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# Franchise Fixation: Halloween Kills (2021)
- URL: https://www.reel-fixation.com/franchise-fixation-halloween-kills-2021/
- Published: 2026-10-30T20:59:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T20:59:26.000Z
- Description: Evil dies tonight. Unfortunately, it takes the screenplay down with it.
- Author: Jonathan Watkins
- Tags: Franchise Fixation

I've spent a considerable amount of time in this series discussing Halloween movies I don't particularly like. *The Curse of Michael Myers* is a mess. Rob Zombie's *Halloween II* takes a number of swings that don't work for me. Yet even with those movies, I can usually find something that helps me understand why somebody else might love them. I can see the appeal, even when I can't share it. *Halloween Kills* is different. I've watched it a few times now, and I still struggle to find much of anything to connect with.

That doesn't mean people who love *Halloween Kills* are wrong. It means I find this movie strangely resistant to being enjoyed on its own terms. It looks terrific in places. There are performances I like. It has an energy that separates it from the average slasher sequel, and there's certainly no shortage of Michael Myers doing what Michael Myers does. Yet the more it insists that something important is happening, the less convinced I become that it knows what that something is.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure *Halloween Kills* wants to be a conventional movie. Sometimes it feels like an experiment in what happens when you take the familiar machinery of a slasher film, crank it as high as it will go, and then try to attach a grand statement about the human condition. Maybe director David Gordon Green is deliberately playing with our expectations. Maybe I'm giving the movie too much credit. Either way, I find it fascinating to talk about, even as it works overtime to keep me from caring.

# The Night He Came Home. Again. Immediately.

*Halloween Kills* picks up practically where *Halloween* (2018) left us. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) have escaped the house they set on fire with Michael trapped inside. Laurie is badly injured, and the women are headed toward the hospital. It should be the end of Michael Myers, except we've watched enough of these movies to know that burning down a house with Michael inside is not necessarily the most dependable way to finish the job.

The opening stretch is among the film's strongest material. Firefighters arrive at the burning Strode house and discover, to their considerable misfortune, that Michael is not quite ready to call it a night. His emergence from the flames is a terrific image, and the ensuing attack is startling in its sheer brutality. The film knows how to make Michael look imposing, and James Jude Courtney gives him a physical presence that is hard to ignore.

Here's where something odd begins to happen for me, though. Watch how the scene is staged. Michael emerges, takes on an entire group of opponents, and cuts through them with the determined efficiency we usually associate with an action hero. I'm not suggesting the movie literally asks us to applaud the murder of firefighters. Yet something almost John McClane-like shapes the sequence. The impossible odds. The dramatic entrance. The successive takedowns. The character who simply cannot be stopped.

Horror fans have long been accused of rooting for the killer once a slasher franchise gets popular enough. I've never found the broadest versions of that accusation particularly persuasive. Enjoying a fictional villain's screen presence isn't the same thing as approving of his actions. Still, *Halloween Kills* keeps bringing the idea to mind. Is Green deliberately borrowing the language of heroic action cinema and applying it to Michael? Or is this just what happens when a slasher sequel is built around increasingly elaborate displays of its monster's invincibility? I can't prove either interpretation. I can only tell you that the question becomes harder to ignore as the movie goes on.

# A Trip Back to 1978

Before the film gets too far into its present-day carnage, it returns us to the night of the original *Halloween*. These flashbacks revisit the aftermath of Michael's first rampage and show a younger Officer Hawkins (Thomas Mann) among the police searching for him. It's an intriguing choice. The 2018 film had already made Hawkins feel more connected to Haddonfield's history than most of the officers this franchise has introduced over the years, and Will Patton remains one of this new trilogy's best additions.

The flashbacks also give us Jim Cummings as another officer, and he's a scene-stealer in the brief time he has. The whole detour has a certain appeal simply because it's willing to spend time in the world of the 1978 movie without merely replaying its most famous moments. Of course, there's always a risk in going back and inserting new events into a film that worked perfectly well without them. I don't think these scenes ruin anything, but they do show how determined this trilogy is to keep looking backward, even after supposedly clearing away decades of sequel baggage. Then there's Dr. Loomis. As impressive as the makeup work transforming Tom Jones Jr. into Sam Loomis is, I wish the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to bring Loomis back onscreen. I suppose I should be thankful they didn't resort to digitally recreating Pleasence's face, as other franchises have done with deceased actors, but I think simply hearing Loomis shouting somewhere in the distance would have been enough. Sometimes leaving something to the imagination is the better choice.

