Halloween

Michael has spent four decades incarcerated.

He doesn't speak.

He doesn't explain himself.

He simply exists behind the walls of Smith's Grove Sanitarium.

True-crime podcasters Aaron Korey and Dana Haines visit Michael as they investigate the Haddonfield murders.

Aaron brings something with him.

Michael's mask.

He holds it behind Michael and tries to provoke a reaction.

Other patients become increasingly agitated.

Michael doesn't move.

But somehow the mask still feels like it belongs to him.

Laurie Strode survived 1978.

But the experience shaped everything that followed.

She lives in an isolated, heavily fortified house.

She owns firearms.

She has security systems.

She practises shooting.

She has prepared escape routes and turned her home into something approaching a fortress.

To everyone else, Laurie appears obsessed.

To Laurie, she's ready.

Because she has spent forty years believing one thing.

Michael Myers will come back.

Laurie's obsession came at a cost.

Her relationship with her daughter Karen is deeply damaged.

Karen remembers a childhood filled with survival training rather than normal family life.

She learned to shoot.

She learned how to defend herself.

Eventually, Laurie removed her from her care.

Now Karen has a daughter of her own.

Allyson.

Laurie desperately wants a relationship with her granddaughter, but Michael Myers still stands between every generation of the Strode family.

Even while locked away, Michael has remained part of their lives.

Michael is scheduled to be transferred from Smith's Grove.

The transport never reaches its destination.

The bus crashes.

Patients escape.

And somewhere in the darkness, Michael Myers walks free again.

Forty years after Haddonfield first encountered the Shape, he's heading home.

Michael eventually retrieves his mask from the podcasters.

It's weathered now.

Aged.

Damaged by time.

But once James Jude Courtney puts it on, Michael Myers is immediately recognisable.

The film deliberately strips away much of the mythology accumulated across the sequels.

No Thorn.

No supernatural explanation.

No sibling destiny.

Michael is simply Michael.

And on Halloween night, he begins killing again.

One of the film's strongest sequences simply follows Michael through Haddonfield.

Children are everywhere.

Costumes fill the streets.

People are preparing for Halloween parties.

Michael walks among them almost unnoticed.

Then he begins entering houses.

The sequence captures something fundamental about Carpenter's original idea.

Michael doesn't need an elaborate lair.

He doesn't need a grand plan.

He can simply walk through an ordinary neighbourhood and transform familiar spaces into places of terror.

One of the biggest changes is delivered almost casually.

The famous revelation from Halloween II that Laurie and Michael were siblings?

Not anymore.

In this continuity, it was merely a rumour.

That restores something frightening about their original relationship.

Michael didn't attack Laurie in 1978 because of some hidden family connection.

She happened to cross his path.

Laurie's obsession with Michael therefore isn't necessarily shared.

She's spent forty years waiting for him.

Michael may not have spent forty years thinking about her at all.

Dr Ranbir Sartain became Michael's psychiatrist after Dr Loomis.

But where Loomis ultimately wanted Michael stopped, Sartain is fascinated by him.

He wants to understand what Michael experiences.

What drives him.

What happens when predator and survivor meet again.

That fascination eventually crosses a line.

Sartain doesn't merely want to observe Michael.

He wants to create the conditions necessary to study him.

It proves catastrophically foolish.

Michael Myers has never been particularly interested in participating in psychiatric research.

Will Patton plays Officer Frank Hawkins, whose life was also shaped by Michael's original rampage.

Hawkins helped apprehend Michael in 1978.

He has carried his own history with the Shape ever since.

When Michael escapes, Hawkins immediately understands the danger.

Like Laurie, he knows this isn't simply another escaped prisoner.

Haddonfield has seen this man before.

Allyson begins the night worried about ordinary teenage problems.

Then Michael reaches her generation.

Suddenly, the stories surrounding her grandmother aren't stories anymore.

The Shape is real.

The trauma Laurie carried for decades becomes something Allyson can see firsthand.

Michael Myers has returned to the Strode family.

But this time Laurie isn't the frightened babysitter from 1978.

She's waiting for him.

Eventually Michael reaches Laurie's home.

This is where Halloween cleverly reverses the original film.

In 1978, Michael stalked Laurie through dark rooms.

Now Laurie stalks Michael.

She moves through the house with a gun.

She checks doorways.

She searches shadows.

At one point, Michael disappears from view in a deliberate echo of Carpenter's original ending.

Only now does Laurie understand exactly how the game works.

She has spent forty years learning it.

Karen initially appears to reject everything her mother taught her.

Then Michael arrives.

Suddenly all that childhood training matters.

Laurie, Karen and Allyson become three generations fighting the same monster.

The story isn't simply about Laurie confronting Michael anymore.

It's about the trauma Michael created passing through a family — and that family finally turning against him together.

Laurie's fortified basement initially seems like a refuge.

It isn't.

It's a trap.

Michael is manoeuvred inside.

Metal barriers seal the exits.

Laurie sets the house on fire.

For once, Michael Myers isn't trapping Laurie Strode.

Laurie Strode has trapped Michael Myers.

The three women escape as flames consume the house.

Michael stands below them.

Watching.

Burning.

And apparently defeated.

Of course, this is Halloween.

Jamie Lee Curtis's return as Laurie was central to the film's identity.

This isn't the Laurie of H20.

That continuity no longer exists here.

This Laurie has lived with the events of the original film for forty uninterrupted years.

Curtis plays her as tough but damaged.

Capable but isolated.

Prepared but consumed.

The movie doesn't pretend that surviving Michael turned Laurie into an uncomplicated action hero.

Preparing for his return has cost her decades of her life.

James Jude Courtney handles most of Michael's physical performance, while original Shape actor Nick Castle also returned for an appearance.

Courtney's Michael feels older without feeling weaker.

His movements are controlled.

Deliberate.

Heavy.

The film understands that Michael doesn't need to sprint or perform elaborate feats to be frightening.

Sometimes all he needs to do is enter the frame.

Jamie Lee Curtis wasn't the only important name to return.

John Carpenter came back to the franchise as an executive producer and, alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, contributed to the film's music.

The familiar Halloween theme returned with a modernised score that immediately connected the film to 1978.

Four decades later, Carpenter's music still sounded like Michael Myers.

The continuity decision was bold.

The filmmakers didn't attempt to untangle everything that happened after 1978.

They simply removed it.

That means this timeline is remarkably straightforward:

Halloween (1978).

Then Halloween (2018).

Forty years apart.

Everything else becomes another branch of the franchise.

For a series famous for complicated continuity, the simplicity was refreshing.

Naturally, it wouldn't remain a two-film timeline for long.

Halloween became a major box-office success and revitalised the franchise.

Michael Myers was once again a major theatrical horror character.

Jamie Lee Curtis was Laurie Strode again.

And rather than ending the story, the burning house created the beginning of a new trilogy.

Because Michael survived.

Halloween Kills would pick up almost immediately from that same night.

Then Halloween Ends would attempt to close the story between Laurie and Michael.

But in 2018, the objective was simpler.

Strip away forty years of mythology.

Return to Haddonfield.

Put Michael Myers back behind the mask.

And let Laurie Strode face the nightmare that had followed her since she was seventeen.

Forty years earlier, Laurie had survived the night he came home.

This time?

She was waiting for him.