I’m a feverish John Carpenter fan, and I’ve spent the last two years going through his filmography at Black Gate. But I am not a Halloween fan—the Halloween franchise, that is. I love Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, although it wouldn’t make my top five of his films. (Serious competition at the peak of that pyramid.) I don’t have much interest or patience for the many sequels/reboots/remakes done over the past four decades. Except for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the one sequel without the iconic masked killer. That movie is so weird and baffling, yet also so infused with the spirit of the holiday (more so than the original), that it has a special place in the season for me. It’s by no means good, but Carpenter was still involved and it’s not just another slasher.
Despite my apathy for the Halloween franchise, I was looking forward to Halloween ’18, the third movie to just call itself Halloween and yet another timeline reboot. Like Halloween H20, the twentieth-anniversary installment, this fortieth-anniversary installment is poised as a direct sequel to the earliest films. However, Halloween ’18 goes H20 one better, since it also ignores Halloween II (1981), the movie that started the trend of over-complicating the franchise and its main figure, the masked killer known as “The Shape.” (Or, boringly, Michael Myers. I’m not calling him that. He’s always the Shape to me.)
Ryan Harvey 