Some thoughts on the new Halloween

"The night HE came home."

Or maybe that should be: "The night SHE circled the wagons and waited for him to come home."

I have another post that I am currently working on (it's a look at John D. Hancock's 1971 spook-fest Let's Scare Jessica to Death), but I wanted to touch briefly on something I noticed about the new sequel to Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) — which, oddly enough, is also called Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018) — and the critical dialogue surrounding it.

As I am sure you well know, David Gordon Green's Halloween is a critical and box office hit.  It is well-deserved.  The movie scraps everything that happened outside of Carpenter's original film.  Gone are any mentions of Druidic death cults and familial connections between Laurie Strode (Jamie Leigh Curtis) and Michael Myers (played in the new film by James Jude Courtney, but with a little help from the original Shape, Nick Castle).  The new film benefits from this stripping away of superfluous storylines.  It is very lean and very mean.

I am not going to delve into the story.  This post isn't a review or anything like my other writings.  I just wanted to point out something that I noticed when I saw the picture but, when I read other reviews, hadn't seen other critics bring it up.  (And if they have, please bring them to my attention!)  Maybe I'll expand all this later, but, for now, I just want to kinda stake my claim to the idea.

One of the things that screenwriters David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Jeff Fradley do well is set up lots of echoes between Carpenter's film and this new iteration.  Some people have complained that the film just revels in nostalgia, but I think the little twists that they give to these moments are well done.

For instance, there is a call back to the scene from the original in which Laurie Strode is in class and sees The Shape standing outside.  In the new film, it is Laurie's granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak) who is in class, and when she looks out the window, she sees her grandmother.  Both scenes deal with a lesson in fate.  In 1978, Laurie learns that fate is like a natural element, "like earth, air, fire, and water."  It exists, and there is nothing you can do to change it.  In 2018, Allyson is also learning about fate, but she is doing so by reading the work of Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl.  Frankl's view of fate is much different.  He thought if a person could accept it and learn to live with it and from it, then s/he could create meaning from it.

"Hey, Laurie. Did you do your chemistry homework? Can I copy?"

I expected there to be a lot of references and parallels to the original Halloween.  Whatever you may think of them, "easter eggs" are a part and parcel of this kind of remake/re-imagining/whatever-it-is.  What I did not expect were references to other Carpenter movies, namely those films that were themselves references to the director's favorite movie genre: the western.

John Carpenter has always talked about his admiration for the work of Howard Hawks, particularly his westerns.  One of the movies that Carpenter says influenced his career the most is Rio Bravo (1959).

The plot of Rio Bravo is simple: a rag-tag group of misfits holes up in the local jail to keep a gang of killers from getting hold of one of the prisoners.  In fact, the plot is so simple that you could probably rattle off a dozen similarly constructed westerns.  It doesn't really matter where the "good guys" are holed up (a jail, a circle of stagecoaches, or the Alamo), and it doesn't really matter who the "bad guys" are (bandits, cutthroats, and assorted other ne'er-do-wells), all that matters is that one group is on the "inside" and another group, on the "outside,"  wants in.

John Carpenter movies like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Fog (1980), The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness (1987) are all, like Rio Bravo, "siege" pictures in one form or another.  They are films that feature large and diverse casts of characters coming together to fight off the attacks of some foe(s).

What is Halloween (2018) but a siege picture?  Laurie Strode is the leader of a group of women who have to learn to work together in order to protect the family homestead from Michael Myers's vicious onslaught.  Even the rifle that Laurie uses echoes the lever-action Remington rifles seen in countless westerns.

Not only have the screenwriters for the new Halloween referenced John Carpenter's original movie in countless ways, but they have also written a film that references other films in a way that Carpenter himself would.  I think the western / siege elements of the new Halloween are what made Carpenter excited enough to give his blessing to Green's and McBride's project.  Indeed, if Carpenter had written and directed the picture himself, I think he would have made it a modern-day western.  Maybe he'd have Laurie team up with her fellow survivors, Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, to fight off the Big Bad Shape one last time?

Well, there's always the sequel, isn't there?

...but would that make it Halloween II or III?

I'm so confused...