John Carpenter’s Halloween is a hugely influential movie, and the horror classic was itself heavily influenced by others, including Black Christmas, The Innocents, Touch of Evil, and Psycho. David Gordon Green‘s new sequel, also titled Halloween, will not be quite so effective. And its own influences aren’t so apparent. Halloween 2018 just seems to be inspired by Halloween 1978 and the no-longer-canon sequels made in the last 40 years. Still, I’ve come up with a nice little bunch of recommendations for what you need to see after checking out the highly anticipated follow-up.
Add these titles to your viewing list:
Titicut Follies (1967) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
I’d planned on only recommending movies that were released after the original Halloween, but these two films are the best options for tying to the psychiatric facility scene in the new movie. Green has mentioned Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as one of his all-time favorites, and while the institution where Michael Myers resides is nothing like the mental hospital in this merry adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, it would seem the closest Green has gotten to paying homage to the Best Picture winner.
As for Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman’s controversial and impactful breakout documentary showcases a more similarly uncomfortable facility. As he told The Dissolve in 2014, he discovered the film later in life, and it became an important work at the time: “At 30, I was getting into Frederick Wiseman documentaries… I watched Titicut Follies over and over.”
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Even though the new Halloween has retconned all the other Michael Myers sequels, there is a reason to still see every other one of the previous installments (excluding the Rob Zombie remake and follow-up, I think) if you like Green’s follow-up: in order to get all the homages, including the cameo of three Silver Shamrock masks from Season of the Witch. But Halloween III (which features Jamie Lee Curtis’ voice in an uncredited cameo) is also the only one of the sequels that can still be considered canon, regardless of its never being linked to the others anyway.
With Green’s Halloween being the new Halloween II, Season of the Witch still gets to be Halloween III, so that’s to be watched next. Perhaps if Blumhouse is eager to make more Halloweens after the success of the latest, they can respect the intentions of Season of the Witch as the start of an anthology series and actually produce unrelated Halloween-branded features.
Psycho II (1983)
By ignoring the other Halloween sequels, the new movie is a direct follow-up to the original arriving a whopping 40 years later. And it’s the only Halloween besides the original to have a positive Rotten Tomatoes score. Similarly, Psycho II, which came out 23 years after Alfred Hitchcock’s original, is the only one of its franchise besides the first to have a positive Rotten Tomatoes score. Of course, much of its favor has come in the decades since its debut, at which time its reviews were mixed.
Unlike the new Halloween‘s return of Jamie Lee Curtis, Psycho II couldn’t bring back her mother, Janet Leigh, but Vera Miles does reprise her part as the sister. There is also a plot parallel with Halloween. This late sequel follows its serial killer’s reentry into the world — albeit through official discharge rather than a breakout — and a mother (Miles) and daughter (Meg Tilly) who aren’t so keen on that idea. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) does mean to make good on his second chance, however, but can people like him really be cured?
Murder: No Apparent Motive (1984)
Although there’s no official acknowledgment of this, serial killer Ed Kemper is believed to have been an influence on Michael Myers. His story is definitely similar, having murdered family members as a youth and then killing a number of coeds after his release from a psychiatric hospital. And being a towering figure. Unlike Myers, Kemper has talked about his acts and why he committed the murders and did the heinous things to the bodies of his victims afterward.
You can see one interview with him in the more sensational and broadly focused 1981 documentary The Killing of America, and you can find even more of his confessions and story in this true-crime documentary about him and Ted Bundy and what the FBI has learned from them. That premise is, of course, dramatized in the David Fincher-produced Netflix series Mindhunter, in which Cameron Britton portrays the real Kemper.
Repo Man (1984)
Similar to the nods to The Thing From Another World and Forbidden Planet in the original Halloween, Green’s movie also features television sets airing a couple cult classics. One is the early ’80s sci-fi television series Voyagers!, which I can only hope means — as Carpenter did with The Thing — that Green means to remake the time-travel show. The other is this sci-fi movie, highlighted with the opening scene where a highway patrolman is vaporized by a mysterious light emanating from the trunk of a car.
Hopefully Green isn’t hinting at a desire to remake it, because that would be an unnecessary and likely unsuccessful idea — unless he somehow could do for Repo Man what Carpenter did with The Thing and create something totally its own and arguably even better. Some might claim that he’s done a good enough job respecting Halloween with his sequel that he deserves a chance with any other fan-favorite mythology.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Much has been written on how James Cameron’s The Terminator is just a slasher film with a sci-fi twist, and there’s a Couch Tomato video highlighting the 24 ways the 1984 time-travel classic is basically a remake of Carpenter’s Halloween. So, it’s only logical that the new Halloween, as a direct sequel to the original, should just be a remake of the Terminator‘s first follow-up. That’s not quite the case, but there is the link of the final girl of the original now being a militant badass.
