Halloween II

I have always thought that John Carpenter directed Halloween II. Up until today, I would have told you that he didn’t want to direct it, but after the massive success of the first one, he was told by the studio, the producers, or some such higher-up that they were going to make a sequel with or without him, and he decided it would be best if it was with him.

Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and the second part I guess I just made up. It is true that Carpenter didn’t really want there to be a sequel, had no interest in making one, but was pressured into making it. But he was never given an ultimatum, and he never agreed to direct. That job fell to Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter did write the script, along with the original film’s co-writer Debra Hill. He was also a producer and, depending on who you believe, Carpenter either came in during the filming stage and directed a few scenes himself, or had a large hand in post-production, adding in some extra violence and gore.

It is easy to see why I believed this was a John Carpenter film. His name is featured prominently in the credits (I guess I always overlook the Directed By card), he did write and produce this one (he basically completely bowed out of all the other films featuring Michael Myers after this – he did produce Halloween III, but Myers isn’t in that one), and this looks and feels like a John Carpenter film. That feeling is helped by the plot of this one taking place immediately after the original one; it stars most of the same cast and utilizes the same cinematographer, and Rosenthal has stated he intentionally mimicked Carpenter’s style in the first film.

This one gets a lot of hate in certain corners of the internet (and I now wonder if that isn’t because it was helmed by Rosenthal and not Carpenter), but I unabashedly love it. True, it isn’t as good as the first one, but it looks fantastic, has some great deaths, and the hospital setting is terrific.

It really does begin just as the original ends. Actually, it begins a couple of minutes into the ending of the first one. We revisit Michael Myers getting “killed” by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), but from a slightly different perspective. Then we watch him walk away.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to the hospital with some cuts and bruises and a pretty banged-up leg. Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a whole lot of screen time in this film. She’ll spend the first half of it basically lying in a hospital bed. She gets plenty of action in the back half, though. But first, we’ll spend time with various nurses and staff members of the hospital. They will mostly become cannon fodder for Michael Myers.

Myers will spend that first half of the film wandering around the town of Haddonfield, randomly killing folks. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) will do a poor job of hunting him down. Eventually, Myers will hear someone say something about how Laurie was sent to the hospital, and he’ll head that way. It all leads to a long showdown between Laurie, Loomis, and Michael Myers.

The stuff in the town is fine. There are some good kills, and it helps build tension to the hospital showdown. Pleasence plays Loomis even more hysterically than he does in the first. Having shot the man multiple times at the end of the first film, he’s now more sure than ever that Michael Myers is not human but something like a demon.

The hospital stuff is well done, if a little silly at times. One of the nurses, after getting yelled at for being late, decides to slip off with a boy to the lower decks, where there is some kind of therapeutic hot tub where she gets sexy (and dead). It always drives me a little crazy when hospital lights are turned off or dimmed. Sure, you can turn your room lights off, but hospitals are notoriously bright. They have to be. Doctors, nurses, and staff can’t function if they can’t see. But yeah, it makes the movie a lot moodier.

Those long hallways are used effectively, and Michael Myers still has a way of popping into a scene seemingly out of nowhere. I’d argue that Halloween is not only one of the greatest horror movies, but is a great movie on its own merits. Halloween II is a great slasher, but not a particularly good movie.

Still, I love it so.

halloween 2

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) essentially created the slasher craze of the 1980s. It either popularized or outright invented many of the tropes of the genre – a final girl, deaths coming to those who are promiscuous or otherwise “sinful”, killers’ point of view shots, etc. – and created a slew of knock-off holiday-themed horror films and generally influenced a decade of horror films.

It was followed by seven sequels and then was remade by Rob Zombie, that remake got a sequel and that was followed by the David Gordon Green trilogy which pretended none of the sequels happened and set the story 40 years after the original.

Rob Zombie remade the original film in 2007 and as I noted in my review, it is pretty terrible. Its sequel improves upon the first one a great deal, but it still isn’t great.

Scout Taylor-Compton returns as Laurie Strode some two years after the events of the original film (or the remake of the original film, or…whatever). She’s having a rough time. She’s in therapy, she’s taking a myriad of pills, and she’s having nightmares about Michael Myers every night. In a word, she was deeply traumatized by the events of Halloween night two years ago.

Now, horror movies about trauma may have been new in 2007. Certainly, a great many slasher sequels had the Final Girl return as bad as ever. They were able to shake off the events of the first film and come back after the evil villain with renewed vigor. But that isn’t reality. Surviving an attack by a vicious killer is traumatizing. It likely takes years, decades even, to overcome such a thing.

It is refreshing to have a horror movie’s protagonist have to deal with the trauma of the first film. Or it was back in 2007. I guess. In 2023 it feels like every horror film is about trauma. Hell, even Avengers: Endgame was about trauma. Certainly, the David Gordon Green Halloween films were about trauma. So watching this film now, and seeing how it deals with trauma feels a little old hat.

It isn’t as if Rob Zombie was doing something really interesting with the idea either. As mentioned, Laurie is in therapy, she’s popping pills, she has nightmares, she dresses like a punk goth, and covers her room in hard rock posters and “edgy” things like anarchist symbols and the number “666.” That isn’t a bad thing for this type of horror film, but it isn’t exactly original either.

It doesn’t help poor Laurie Strode that Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is back in town pimping another book about Michael Myers. In this film, he is a shallow huckster, trading stories about the murders for fame and fortune. His new book gives the audience new details that have come to light since his last one, including how Laurie Strode is actually Angel Myers, Michael’s sister. When Laurie finds this out it sends her spiraling farther into despair.

Meanwhile, Michael has apparently spent the last two years wandering the countryside, hiding out in old farms, eating the raw corpses of animals he’s killed, and waiting around for the second anniversary to come find Laurie and finish what he’s started.

In Carpenter’s original Michael Myers was the face of evil. He was an emotionless, soulless, killing machine. There is a scene in the original film in which he stabs someone to death, his knife holding the corpse to the wall, and Myers crocks his head just a little as if admiring what he’s done.

Zombie spent the first film examining just exactly what made Michael Myers a killer, completely destroying what made Carpenter’s character so terrifying. He drops most of that with this sequel though his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and a version of himself as a child (Chase Wright Vanek) continue to haunt him like memory specters.

What saves this film are some truly scary kill scenes, and some wonderful, even beautiful imagery. The carnage is a bit too visceral and gory for my tastes these days, but there is no doubt he blocks them in really interesting ways.

If you strip away all of the Halloween stuff, if you just look at it as a horror film, as a slasher, I think it is pretty good. But as another entry in the Halloween franchise, it doesn’t really work for me. It is a great improvement on Zombie’s first entry, but there are so many other better films in this series I don’t see myself ever returning to this one.