen when he tries to kill Laurie after she senses the evil in him and tries to split he and Alison up. When he fails, he declares that if he can't have her, nobody shall... before taking his own life just before Alison comes into the house. The true pitiful tragedy, then, is Corey became the very thing which victimized him at the end. He willingly and maliciously puts Laurie in the same situation he was placed in by accident, where she will be misunderstood by Alison and blamed for murdering poor innocent Corey. What a monster. What a sad, pitiful creature which Haddonfield's festering aura conjured up in the absence of Michael Myers... and oh, look, he's here too. The final fight is decent enough, but an afterthought. Corey's story was the real tragedy. Laurie wins and Michael dies, giving her redemption and maybe, just maybe, quelling the lust for a scapegoat lurking within Haddonfield.

Is it a good movie? I don't know. Corey's tragic descent is miserable, and his murder spree is equally grisly. Yet, there's a part of me that loves this movie. I find it a bold exploration, a fresh take on Michael Myers and his aura, a film that finally says something different about this shit beyond a stabby man in a William Shatner mask. I respect it a fuck of a lot more than Halloween Kills, and applaud it for being different. That counts for a lot. That's where we leave Halloween as a series for now. There will be other journeys in other marathons, but this is where we end. I'd like to thank you for coming on this spooky journey with me. I'll see you around sometime, before the end of 2022. Until then, stay spooky.