From the first look at Jamie Lee Curtis’ gun-toting grandma in images from Green’s Halloween, people have been comparing her transition to that of Linda Hamilton’s between her damsel in distress role in The Terminator and her action heroine evolution in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. If only Green had made Michael Myers a goofy good guy in his movie, protecting Laurie Strode’s daughter and granddaughter from an even worse killer. Yeah, that would have been bad, like old-canon Halloween sequels bad.
Man Bites Dog (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994)
I thought about recommending Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde due to the gender-swapped Halloween costumes worn by Andi Matichak and Dylan Arnold. But that’s a little on the nose, so I’m following a throughline to Oliver Stone’s controversial and highly stylized serial killer thriller, which the director has said was heavily inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. Of course, it’s also co-written by Quentin Tarantino, who’d clearly still been influenced by the Starkweather/Fugate murder spree-inspired Badlands — the debut of Green’s idol, Terrence Malick — that also inspired the Tarantino-scripted True Romance. Also, Natural Born Killers features a sensational documentary crew, led by a tabloid journalist played by Robert Downey Jr., entering the prison to interview the main characters and winding up provoking inmates and inadvertently helping to instigate their escape. Spoiler alert, as in Halloween, the journalist doesn’t get any reward for his assistance.
As for Man Bites Dog, the mockumentary thriller following a serial killer on a murderous robbing spree, there’s a documentary crew that winds up actually allying with their subject, more akin to Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) trying to team up with Myers, and of course their lives aren’t any better for their very direct aid.
Panic Room (2002)
Throughout her 40 years planning for the return of Michael Myers, Laurie Strode appeared to be overly paranoid, but as we see in the new movie all her efforts — and her prayers — were satisfied with the actual return of her assaulter. If you build it, they will come. That’s a rule for movies. If you construct or buy a place with a panic room, for instance, that shelter will wind up coming in handy. Jamie Lee Curtis and Judy Greer (eventually joined Matichak) as a mother-daughter duo hiding out in Laurie Strode’s hidden basement as Myers stomped around reminded me of Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart’s dual-generational hideout situation in David Fincher’s Panic Room.
The difference is they don’t know their intruder, and here it’s a trio of robbers (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam). Maybe in a few years, someone will make a sequel to Panic Room where Whitaker’s character gets out of prison and for some reason has another change of heart and goes after the Altman women.
Stronger (2017)
David Gordon Green has had an eclectic career as a filmmaker, yet Halloween is his first horror movie. There’s not much he’s directed beforehand that obviously relates. Sure, in name The Sitter would seem to have a connection to a sequel to a movie once titled The Babysitter Murders, but there’s not really one other than the fact that both have babysitters. Green’s previous feature, though, does have a link to Halloween in that the underseen drama from a year ago apparently led the director to his next project.
“For Halloween, I was coming off of making Stronger, which is about the Boston Marathon [bombing],” he told amNewYork, “and in many ways I was exploring post-traumatic stress in a narrative and random acts of violence but then this seemed like a way to segue into a movie that felt more ‘genre.'”
He elaborated further in a recent interview with The Wrap: “A lot of [Stronger] dealt with randomness of violence, and in a way, that was a horror film, so it wasn’t such a huge narrative leap. In some ways, that project informed our approach to Michael’s narrative drive. What’s scary in the real world is what you don’t know, and random acts of violence get under my skin rather than something that is motivated or supernatural.”
According to Curtis (via Variety), it was also Stronger star Jake Gyllenhaal, her “unofficial godson,” who convinced her to work with Green and return to the Halloween franchise.
On Her Shoulders (2018)
When the character Dave (Miles Robbins) says that Michael Myers’ handful of kills is nothing compared to all the other horrors of the world today, he has a point. But there’s global terror and there’s personal trauma. For recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, the mix of the two drives her in advocating for the safety and preservation of her people, the Yazidis. Murad is a survivor of the Yazidi genocide being committed by ISIS in Iraq and of being personally raped by ISIS terrorists while enslaved in Mosul four years ago.
Murad has turned her experience and the plight of other Yazidi refugees into a human rights campaign, and On Her Shoulders — released the same weekend as Halloween — follows her in her political pageantry and her leadership and her induction as a UN Goodwill Ambassador. Unlike Laurie Strode, she’s not isolating herself and packing heat awaiting the day she can have direct revenge on the men who traumatized her, she instead works with such international legal figures as Luis Moreno Ocampo and Amal Clooney.
The post Watch ‘Halloween,’ Then Watch These Movies appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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