On today’s standards, a guy with a knife killing half of a dozen people doesn’t shock anymore.
Certain fears never die. We can lock the horror, keep it huddled on the center of a checkers board, wich goal is to immobilize the enemy piece, but the fear will remain there, even inaudible, waiting for the right moment to resurface. Years can go by, but the memory of a trauma will never be erased. Other things will be prioritized, hiding a certain information for a period of time, but, again, the fear will never die. Green’s new Halloween remains clear about that – from the start to finish. He is concerned about how the characters can react to the events of a traumatic episode. For example, the beginning of the feature was able to illustrated, between clocks, the time and the rhetoric about our mind’s issues and our dreams, for only then we enter the world of stories, legends, now informed through contemporary journalism.
How to understand the physiology of evil?
In the game that led Dr. Loomis to a simplistic contestation – that Michael Meyers was the raw state of all that is evil – Green was interested in the impact that evil has on the aggressor and the victim, prioritizing, of course, the second. Thus, in addition to being eery, the scene in which patients from an asylum start screaming around Michael, the only one who is silent and in the center of the picture, denounces the strength of a traumatic memory and how much the mask can be a figurative object of the human suffering.
When Carpenter released his greatest masterpiece, Halloween, 40 years ago, his interest was in a little town’s fear, wich provides insecurity and closed doors. Evil could come from where we least expected, the boogeyman would be an adult fear and create a enduring identity for the affected city.
After all, certain wounds are too much adults. Although Green points out the social scars created by Meyers punctually in the feature film, more in the pratics jokes (“I’m a doctor. Lock your doors”), since there is the population hiding in their homes, incarcerated by their own will, while the murderer feasts, the inner monsters present in the mother/daughter/granddaughter relationship matter much more to the film director.
From that perspective, it is beautiful to observe the changes that the director creates while he is paying homage to the characters and the cult of the original film. Meyers’ first appearance on a schoolyard lawn in the original changes to a Laurie on a mission, in a very similar frame (both times, as a teacher rants about destiny). In the family environment, by the way, Laurie represents the unspoken monster, who remains outside the family circle; it is she who takes Meyers’ place.
There are differences between the monsters that are part of our lives – internal, external, social. Laurie’s family carries a hole generation traumatized by a single monster, while the grandmother, who received the greatest impact, becomes the reference of an rueful emotional experience. She deals with it in many ways – as shown in the anguished scream in the car’s scene, or the alcoholism implicit in her story, or in the resignation of the bond with her daughter – and tries to change her narrative as we all would like: starting being in control. If we had the chance to be the commander of our lives, to use our knowledge to change certain decisions, how would we do it? If the memory of a trauma is much stronger and the evaluation of it is daily – we can imagine multiple options. And when someone keeps a single encounter in their memory for 40 years?
On that prospect, Green recreates the original’s scenarios with brilliant logic, just as Wes Craven had approached in Scream 4: the change of the aggressor and the attacked on a certain location. With that in mind, Laurie starts to live in a house where she exercises full authority, in environments that remind us the same ones that she becomes a victim in 40 years ago. The same room, the same wardrobe, the same situation – but with a twist, now she is the one with the a weapon and looks for her monster, she is the one who feeds revenge, she is the one who is after something. The visual rhyme with Laurie being hit and falling off the balcony, equal as Michael falls in the first film, mark this script very well. Laurie has become the monster chasing her own. At one point, this proposal is so great that the granddaughter herself screams when she comes across her grandmother’s personality in front of a field of dead dolls.
Family is the central theme of Halloween. In the present, with three distinct generations knowing Meyers, linked by blood.
But how to rebuild this history? The script works on this aspect from the very first scene, as said, when time and information are treated in a vital way for the return of the monsters in Haddonfield. Ahead, Green explores that step by step: our story starting to be told again in the cemetery and Meyers appear in the background, behind a tree.
Gradually, the legend sought by journalists, begins to revive, culminating in the magnificent scene at the gas station, where Meyers’ shadow is seen in the back, with a combination of exceptional focus (and very reminiscent of Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer), whose presence of the assassin is only shown in the suggestion of his shadow and the sound of a tool falling to the ground; in addition to a van’s signal who apoints the exactly word: “resurrection”.
The visual rhymes with the first films generate deepness. The journalists literally give their lifes for the story lives.
In the national emphasis, Meyers walking out the front door of a house with the US flag, watching people living between tricks and treats on the Halloweens night, dialogue with the monsters that we don’t talk about. Scenes such as when the viewer studies Meyers’ movements from the glass of the room until the victim is stabbed when she lowers the blinds, so that no one realizes what is happening there, or the murderer in a closet of a house, waiting to appear for whoever opened it, it more than cinematic. They express a great narrative value for a subgenre like slasher.
A sub-genre popularized about 40 years ago and whom gradually become a distant cinematic memory. Without the impact of the first experiences and deaths. In the new Halloween, therefore, David Gordon Green not only gives voice and life to one of the most iconic characters in the history of horror cinema, but also rescues a forgotten formula. Proving that, like the monsters that haunted Laurie Strode for 40 years, certain fears don’t die. Legends, memories, don’t die. They stay. They hope to return to society. No matter how long they are left behind, they will come back someday. Even if we burn them in a cage, we know: the horror survives.
