It’s weird wrapping up Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and knowing that I’ll be working through a second entire continuity by tomorrow. The Halloween multiverse is such a delightful trainwreck. In any case, for today’s 31 Days of Halloween, I watched Halloween H20, something I haven’t seen in over 15 years.
I’m quite surprised I liked in as much as I did, to be honest. In any case, let’s continue our 31 Days of Halloween Vol. II project, shall we?
I was eleven years old when Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) was released. But even at eleven years old, there were three things that I knew coming into it. First, it had a terrible title. Second, this movie seemed to ignore a bunch of previous movies. Third, I was excited to see Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode.
Halloween H20 owes a lot to the success of Scream (1996), released just two short years earlier and a year after Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. The fact that Halloween H20 landed as well as it did is a small miracle, in a way, but audience sophistication had grown thanks to Scream’s meta-slasher approach. But Halloween H20 also ended up learning the wrong lessons from this success, too, and there is little chance of the franchise going beyond two or three movies of a single continuity ever again.
Part of the success that can be attributed to Halloween H20 comes from one of the architects of the meta-slasher, Kevin Williamson. Writer of the screenplay for Scream, Williamson in many ways was a good fit for delivering on a new Michael Myers story; Scream is a perfect slasher film that relies on the understanding of horror films on a fundamental level. Audiences were conditioned by Scream to have much more to say and critique in slasher films, and when it came time to return to the well of Halloween, Williamson and audiences alike knew exactly what worked best in a Halloween film and were happy to see an orchestration of the pieces and jettisoning of continuity to get back to the basics: Michael Myers and Laurie Strode.
Everyone knew what made a good Halloween, or at least a profitable one, and were willing to afford any contrivance to put Michael and Laurie back in focus. If that meant Laurie faked her death after Halloween II, so be it. It’s not any more out there than the psychic daughter and cults around Haddonfield, right? The film that taught Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks the rules of surviving a horror movie in Scream had been elevated to a holy book in slasher cinema, and if you’re going to try to follow up the bible, you better play the hits. People actually seem to care about these sorts of things in the mid-1990s.
Looking at the film, the structure of Halloween H20 borrows heavily from the original Halloween to such a degree that the principal action – Michael’s actual killing spree – doesn’t really happen until about an hour in. There are a couple of slayings to open the film, but after this inciting incident the film slows down dramatically to focus on Laurie’s new circumstance and to give Michael plenty of time to menace. We see that Laurie, now Keri Tate, has never recovered from the events of Halloween and Halloween II, and that her functioning alcoholism is what seems to get her through most of her day. She has a difficult relationship with her teenage son John (Josh Hartnett), who, while supportive of his mother, mercifully never knew his uncle and is convinced he’s dead. He has a different generational trauma to deal with from living with a traumatized person.
The film also pares the cast down to about four teens, Laurie and her current beau, Will (Adam Arkin), and security guard Ronny (LL Cool J). The film emphasizes a smaller scale with Michael’s unexplainable arrival. He and Laurie both vanish twenty years earlier and seem to converge yet again. No reason or explanation, but plenty of cleverness on display from Michael. This may be the most we see Michael “think” through his massacres in the franchise, presenting some interesting moments where we get more of a sense of the thinker involved.
Because the film is so stripped down to its essentials, it also makes the film’s climax, a brawl between Laurie and Michael, pretty affecting. Laurie is terrified of Michael, who wouldn’t be, but she is also tired and takes the fight to him. It becomes the best twenty minutes of the film, culminating in a cheerworthy moment where she finally beheads the monster. In many ways, it would be a perfect ending for the franchise. But we don’t live in such a world where there isn’t a Halloween film down the pipe, and the triumph of Halloween H20 is undercut in the most frustrating way possible in Halloween: Resurrection, which immediately killed the stab at a Halloween series.
I hadn’t seen Halloween H20 in about fifteen years before I watched it tonight. grew up watching it a lot as a kid until I stopped – not sure why. Life, maybe? I am not the biggest fan of the Myers siblings concept, either. But Halloween H20 worked well enough on my rewatch that had they never followed it up, I’d have considered it a satisfying enough ending.
But that’s just not how this franchise works, is it?
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