In the present, Hawkins (Will Patton) winds up in the hospital alongside Laurie. Their conversations offer some welcome breathing room, and Patton makes Hawkins' guilt about what happened in 1978 feel genuinely painful. He's carrying around the idea that Michael might not be terrorizing Haddonfield now if things had gone differently then. I like these scenes not because they unlock some great new secret about Michael Myers, but because they briefly let two people behave like people instead of mouthpieces for the movie's themes.

# Everybody Comes Back to Haddonfield

*Halloween Kills* also brings back a surprising number of characters connected to the first film. Anthony Michael Hall now plays Tommy Doyle. Lindsay Wallace and Nurse Marion return, with Kyle Richards and Nancy Stephens reprising their roles. Lonnie Elam, the kid Loomis frightened away from the Myers house in 1978, is here as well, and is now played by Robert Longstreet. Even former sheriff Leigh Brackett is back, with Charles Cyphers returning to the role, though Brackett now works security at the hospital.

On paper, I understand the appeal. The original film left scars on more people than Laurie, and the idea that an entire town might carry the memory of one terrible Halloween is worth exploring. Unfortunately, gathering recognizable survivors isn't the same as giving them interesting things to do. Most of these characters are introduced, reminded of their history, and then shuffled toward whatever the next plot requirement happens to be.

Longstreet probably fares the best, although that's not exactly an endorsement of the material. Richards is fine with what she's given, which isn't much. Poor Nancy Stephens returns to this franchise only to be dispatched again, as happened in H20\. At least Marion can now claim the unusual distinction of dying in two separate Halloween timelines. I suppose that's something.

Then there's Tommy. I know Anthony Michael Hall can be a good actor, which makes his performance here particularly frustrating. His early speech about the Boogeyman returning to Haddonfield sounds less like a man confronting childhood trauma and more like someone trying to win a dramatic-reading contest at a community theater. I don't know how much blame belongs to Hall and how much belongs to dialogue that might have defeated anybody asked to deliver it. What I do know is that Tommy quickly becomes exhausting, and he's about to get a lot of company.

# Evil Dies Tonight. Have You Heard?

If *Halloween Kills* has a signature line, it is “Evil dies tonight.” If you somehow miss it the first time, don't worry. Somebody will say it again. And again. Eventually it stops sounding like a rallying cry and starts sounding like the film is checking whether we remembered the theme from the previous scene.

Tommy rallies the townspeople into a mob determined to hunt down Michael. The underlying idea is perfectly serviceable: fear spreads, anger makes people reckless, and a community desperate to take control of a nightmare can turn that desperation on the wrong person. There's a good horror story somewhere in that premise. The problem is that the movie seems far more interested in announcing the lesson than in making the behavior leading to it convincing.

That becomes impossible to ignore at the hospital. The crowd decides another escaped patient must be Michael and pursues him through the building. I understand that Michael normally wears a mask, but he spent decades unmasked in an institution. More importantly, the man they're chasing looks nothing like the imposing figure we've been watching all night. The size difference alone ought to give somebody pause. Instead, nearly everyone behaves as though the film has ordered them to abandon basic observation so its metaphor can reach the finish line.

The sequence culminates in tragedy, followed by Brackett's observation that Michael has made monsters out of the people chasing him. I understand what the line is supposed to mean. I just wish the film had earned it. It begins to resemble an overcooked *Twilight Zone* episode, something in the vicinity of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” except with the moral underlined so aggressively that there's hardly room left for the story.

Cyphers deserved better material, too. Brackett also gets to repeat his “one good scare” line from the original movie, and the callback lands with a thud. It isn't that returning to a familiar line is automatically a bad idea. It's that the movie keeps mistaking recognition for emotional payoff. We know these people. We know these words. That doesn't mean repeating them will make us feel what we felt in 1978\. I wish more franchises would realize this, because this kind of line-delivery fan service rarely works; I’m almost inclined to say it never works.

