Went to the movies for David Gordon Green’s new HALLOWEEN to cheer myself up. After all, a cinematic manifestation of relentless evil stalking the codified world-simulacra of slasher movies is comforting compared to the real world of 2018. In slasher movies, evil returns without fail (as it does in reality), but that doesn’t stop Final Girls putting it down. HALLOWEEN (2018) is for the most part a solidly entertaining slasher and mirror image of HALLOWEEN (1978). Falters at times to justify itself, but attains some primal potency with its images of three generations of women, configured as Maiden, Mother and Crone (Jamie Lee Curtis returning as a traumatized but much more prepared Laurie Strode), battling a phantom of trauma with blade and flame.
Michael Myers is banal, empty, empathy-free evil poured into The Shape (as Laurie calls it) of a dead-eyed, undying white male. Seeing him return yet again to a (near) unchanged cinematic paradigm felt pretty spot-on for our times. Also, finally hearing John Carpenter’s (slightly updated) Halloween theme in a movie theatre gave me the best kind of goosebumps (I saw the first Halloween on TV, being born several years after 1978). It’s still perfect.
