Halloween H20 vs. Halloween 2018

I am going to preface this article by acknowledging that two years ago, when I saw Halloween 2018 at the world premiere, I loved the movie the first time I saw it. It was a combination of being a part of the premiere and the first new Halloween film in almost a decade. And the first one to have Carpenter score in nearly four decades, since that time, each subsequent viewing revealed more and more of its flaws, and the movie now sits at the very bottom of my list of Halloween films.

Let’s journey back to February 2017.  It was announced that Michael Meyers and the Halloween franchise (which had been lying dormant for eight years) would be resurrected for its 40th anniversary, as a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original film, and its much-loved sequel Halloween II.
With Jamie Lee Curtis returning once again, even after her iconic character of Laurie Strode was killed off in the opening scene of Halloween Resurrection 18 years earlier, John Carpenter returned to produce and compose the score for the film as well. Setting up what should have been the makings of a perfect follow up completely ignoring Rob Zombie’s two Halloween remake films.  David Gordon Green was hired to direct a script co-written by comedy superstar Danny McBride.

Other pieces begin to fall into place.  Judy Greer was cast as Laurie’s Daughter (now named Karen) and Abdu Matichak as Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson. Nick Castle, the original Michael Myers actor, was announced as returning to the role. However, Nick was relegated to a single shot in a mirror reflection and not even an entire scene, which was a huge letdown. James Jude Courtney did the majority of the performance.

Amid all these announcements, it was also revealed in an interview with Carpenter that the movie would ignore ALL the sequels, including Halloween II, and that Laurie and Michael would no longer be related. Something that caused a bit of concern for fans who were still excited for the first new Halloween movie in almost a decade, but also was a bit disappointed and confused why Halloween II was being ignored and why Michael and Laurie were no longer going to be related.

In the lead up to the release of Halloween 2018, it had premiere screenings at the Toronto film festival and the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Following the premiere screenings, while critics enjoyed the movie, audiences were mixed as to their feelings for the most part. People either loved it or hated it. As I admitted above, my first experience seeing it at the premiere was that I loved it. The chief complaint amongst fans of the series who didn’t like Halloween 2018 was the filmmakers wanted to ignore all the sequels.

The 2018 film wound up cherry-picking a few scenes and story beats from Halloween II-H20. In particular with Jamie returning to the series as Laurie Strode.  It felt very much like Halloween H20. Except this time, Laurie was a reclusive paranoid Sarah Connor wanna-be who was waiting for Michael to return even though they weren’t related and hadn’t seen each other in 4 decades. She was hiding out in her secluded cabin with barely a relationship with her daughter and son in law, and a slightly better one with her granddaughter.

Whereas in H20, the traumatized Laurie, while now living far away from Haddonfield living under an assumed name and having faked her death. A nod to Laurie being dead in Halloween 4.  Laurie had managed to hold a career as the headmistress of a school.  She raised a son, who was increasingly getting frustrated, still loved and understood as best as he could what she went through, and even was in a committed relationship with one of her co-workers.  She was still traumatized, but she wasn’t the reclusive agoraphobic Sarah Connor wanna-be mess that we see in Halloween 2018

Taking away the brother and sister bond for Michael and Laurie in Halloween 2018 also takes away why Michael would be obsessed and stalking her four decades later when he hadn’t seen her in all that time. And if Laurie was no longer living in the same home she lived in 40 years earlier, how would 40 years incarcerated Michael Meyers even find her to begin with, when she completely isolated herself. With H20, the bond between being brother and sister and Michael wanting to purge his last ties to his family makes sense.

A big part of my problem with Halloween 2018 comes from the recycling (with less success) scenes from the movies they chose to ignore (after claiming it was done to let the film chart its own path). A key example both films have a rest stop scene, the rest stop scene in H20 involving a young mother and her little kid, having no choice but using the dark, creepy rest stop bathroom for the kid. Michael moves the rock holding the door open while the kid is humming and singing next door to her mom. You know Michael, and utilizing Jon Ottman’s very scene appropriate score, there is a high tension level to hearing the unseen footsteps. Will Michael hurt this mother and child?  The tension of watching the mother through the crack of the stall door as Michael moves through the bathroom. When he steals the mom’s purse and looks at the mom dead in the eye through the stall door crack, and then the kid screams only to be revealed as a spider being in her hair and not being attacked by Michael, that whole sequence has you on the edge of your seat.

On the other hand, Halloween 2018 gas station scene has zero tension, combined with the fact that it involves a character you don’t care what happens to either. When she walks into the bathroom and minutes later, Michael also enters, there is no tension; you know he’s going to open each door and not find her, and then when he gets to the last door, where she is sitting behind, and she shouts out occupied, as he tries to open the door. Even when he drops the teeth over the door, it doesn’t feel scary. Of course, the 2018 take on the scene cuts away to her podcasting partner discovering the dead attendants, which breaks up the woman’s tension being alone in the bathroom by herself with Michael stalking her. When he starts attacking her in the bathroom, it still doesn’t play out scary as she crawls under the stall doors and when her partner bursts in with the crowbar, it’s more about the gore than actual fear.  The whole scene plays out just as an excuse for Michael to get his mask back. And that’s the other thing, by ignoring all of the films that came before it, why is he even fixated on his old Captain kirk mask, to begin with. I get the wanting to cover his face.  But why that mask? He only has worn it once since they ignored the other Halloween films. Why not another clown mask even?

Now we get to the shadow of Dr. Loomis. As everyone is well aware, Donald Pleasence was as much Halloween as Michael Meyers is; even after Donald passed away, he left a very imposing shadow over the series. And the way to two movies chose to acknowledge his not being alive anymore also speaks volumes.

