It may be hard to remember, given it’s nearly been 15 years since this was true, but David Gordon Green was once a small-scale indie director who often made films focusing on communities before he got caught in the literal undertow of Seth Rogen-styled comedies and was pushed out to the unfamiliar waters of Hollywood genre “content.” His time spent afloat here has been bizarre, to say the very least, especially before he became the new auteur-in-residence behind Blumhouse’s biggest properties: He had a few hits (Pineapple Express, Stronger), a few misses (Our Brand is Crisis, The Sitter, Your Highness), and occasionally returned to his roots for some fascinating small-scale cinema (Joe, Prince Avalanche, Manglehorn). Until Halloween hit in 2018, it felt like he was slowly becoming more famous for his TV work — when you’re working on shows as good as Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones, is it really that surprising? — but, again, him taking the reins from Rob Zombie and crafting a pretty great “legacyquel” transformed that trajectory. Now the dude’s got a deal worth many millions of dollars to make Exorcist films for Blumhouse, and, of course, has two Halloween films left in the pipeline, the first of which, Halloween Kills, arrives in theaters (and on Peacock, but come on) this week, and represents in some part a meeting of the Gordon Green of yore and the one with the fat stacks.
In fitting with the tradition of Halloween IIs, Halloween Kills picks up mere minutes after the Strode family has fled their burning family home, believing that they’ve finally triumphed over Michael Myers, the ghastly Shatner-masked killer that they’ve trapped in the basement. But the Haddonfield Fire Department has other ideas, and races to the scene, keen on putting out the fire before it starts spreading to the woods and the other houses in the area, serving up a veritable buffet of public servants for The Shape, who promptly escapes after massacring the firemen, fleeing into the suburban Illinois woods. This, of course, is all in the trailers, so you don’t have to worry too much about spoilers, and I promise I won’t tell you many more of the specifics — from here on, this is a generalization zone, full of hand-waving and allusion and whatnot, because a lot of this movie hangs on your expectations. Perhaps that’s why so many have already found it to be particularly disappointing compared to 2018’s reboot or even the Zombie films (which are, in true vulgar auteur fashion, pretty good if you can handle how rough they all), but I think they might be approaching the film in the wrong way: this isn’t only a Halloween movie, of which there have been a ton of genuinely horrible ones so the bar-to-clear is pretty low anyhow, but it’s a David Gordon Green film.
Much like how Zombie’s Halloween II was when the thesis for the man’s take on the series truly began to emerge — numerous folks online have compared it to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in the way that it viscerally deals with grief and trauma in the aftermath of a universe-rending series of crimes — Halloween Kills is the first movie of the Gordon Green era to actually liberate itself from the Carpenter template and attempt to explore new ground. He already set up the pieces in this last installment: the status quo was reset, and though a few things did change (everyone’s older, obviously, but, more importantly, the sheer brutality of Zombie’s WWE-style Myers was carried over), the song, for the most part, remained the same. Here, Green’s focus expands to cover the whole of Haddonfield rather than just on the Strode family, whose in-continuity connection to the killer was severed by the reboot, which allows Green to explore the impact that such brutality would have on the lizard brains of the panicked and also-affected by the killer’s violence. Sure, it may feel similar to “The Monsters Are Out On Maple Street,” but Gordon Green (especially when paired with co-writer Danny McBride) has enough of his own voice to make this kind of community-wide panic feel more compelling than it could be in other hands. There’s an old, famous line from Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones claims that “[a] person is smart. People are stupid,” and that is the mindest Gordon Green has carried over into this film, though perhaps even that one smart person isn’t bright enough to avoid The Shape when he finally comes for them.
Once again, Green’s pairing of mild and genial humor — which oftentimes refuses to implicate the characters as “bad people,” defying the sex-drugs-rock and roll ethos of a lot of slasher victims that tries to implicate their behavior as a reason why they’re getting murdered by a random dude in a mask — with hideously brilliant gore and metal-as-fuck violence is intoxicating (it’s always a mystery to me why people feel the need to put Gordon Green and Zombie up against each other, as if it were a contest, given that the former seems to have a great appreciation for what the latter brought to the table, given that theft might be one of the greatest forms of directorial flattery in horror cinema). These moments remain the standouts, though they’re not as well assisted by the moment-to-moment composure of the in-between scenes as they were in the last film. Whole stretches of the film look too sharp and just kind of odd-to-the-eye in that way that only a certain kind of digital cinema can produce, and perhaps it’s due to a small change in the kinds of cameras that were used in the project rather than just a kind of aesthetic collapse. There is no scene as well-executed as the tracking shot following Michael as he murders his way across Haddonfield in the 2018, but that might be made up by John Carpenter’s astonishing score, which is somehow even better than in the last one. For all of you who, like myself, don’t listen to soundtracks in your spare time, you might actually bump this one on the way home from the theater, much like I did.
Still, I can absolutely see why the response to Halloween Kills has been, to say the very least, mixed: This is a different animal than 2018, whose combination of smart characterization, gore, and, most importantly, really great pacing provided a good framework for the series to return to power as one of the premiere slasher franchises in cinema. This is a shaggier and stranger movie that doesn’t fit comfortably into the subgenre’s conventions, and, given that Halloween Ends is coming in Fall 2022, you’d have to be dumb to not realize that you’re not going to get a ton of fulfillment from this installment’s ending, given that a delayed catharsis is implied by that very title. It feels like a cop-out to say “wait and see where this goes,” but it honestly does feel incomplete to review this film without seeing its pairing, akin to, perhaps, watching something like The Matrix Reloaded with no idea of what Revolutions would do with everything it set up (I’m not saying that this is even an ounce as complicated as what that film did to its audiences, but, again, a whole lot of set-up and little payoff only works so much before you start disappointing people). But given that I’ve enjoyed Gordon Green’s prior work about how communities deal with one another — one can imagine an aged Bust-Ass from All the Real Girls making an appearance before getting his ass slain by the Shape in a predictably goofy fashion — I found his approach to Haddonfield here, good and bad in equal measure like every small town he’s studied, to be quite endearing and an intriguing, if not entirely successful, departure from tradition. Bring on Halloween Ends.