# Laurie Strode: Hospital Edition

Meanwhile, Laurie spends most of *Halloween Kills* confined to a hospital, which makes this installment feel even more like a companion to 1981's *Halloween II* than the filmmakers may have intended. Given the injuries she sustained at the end of the previous film, it's perfectly reasonable that she's not sprinting through Haddonfield in pursuit of Michael. The trouble is that the movie doesn't find a particularly satisfying substitute for having its central character participate in the story.

Jamie Lee Curtis still has presence, and Laurie gets a few worthwhile moments with Hawkins. Too often, however, she's asked to explain what Michael represents or deliver another speech about evil. That might work better if the movie's ideas were clearer. At one point, Laurie seems willing to encourage the effort to hunt Michael down. Later, she suggests that perhaps Loomis was right all along and Michael cannot simply be defeated through brute force. I can imagine a coherent character progression connecting those positions, but the movie moves between them so abruptly that the shift feels more like the screenplay changing its mind.

Laurie is not the only character reduced to declaring what the movie means. Tommy is pretty much doing the same thing across town, only louder. The irony is that this series began with a film that understood how frightening Michael could be when almost nobody knew what he was doing, what he wanted, or even where he was. Halloween Kills cannot stop talking about him, and somehow, the more everyone tries to explain Michael Myers, the less frightening he becomes.

# Big John, Little John, and the House That Started It All

The film makes time for a couple of fun characters affectionately named Big John and Little John, played by Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald, who now live in the old Myers house. They have an amusing rhythm together, and I always enjoy watching both actors. There's also some business involving neighborhood kids making trouble around the house. In isolation, the scenes have charm, even if the charm is of a very peculiar sort for a movie about a mass murderer returning home.

What bothers me is how little these scenes seem to belong to the movie surrounding them. They remind me of the sandwich-obsessed police officer in *Halloween* (2018): an attempt at offbeat comic texture that feels as though it wandered in from a different film. As I said in the last write-up, I'm not against humor in Halloween. The difference is that those moments arise naturally from people we recognize, rather than stopping the movie to show off a strange little comic routine.

I will give *Halloween Kills* one completely useless bit of trivia (and I won’t be the first to mention this) that delights me: Michael McDonald has now played a character killed by Michael Myers, and a character killed by Mike Myers in an *Austin Powers* movie. That might be the most memorable thing I take away from the entire subplot, which probably says more about my experience with this film than the filmmakers would prefer.

# Karen Deserved a Better Movie

Judy Greer is one of the few performers who consistently makes this material work for me. Karen, Laurie’s daughter, was one of my favorite parts of the 2018 film, even though the mother/daughter emotional arcs didn't play very well. The filmmakers handle that relationship a little better in *Kills*, even if the movie has plenty of other problems waiting for Karen. Also, in this installment, she takes a more active role as the situation deteriorates. She is frightened, angry, and increasingly determined, and Greer finds something believable in those reactions even when the plot around her becomes ridiculous.

I especially like that Karen ultimately lures Michael into the mob's trap. It's a moment that gives her a concrete action instead of another speech. For a little while, it even suggests the movie might bring its various threads together in a satisfying way. Unfortunately, the ending has other plans for her, and I hate the fate she's dealt. I don't hate it because I think characters I like should be immune from death. That would be a strange complaint to make after spending this long writing about Halloween movies. I hate it because the movie hasn't done enough to make the choice feel like a meaningful culmination of her story.

Greer and Patton are the two actors who most often remind me there are human beings somewhere inside all this noise. I wish the movie trusted them more.

# When Michael Myers Becomes Rocky Balboa

Then we arrive at the ending, where the strange feeling I had during the firefighter attack returns with a vengeance. Karen draws Michael into the street, Tommy and his assembled townspeople surround him, and the group beats him down. This is the moment when the people of Haddonfield finally have their monster at their mercy. It should feel like the culmination of everything the movie has been building toward.

Instead, I find myself watching the scene through the language of an entirely different kind of movie. Michael is the fighter on the ropes, the unstoppable figure finally knocked to the canvas, the battered Rocky Balboa waiting for the inevitable comeback. The editing and presentation give his defeat the shape of a heroic setback. Then, sure enough, he rises and starts cutting through the crowd. I'm not saying I actually want him to kill these people. I'm saying the movie has created a peculiar situation in which its villain is receiving the sort of cinematic treatment normally reserved for someone we're supposed to cheer.

