Video Ferox

I couldn’t rightly finish an inclusive series of reviews of the HALLOWEEN films without taking a look at the remake.

A remake was a wise decision. Not only was the slashing and stalking fans expected from Michael Myers getting pretty old, but so was Michael himself. A new HALLOWEEN sequel in 2007 would have featured a fifty year old Michael Myers (although estimates vary). Too old to be wearing a mask? Maybe not. But old enough to join AARP? Definitely.

While we all know Michael could surely use some bitchin’ health insurance after being continually pummeled and mistreated by both movie victims and movie writers alike, the idea of him being able to reminisce about Vietnam, Watergate, and other parent-related historical events over a free cup of coffee doesn’t exactly fill us with fear. It pains us to see so many of our elders in this day and age having to continue working past the age of retirement, and it would have been in poor taste to force Michael to count himself among their numbers.

Of course, this wasn’t a retirement in the normal sense. A better word might be “reincarnation.” Or perhaps “reconstitution.” Or we can use a neologism suggested by the new filmmaker himself: Reimagining.

This word is indeed a clever word. Reimagining allows you to evade certain accusations. You got this wrong. You missed the point. No, I didn’t. I was reimagining.

Thanks to this single-worded disclaimer we can’t really bash the new HALLOWEEN over the head with the old HALLOWEEN. We can, on the other hand, still badmouth it till it’s bloody so long as we have some bigger and badder denunciations than that it shows Michael Myer’s face.

Honestly though, there are very few occasions when the movie pauses to offer contributions to the critical arsenal. The two hour film (I’m watching the unrated version) isn’t bad. It’s violent as all hell, sure. And there’s a lot of sex too. But when have I ever heard you complain about either of those two things?

The cast listing (if I may steal a metaphor) has more names of veteran genre actors than the flyer for an upcoming horror-con: Udo Kier (ANDY WARHOL’S DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN), Sybil Danning (THE TOMB), Clint Howard (every movie ever), Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), Sid Haig (SPIDER BABY), Danny Trejo (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN sequels) Bill Mosely (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2), and little Danielle Harris who played Jaime Strode in HALLOWEENs 4 and 5.

All these faces, along with the package-deal of their noteworthy performances, help the movie look really cool. And the apt soundtrack (Misfits’ “Halloween II,” BOC’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” somebody’s cover of that Alice Cooper song from that one Alice Cooper album) helps it sound really cool too. It’s got all the little peripherals correct. Now how’s the writing? And in what way is it a reimagining?

A major departure from the original HALLOWEEN is the amount of time the new film spends focusing on Michael’s early years. We get almost forty-five minutes of back story before we meet a teenage Laurie Strode and her soon-to-be-dead girlfriends on October 31 of the present day. While I really enjoy the first part of the movie and even find the account of Michael’s childhood more interesting than the story that follows, it does sort of give the movie a barbell shape, with the weight of the film distributed between two sides without very much connecting them.

The first part of the HALLOWEEN remake focuses on Michael (and to a lesser degree Loomis), while the remainder of the film focuses on Laurie Strode, who though shown as a child in the earlier half, is effectively a new character that we’re suddenly introduced to halfway through the film. Of course Michael appears in the later half as well, but as a mute and deranged maniac, so there’s little to connect him psychologically to the character we had seen developing in the early part of the film. Just as in the course of the sequels, Michael is divested of his humanity, only the remake of HALLOWEEN accomplishes Michael’s dehumanization within the course of its own story.

This dehumanization of Michael ultimately throws the film off balance, as we no longer know who to follow in the remaining hour and fifteen minutes. Loomis is the only character to remain present for the duration, but he’s certainly underutilized in the latter half and unfortunately seems less the dramatic foil to Michael than he might have been. And Michael, of course, as in sequels past, has no psychology¹.

Nevertheless, the new HALLOWEEN is a pretty fun horror flick, and it even manages to resist the urge to be “cute” as few sequels have. No overt references to other horror movies (like H20’s hockey mask joke) take us out of its reality, and the filmmakers even manage to avoid exploiting our knowledge of the plot.

A perfect opportunity for this kind of exploitation might have been the final moments of the film. This scene brings to mind the conclusion of the original where Michael crashes to the lawn only to disappear a few seconds later.

In the remake, both Laurie and Michael fall and Laurie blacks out. This would have been a fitting opportunity to rehash the ending that we all expected: Michael’s disappearance. Laurie would awaken to find herself alone on the lawn. Here filmmakers might have confounded our expectations. Just as we think the theme is about to cue and the movie end, Michael jumps out and a final battle ensues.

Nothing like this occurs in the film. When Laurie awakens she finds herself next to Michael who is himself — realistically — blacked out on the lawn. This restraint on the part of the filmmakers is a clear sign that they didn’t want to indulge in any “cute” twist but rather present a gritty and real film that wants us to forget as much as possible the original HALLOWEEN and see this new offering as a story of its own.

Of course, it’s implausible to expect audiences to completely forget the classic movie that is being restaged before their eyes. The absence of one detail in particular, present in the original but left behind in the new treatment, certainly has a powerful effect on the reception of the new story: Michael’s supernatural aspects.

The original HALLOWEEN suggests that Michael was a normal child — the kind of child any of us might see playing in the yard next door, walking home from school, or attending our church’s Sunday service. Michael’s parents, though we get only a brief glimpse of them, look like anybody’s parents. And his house looks like anybody’s house. Yet unlike other children, Michael one day picked up a knife and killed his sister. This confounds our expectations of how normal six year old boys behave, because he did it for no reason — or no reason we can fathom.

The new HALLOWEEN suggests a reason — a few of them actually. Michael’s psychopathic episode — his murders — may have been influenced by his family life, the bullies at school, and a resulting lack of self-esteem. Furthermore, the mutilation of small animals is a psychopathic precursor that points towards brain abnormalities. These things fit into our understanding of the world — fit in a way that a normal six year old, with a good family life and no urge to mutilate animals, grabbing a knife and stabbing his sister does not.

The new Michael Myers fits into our picture of the world — our weltanschauung. We don’t have to reinterpret the universe in order to make sense of this new Michael. There’s nothing confounding or irreconcilable about him. We expect and accept that some people are criminally insane. That’s awful and scary, certainly, but it’s not chilling in the way the original Michael was.

The original Michael’s existence was something of a “prime movement,” an “acte gratuit,” an effect without a cause — and thus something that cannot be predicted or accounted for, an event beyond understanding, something wholly other.

I won’t say that the new filmmaker “got it wrong” because, as he said, the new HALLOWEEN is a reimagining. I will suggest that the film might have been more powerful, though, had he not reimagined this particular aspect.

Still, even with all reimaginings intact, HALLOWEEN’s new beginning is a pretty gory and violent movie. So if you like that sort of thing, definitely check it out!

P.S. Sadly world politics has its devastating influence on even things as remote as horror movies. Longtime HALLOWEEN producer Moustapha Akkad — who was himself a filmmaker with a genuine vision of bringing to life the beauty of his Muslim faith through film — died previous to work on this movie through injuries sustained during a terrorist attack in Jordan. The remake of HALLOWEEN was dedicated to his memory.

Notes:

¹ I should qualify that statement. In an interesting twist, Michael doesn’t want to kill Laurie Strode so much as he simply wants to keep her in his presence. We can ask the following questions: Why does he go out of his way to find her? Why does he kill her friends and family? An answer might be, so that he can protect her — as though the only role in which he could take any pride in his early life has now been monstrously distorted. If this is the case it’s a subtle suggestion indeed, especially since by the end of the film Michael seems to want to bash the shit out of his sister with a two by four.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Halloween, Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.