Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
“My brother killed my sister when she was 17. With a really big, sharp kitchen knife.” – Laurie Strode
There’s no denying that the Halloween films had been run into the ground with Parts 4-6. The series that had started with no sequels in mind with (in my opinion) the best horror film of them all had run out of steam and creativity. They had become dull, pointless, devoid of any measure of tension, absent any shred of suspense. Halloween was dead.
But the 20th anniversary was coming up, and a film called Scream had made a major dent in the box office, being a homage of sorts to Halloween, and celebrating its tropes and what had over the ears become cliches. Scream writer Kevin Williamson had a notion to put the Halloween films back where they belonged. Friday the 13th veteran Steve Miner took the director’s chair and the scene was set to deliver the best Halloween film since the first. Big words?
This film is a prime example of a reboot that was much needed, and works perfectly.
First of all, completely forget everything that has happened since Michael Myers met his fiery death in Halloween 2. Halloween 3 was a totally different story. Nothing from Halloween 4-6 ever happened. Only Halloween 1&2 are canon here. They happened on Halloween night 1978. Now, it’s Halloween 1998. Okay? To set the mood and the continuity, the first bit of music we hear is “Mister Sandman” the closing theme from Halloween 2.
Dr Sam Loomis has passed away in the intervening years. But as the film opens, we hear his monologue, and we see his photograph;
“I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding, even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.”
In his final years, succumbing to ill health, he was cared for by his colleague from the first films, Nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens returning to the role). They moved to Langdon Illinois to a retirement house, which is where we see Nurse Marion returning in the evening. Someone has broken in and trashed the office, leaving behind an empty file folder marked “Laurie Strode”.
It’s the eve of Halloween, it’s twenty years later, Myers’s body was never found. But something has triggered him again. Now, he knows where Laurie is, and finally, the third time being the charm, kills Nurse Marion before stealing a car and heading for…. Whoa. Let me back up a little bit.
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is alive and well. Her death was faked and she was given a new identity. She now lives under the name of Keri Tate, and is the headmistress of a private boarding school in Northern California. (All these details would have been in the file.)
She is divorced, and has a seventeen-year-old son John (Josh Hartnett in his film debut). However, despite counselling, twelve step programs and self-help, she is still severely traumatised by the events of the evening she was babysitting while Myers came trick or treating.
There are a number of really cool flourishes to the film, the highlight for me is a cameo for Janet Leigh as a motherly, over-protective school secretary. Janet Leigh was Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother, and also starred as Marion Crane, Norman Bates’s shower stabbing victim in Psycho (1960) pretty much the first slasher movie. As the school closes for the weekend, the secretary Norma (get it?) says her goodbyes and walks to her car – the exact same car she drove to the Bates Motel in Psycho, as a refrain from Bernard Herrmann’s famous score plays wistfully in the background.
Yes, I mentioned the school’s closing for the weekend – and all the kids are going for a weekend field trip to Yosemite. Apart from Laurie’s troublesome brat, who decides to hide out in the school, without his mother knowing, partying with his girlfriend and another couple. (They want a private Halloween party, and oh, they’ll get one.)
Not that Laurie is planning a chaste weekend either, she’s in a relationship with school counsellor Will Brennan (Adam Arkin) and decides to tell him about her troubled past. And here we get a link that’s hinted at, but not followed through – but it’s intriguing. She mentions to Will that her sister Judith was 17 when 6-year-old Michael murdered her. And that SHE herself was 17 when Michael came for her in 1978. Her son John is now 17!
Of course, she doesn’t know that Myers is not only active again, because the contents of her file are missing and anybody who’d know to alert her that her records had gone is dead – and Michael is presumed dead anyway.
Consequently, we have the prefect setup for a brisk eighty-two-minute movie that delivers on every level. Myers hacks his way through the two superfluous teens easily, leaving only John and his girlfriend to just about make it to the house as Myers approaches and gives us the scene we’ve been waiting for as Laurie finally confronts the nightmare she’s been hallucinating about.
Poor Will doesn’t last very long, leading to Laurie driving John and his girlfriend to the school gates, telling them to get the police, before heading back alone to the school for a showdown. And what a showdown! Laurie becomes the opposite to the almost, but not quite victim she has been before. And in one scene, mutters an expletive when faced with the possibility of hiding in a wardrobe as she did in the first film. She’s a feral warrior and finally beats Myers down.
The emergency services arrive, presumably declaring Myers dead. They load his body-bagged corpse on to a gurney, when Laurie unexpectedly flips. Taking a cop’s gun, she orders the body to be loaded into an ambulance, which she then drives off at high speed. Keeping an eye on the gurney as she drives, she waits for the inevitable resurrection, and when it happens, she slams on the brakes and he goes frying through the windscreen before resurrecting again and being run over. Laurie crashes the ambulance down an embankment. Michael is pinned between the front of the vehicle and a tree.
He manages one more resurrection before Laurie decapitates him once and for all with a fireman’s axe she had stolen. She’s taking no chances this time. Done and done, as the wailing of approaching sirens can be heard.
On a personal note, this film is the one that really brought Halloween back for me in the nineties. For years, my preferred viewing of the series was the original, the second and then this one – and it really works well as a trilogy. I recommend it.
But there was more to come…