Halloween Kills (2021) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 49

Halloween Kills is the angriest movie in the series, and it's also one of the most divisive. I'm comfortable with both of those things. It's a film built around one night and one question: what happens when an entire town decides it's had enough? The answer, as you might guess, isn't good for anyone, and the film refuses to pretend otherwise.

The timeline alone tells a story. Director David Gordon Green and his co-writers, Danny McBride and Scott Teems, shot the film in Wilmington, North Carolina, between September and early November 2019. It was originally scheduled for October 2020, then delayed by COVID-19, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, 2021, and hit theaters on October 15, 2021, with a simultaneous run on paid Peacock tiers. For a movie about a town that's been holding its breath since 1978, it's fitting that the audience had to wait a year to exhale. It opened at number one with about $49.4 million, and it earned roughly $133 million worldwide against a $20 million budget.

What I love about this film is its scale. The 2018 Halloween was about one woman's long, private war with a killer. Kills opens that war up to the entire community. The story picks up right where the last movie left off, with Laurie Strode's house in flames and a town beginning to wake up. Jamie Lee Curtis spends much of the film in a hospital bed, but she's still the center of gravity, and Judy Greer and Andi Matichak carry the next generation with real emotional force. Meanwhile, the film hands the wheel to a character from the original: Tommy Doyle, the boy Laurie babysat in 1978, now grown up and played by Anthony Michael Hall. He becomes the leader of a mob of survivors determined to hunt down Michael Myers once and for all, chanting "Evil dies tonight" as they go, as if saying it enough times could make it true.

This is where the film does its smartest trick, which is dragging the franchise's history back into the room. Kyle Richards returns as Lindsey Wallace, Charles Cyphers returns as Sheriff Leigh Brackett, and the film cuts back to the night of 1978 with younger actors, including Thomas Mann as a young Frank Hawkins and Airon Armstrong as a younger Michael. Archive footage from the original film and Halloween II is woven in too, and to my eye the flashbacks work hard to match the grainy, shadow-soaked visual language of Carpenter's 1978 film. You can almost hear the hum of the streetlights. Even the shape itself has some pedigree: James Jude Courtney plays Michael, and Nick Castle, who wore the mask in the original 1978 film, appears in some scenes. For a fan, it's a thrill to see so much history stitched into one movie.

The action is relentless. The film's best-known sequence puts a fire crew in the path of Michael at his most primal: a burning house, a brigade that thinks it's answering an ordinary emergency, and then the shape stepping out of the smoke with a Halligan bar in his hand. It's brutal, and it gives the mythology a jolt of raw power, because Michael's strength is treated like a force of nature rather than a gimmick.

That's also where I find the most interesting contrast with Rob Zombie's 2007 take on the character. Both versions are physically punishing, but they feel like different animals. Zombie's Michael is a damaged person, someone whose rage you can trace to a broken childhood. David Gordon Green's Michael is closer to weather: colder, cleaner, and less interested in cruelty than in inevitability. One makes you feel the pain. The other makes you feel how little you can do about it. The climactic confrontation with the mob was reportedly filmed on a rotating, lazy-Susan-style stage, which helps explain why those scenes feel disorienting in all the right ways.

John Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies scored the film, and the single "Unkillable" is exactly what it sounds like. The end credits are accompanied by Ghost's "Hunter's Moon," a single released separately from the soundtrack.

Not everyone's on board, and I'd be lying if I said the critics were. It sits at 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 42 on Metacritic, and audiences gave it a B− on CinemaScore, lower than the 2018 film's B+. Critics praised the effects, score, cinematography, and cast, especially Curtis, Greer, and Matichak, while knocking the screenplay and direction. That's a fair assessment. But I think the film's messiness is honest. It's about people who don't know what to do with their fear, so they do the worst possible thing with it, and it doesn't try to make that look tidy.

If you've been following this countdown, you can see how it connects. Michael has been absent and present all week: skipped entirely in Halloween III, stalking his way through Halloween 5, and heading for the trilogy's conclusion in Halloween Ends.

So here's my question. Halloween Kills suggests that a mob can be more frightening than the monster it's chasing. When fear turns into a crowd, do you think the town is any safer, or is it just a bigger target?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.