Halloween Ends

No spoilers here. But, as tradition, the third installment goes off on a tangent. It opens with undoubtably the best pumpkin title sequence, and a thudding mix of Carpenter's theme.

The attraction of the final three movies to me is Jamie Lee Curtis. And although I feel she's stretching it a little to claim in interviews this film is all about relatable trauma (it's still a modern horror with modern annoyances), there are elements of this and the roundup is somewhat satisfying. Not because it is classical Halloween as hoped, but because as producer and overseer she may have delivered the ultimate f-you to the anti-hero worshiping fanboys of this franchise. In a fashion: trauma dealt with.

Of the 1978 original, Richard Combs said it was "one of the cinema's most perfectly engineered devices for saying 'Boo!'". That's spot on, and nothing beyond the original really matches. The moment Myers steps beyong those first 91 minutes, with any attempted explaination, motivation or widening, the illusion evaporates. Today the suspense and atmosphere is replaced with an apparent need for seeing people stabbed many, many, many times. Weirdly this might be more to meet the limited appetites of an attention deprived modern audience, rather than anything to do with the original.

There was no blood shown in 1978, and the ghost story worked well in the first telling.