The following story contains spoilers for the upcoming sequel to Halloween, so stop reading now if you don't want any details.
This has become a trend, as of late. Sequels come around, and connect to the first or second installment of a popular film franchise. Only, in the process, they ignore the sequels that exist already, and just build on the story that they want to follow. This is what David Gordon Green and Danny McBride are attempting to do with John Carpenter's classic horror masterpiece, Halloween, as they introduce a new chapter that builds off of the original without acknowledging the baggage of, say, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.
Jamie Lee Curtis took the stage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas to tease her return to the role of Laurie Stroud 40 years after she originated the part at the age of 19. She celebrated that outside of Star Wars, this was the only example of the same actor playing he same part 40 years later. Then, she transitioned over to footage, and hot damn, was it amazing.
The hook of the movie blends the new wave of true-crime documentary case solving (so popular on streaming platforms now) with the classic aesthetic of John Carpenter's original. We meet a documentary crew who is heading back to Illinois to profile Laurie and her family 40 years after the attack by Michael Myers. In the process of researching and filming their true-crime doc, they encounter Michael in the high-security hospital that has detained him since the events of the first movie. And, in the yard of the facility, they present Michael with a gift... his original mask.
From there, we catch up with Laurie, who actually admits that she has been hoping (for 40 years) that Michael would escape. Why? So she can kill him, she states, and she fires a live round into a mannequin she has stationed around her house for target practice. The footage looks worn and dusty in the best ways, dated, as if it also has been waiting 40 years to be let loose. Which is exactly what happens. A prison transport bus flips. Michael was on it. And now he's on the loose, heading for Laurie.
The footage in the Halloween presentation was visceral and scary, with a visual hue that tilted back to the look of the original. The scares were both tense and intense, with Michael threatening Laurie's granddaughter as she sat in a bathroom stall (Michael actually reaches over the top of the stall and drops a handful of human teeth to the ground before he starts hammering on the door, to be let in). There's a spectacular closest scare at the end of the footage. All in all, it looks riveting, terrifying and perfectly in line with the original film.
David Gordon Green directs this new Halloween, from a screenplay he cooked up with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley. This looks like the ideal extension of the original story, and I can't wait for this trailer to drop so I can look it over again and again. Halloween opens in theaters on October 19.