Maybe that's the point. Perhaps Green wants us to recognize the uncomfortable pleasure audiences take in watching Michael win, even as the movie lectures us about what happens when violence consumes a community. That's an interesting idea, and I'd be more enthusiastic about it if the rest of the film had shown much ability to handle that kind of contradiction. As presented, the sequence feels less like an intentional challenge to our sympathies and more like two incompatible approaches to Michael Myers fighting for control of the same scene.

The geography and logic don't help. While this confrontation is happening, the police are apparently occupied nearby, around the old Myers house, rather than dealing with the mob that has supposedly cornered the town's most notorious murderer. I realize that demanding perfectly sensible decisions from every person in a Halloween sequel is a losing battle. Still, the film spends so much time insisting that this confrontation matters that its casual handling of the logistics becomes hard to ignore.

Then comes the aforementioned death of Karen, which adds one final ugly punctuation mark to the proceedings. I haven't revisited *Halloween Ends* yet for this series, and I'll reserve my fuller thoughts about where this trilogy goes until I do. However, knowing where that film begins makes the end of *Halloween Kills* feel even stranger. The movie wants to end on an overwhelming statement about Michael's power, while leaving behind a whole collection of questions it doesn't seem particularly interested in answering.

# A Movie at War with Itself

There's something almost impressive about how much *Halloween Kills* manages to do without giving me very much to hold onto. It is bloody, often extremely bloody. Michael has rarely been presented with this much relentless physical force. The photography is frequently handsome, and the film has a slickness that makes it easy to understand why some of its individual images have stuck with people. Even its rhythm has a strange, propulsive quality. I thought back to a character in *Halloween: Resurrection* comparing Michael to a great white shark. There's something shark-like about the way this movie moves: forward, hungry, and seemingly incapable of stopping.

Yet what is all that momentum carrying us toward? The movie spends much of its running time finding increasingly elaborate ways for Michael to slaughter people, often presenting those moments as the kind of crowd-pleasing spectacle audiences have come to expect from a slasher sequel. At the same time, it wants to say something about the dangers of allowing fear and violence to consume an entire community. Those two approaches aren't necessarily incompatible. Horror has always been capable of making us uncomfortable with the very things we're watching for entertainment. In fact, that contradiction could make for a fascinating movie. I'm just not convinced *Halloween Kills* knows how to explore it.

The problem isn't that the movie enjoys its own violence while criticizing others' violence. It's that the criticism feels so disconnected from everything surrounding it. We're apparently supposed to recognize the ugliness of the mob's bloodlust, but the film has spent much of its running time encouraging us to enjoy Michael's. Then, when Michael turns the tables on the mob, the scene is staged almost like an action hero's triumphant comeback. Is the movie deliberately confronting us with our own conflicting sympathies, or does it simply want to have its moral lesson and its crowd-pleasing slaughter at the same time? I wish I could say I knew. Perhaps "moralizing" isn't quite the right word for what bothers me. The film seems to reach for a statement about trauma, communal fear, and how evil spreads, but it keeps substituting declarations for insight.

I don't need *Halloween* to deliver a thesis on the human condition. In fact, one reason I love the original so much is that it knows when to stop explaining. I also don't object to a sequel having bigger ideas than its predecessor. I just want those ideas to emerge from a story that works. *Halloween Kills* is constantly telling me how much its events mean, and I spend most of the runtime wishing I felt any of that meaning myself.

I guess I can understand why somebody might come to this movie for the carnage and have a great time. I can appreciate the craftsmanship of particular shots, the performances from Greer and Patton, and the occasional oddball comic detour. What I can't do is turn those scattered pleasures into an experience I want to revisit. With some of the franchise's other low points, I can at least identify the movie they're trying to be. *Halloween Kills* feels like a movie arguing with itself for 105 minutes, and somehow both sides lose.

Evil dies tonight? Not exactly. My enthusiasm certainly took a beating, though.

# THE FIXATION SCALE

★½☆☆☆

1½ out of 4