H20 decided to address this at the start of the film, at his old house where Nurse Marion Chambers  (Nancy Stephens returning to the roll) has continued to live following the death of Dr. Loomis, the house has been broken into by Michael who is obviously looking for any information he can find on the location of his sister now that he is once again out on the loose. We get a final scene with Nurse Chambers and acknowledge what came before, along with an over the opening credits of a Loomis sound-alike (V.O. actor Tom Kane) of Loomis’s monologue from the first film. And then we move on, and the movie continues.

Halloween 2018, we as the audience have to sit and endure through a good chunk of the movie with a wanna-be Loomis who has more than a few screws loose and most likely had a hand in setting up how Michael even breaks out, to begin with. We’re told the character of Dr. Sartane was supposedly Loomis’s protege. (which is not in the least bit believable ).  We have to sit through groan-inducing scenes with him, such as spouting off nonsense psychobabble, as he fills the role of following the Sheriff around supposedly trying to help find and capture Michael, in addition to also bringing Laurie’s grandaughter Allyson back home.  But the Dr. is obsessed with trying to control him and then winds up killing the Sheriff he is supposedly helping after they run Michael down with a squad car. Moments later, we are subjected to the single worst scene in 40 years of Halloween films, Dr. Sartain putting on Michael’s mask and playing boogie boogie boo with Laurie’s granddaughter. Before dragging Michael’s body to the squad car and throwing him in the back seat with Allyson. Eventually, Michael gets the better of him and does the film and the audience a favor by killing off the Dr.

Moving into the finale’s of H20 and 2018, they both similar but vary significantly in quality. Whereas H20 has that defining moment where after making sure her son and his girlfriend are safe, Laurie decides she’s had enough and is done with running from Michael. As her son and his girlfriend drive off to safety, she turns around and has now become the predator with Michael being her prey and heads back into the school’s main building to find and kill Michael.

In Halloween 2018, she doesn’t have that defining empowering moment of having enough. She’s been crazily obsessed with killing Micael the entire movie. She even basically admits to having used her daughter and granddaughter, and son-in-law as bait to lure Michael into her deadly mouse trap. The final showdown between Laurie and Michael in both films last about 20 mins in each. Like the rest stop scene I mentioned earlier, the end of 2018 has none of the tension that H20 has. While Laurie decides to stop running and pursues Michael in H20, she also knows Michael very likely can and could kill her. And there are those moments where you get the feeling she might not make it out of this. The tension when Michael enters the dining hall and flips over tables two at a time while looking for Laurie still brings chills and has you on the edge of your seat. None of those chills exist in 2018 as this Laurie doesn’t feel like she thinks she will fail.

In many ways, David Gordon Green feels more like he is more concerned with mimicking scenes from the end of the first movie instead.  And whereas H20 ends with the payoff of Laurie emerging triumphant and killing Michael swiftly and definitively when she car jacks and crashes the coroner’s van and then runs him down before crashing the van into a tree and taking the Ax and decapitating her brother. The final exchange between Laurie and Michael where he’s reaching out to her, and Laurie, even after all he’s done to her she still has a moment of sympathy wash over her for him before she ends both her pain as well as his; is one of the most powerful moments of all the sequels.

Halloween 2018 doesn’t give Laurie that triumph or a powerful moment like that. Instead, she was left with Laurie and her daughter and granddaughter fleeing from Laurie’s burning home, not seeing Michael killed.  And she was not getting the closure the character needs.

One other major problem of the finale scene of H2018 is Allyson; jumping back to just before the final reel begins when the groan-inducing Dr. is killed, it becomes apparent there will be some connection moving forward between Michael and Allyson.

When we finally get to the point where the Dr. is killed, Michael pretty much ignores Laurie’s granddaughter until she runs away.  Even then, he just looks up at her, and he finishes off the Dr. Michael doesn’t bother chasing after Allyson, who we cut to running through the woods near grandmothers house (with a laugh-inducing scene that’s supposed to be tension-filled of her running into all the mannequins in the woods that Laurie uses as target practice earlier in the film)  instead Michael kills two more sheriffs and drives the car to Laurie’s home. When Allyson makes it to Laurie’s house, Michael hears her calling out to her mom and granddaughter, but he doesn’t go after her. Later on, when Karen and Alyson are in the basement and Karen armed with her shotgun fakes crying out for help to entrap Michael when she basically has her Bowfinger “Gotcha Sucker” moment as she shoots him and then Laurie attacks him from behind, knocking him down the stairs, as he gets back up he doesn’t try grabbing on Allyson the way he does Karen.

And then, of course, we have a long shot of Allyson seeing Michael’s knife before she grabs it and almost instinctively stabs him multiple times. Even when she stabs Michael, he doesn’t attempt to grab her or take the knife from him before the “TRAP’ closes. Laurie lights the gas and throws a flare in with him as they leave the burning home. Allyson, still armed with Michael’s knife, flags down a truck that happens to be passing by (leading to the question why would anyone knowingly stop when a woman drenched in blood while holding a butcher knife comes running up to your car.) cut to the very last shot Allyson staring off in the distance still holding very tightly on to Michael’s butcher knife, which smacks of heading toward an Allyson / Michael connection very similar to the now erased from existence Jamie Lloyd/ Michael connection. Again for a movie that ignored everything after the original, there are so many key moments that are pulled direct from the film it chose to ignore.

There you have it, my thoughts on why Halloween 2018 is an inferior knock-off of Halloween H20. What are your thoughts about it? Do you prefer H2018 over H20? Do you enjoy both? Am I way off, in my opinion? We would love to hear what your take on the two movies are.