Halloween 2018 - additional musing

Halloween 2018 (HalloGREEN) isn’t the perfect return to form for The Shape, his Peeping Tom antics have been replaced by quick mostly random kills.  If anything, the new incarnation of Michael Myers represents a perfect amalgam of the sequel versions of The Shape; a robotic killing machine slowly walking from house to house on Halloween randomly killing people in his path.  His supernatural elements have been down played but there is still an aura of mystery about him; we are presented with the mere shape of a man, refusing to speak, defined only by killing.

The recent blu-ray release of the film included several glossy studio produced bonus features that give a quick look at the behind the scenes making of the film, the most notable bonus feature being the deleted and extended scenes.  What struck me about these scenes is that they all aped the original film in some way, paying homage to one movie or another, like the cut shower scene that plays out like the shower scene in Psycho.  It was a fun nod, but not really needed in a film chock full of homages and fan letters to the Halloween franchise.  There is a deleted scene of a hanging dog, perhaps paying homage to the poor pooch that Michael ate in the original movie, but again superfluous and not needed, a pace killer in an already uneven film.  It’s unclear if Michael kills the dog to eat from it, or if it’s merely to display in Haddonfield to scare the local residents as kind of a grim impromptu deco art piece.   

I loved the third act, but some of what made the original movie effective as a creepster was its slow burn; Michael slowly circling in on Haddonfield and stalking his victims, setting up his Halloween ritual with Judith’s gravestone and Laurie’s friends, that creeping methodical approach was paramount to the success and atmosphere of the original. HalloGREEN is more contemporary in its approach, Michael doesn’t spend as much time setting up the pieces as he does knocking them down like an animal unleashed from its cage. 

In the original Dr. Loomis’s heavy-handed talk about pure evil in the original made Michael seem more supernatural in a way as if his soul was consumed completely by some foreign and unknowable darkness.  This movie seems to ground him a little more, Dr. Sartain asserts he can speak but chooses not to.  That suggested to me that Michael’s act was a deliberate one; he’s more than a puppet on the strings of some dark entity, that he purposely chose to separate himself from humanity, perhaps like a dark sorcerer practicing black magic attempting to elevate him or herself in the realms of chaos away from humanity, away from any center.  Practitioners of black chaos magic are said to focus on a disturbing event or image during ritual, something that tears down the fabric of morally relative to support their personal praxis and further their elevation in the spiritual realm; perhaps Michael is practicing a form of this, with his focus on recreating the murder of Judith, a dark act that defined him ever since.  If anything is certain, Michael deliberately has separated himself from the rest of humanity, shedding form and social standing to become a sick caricature of man.   

LAURIE WAS RIGHT, this world is a nightmare, we lie to ourselves to sleep at night.  Lying to yourself is fundamental to a sound mind, horror grounds us in this society of comfort, brings us back to the cold harsh landscape of this world where nobody is equal, nobody cares, and all we have are our dreams and hopes and lies to fend off insanity in the face of utter meaninglessness and nihilism.

Depression is the default mindset of the woke; only through defining ourselves through meaning and purpose are we given any hope of shaping the world in our image, but the horror will always remain.  The horror of reality is a perpetual monkey on your back, placate it with purpose.  Feed it with horror fantasy, but balance it with real experience, learn to live on the fringes of civilization as the modern world collapses; embrace the horror of nature, give yourself to the frenzied ecstasy of fear in the night.  Learn from the night creatures, mimic their ways, for the secret wisdom of the world is whispered through the wind in their wings and written in the blood on their claws.

When every institution fails In the end the only thing that can save us from the fear of the boogeyman, of the night, of the steady march of death, is the true love and connection of a family.  of blood.  of tribe.  we cannot hide from it, it will find us in our most sacred and secure spots.  its inevitable, like fate.