When David Gordon Green took on the project of Halloween Kills in 2018, he had to erase almost 40 years of bad sequels. It was a plan to reboot the Halloween series, which had fallen on bad days.
The Director’s main job in this franchise was simply to restore the cinematic gamesmanship that the series was known for, along with the scary-classic mystique of the original Halloween- which in itself was a ripoff of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But then, this was the template for slasher movies back then, so there is no point cribbing about it.
Halloween Kills Is More Slasher-Friendly, Than Horror
Interestingly, Green accomplished it with Halloween Kills. The movie has as much relation to the OG Halloween movie as The Force Awakens has to Star Wars, which somehow ends up emphasizing the incredible simulation that this movie comprises. Needless to say, Green had the necessary spirit and craft which would help replicate the elemental midnight B-movie canniness which John Carpenter boasted. The OG Halloween was scary and diverting enough while showing the world how cool Jamie Lee Curtis was.
In retrospect, Halloween Kills is truly a slasher, as it undermines the fear that OG Halloween put forward. The 2018 movie was set almost 40 years after the original one, which somehow ended up taking the audience back to the days of John Carpenter. But in this movie, it is all about Michael Myers going on a rampage with a kitchen-blade, where it simply turns out to be an amalgamation of all the Halloween formula with the obsessions and tropes of today.
Make no mistake, Halloween Kills isn’t a horror masterpiece. While Halloween night may be the masterpiece of Michael Myers’, the 2021 movie is simply a slasher movie that stops being scary and is simply imbued with topical pablum and several parallel plot strands that don’t seem to be going anywhere
