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halloween_2018_sequel_news.jpg

2018's 'Halloween' Is Getting A Sequel And Why Can't Things Just End?

By Jodi Smith | Industry | June 20, 2019 |

By Jodi Smith | Industry | June 20, 2019 |


halloween_2018_sequel_news.jpg

I was late to the party but I did finally watch Halloween 2018, aka Halloween 2: Ignore All Those Other Flicks. It started a little bit slowly and held no surprises for me in the end, but I felt it was a worthy successor to the original 1978 film. It didn’t pollute the storyline with studio-mandated familial ties or erupt into a multi-sequel explosion of Michael Myers returning from the dead over and over again like your more fantasy-based serial killers (Freddy Krueger, Ted Cruz).

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) didn’t get trapped in a hospital or slapped across the face with the realization that she was the baby sister little Michael just wanted to reconnect with and kill. She grew up, she suffered from the trauma of encountering Myers and losing all of her friends in bloody, horrific ways, and she made a plan to end the bastard. Sure, she screwed up her relationships along the way, but that’s what happens when you have already lived through a worst case scenario with the knowledge that it might occur again.

SPOILER
My favorite part of the new Halloween came when three generations of Strode women took what they had either taught themselves or been forced to learn and used that wisdom to take Myers down together. Karen (Judy Greer) playing the slasher trope of emotionally overwrought female chickening out at the last minute as a ruse to lure Myers to the doorway was delicious, as was Allyson (Andi Matichak) following the lead of her grandmother and mother during their encounter with The Shape.

The ending was perfect. The men that didn’t know how to listen to Laurie all died and the women finished things up nice and tidy. So it pisses me off to a great degree to learn that Blumhouse is planning to film a Halloween sequel for a likely October 2020 release.

NO. WHY. NO.

Jeff Fradley, David Gordon Green, and Danny McBride pulled the Halloween franchise out of the cheesy muck that still bogs down other 1980s horror icons despite attempted reboots and remakes throughout the last three decades. They did it. They took Myers from just another generic unkillable machine back to a terrifying man whose only impulse is to kill his targets and anyone standing in his way. Why? WHO KNOWS WHY? Rob Zombie sure as hell doesn’t actually know, though he tried to fool us.

A sequel to the 2018 box office hit is taking the franchise right back down the path that it purposely veered from, making it all moot. Perhaps the biggest problem with horror movies right now isn’t their predictability or their lack of new ideas but the stance that everything is within a universe that needs in-depth exploration and explanation over the course of as many movies as can be splorped out of the studio machine.

Let us let sleeping murderers lie just this once unless we’re talking about a haunted urn of Myers ashes trying to stab people. I’ll pay cash money for that.



Image sources (in order of posting): Blumhouse Productions, Universal Pictures