New Halloween Kills Clips Feature Halloween, Kills
"And on the eve before Samhain it would stir, and if the lust were powerful enough, it would rise to fulfill the curse invoked so many Samhains before. Then the people would bolt their doors. Scant good it did them, for the thing laughed at locks and bolts, and besides, there were the unwary. Always the unwary."
If you squint real hard, the above prologue to Curtis Richards' "Halloween" film novelization actually spells "unlimited sequels." Richards' 1979 novel, based upon John Carpenter and Debra Hill's original screenplay for the 1978 slasher, lays the simple groundwork that an entire franchise would mine again and again: This boogeyman is cursed, unstoppable, and an October slot guarantee — if the lust is powerful enough.
It was certainly enough for the powers-that-be behind the "Halloween" franchise, among them Blumhouse Productions founder and CEO Jason Blum, and writer-director of the 1978 o.g. "Halloween" John Carpenter, who served as executive producer and composer on the 2018 sequel (also titled "Halloween"). Following the success of that movie, Michael Myers has once again risen to fulfill the curse invoked by Carpenter and Hill so many decades before. "Halloween Kills" arrives this October, and these clips promise lots of kills ... and lots of Halloween.
We fight. We always fight!
We ended Green's "Halloween" with a pile of bodies and a burning house with Michael Myers (played by both James Jude Courtney and, in some scenes, Nick Castle) left inside — but you can't kill the boogeyman. As seen in the above clip, "Halloween Kills" has Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her family discovering that Myers did not burn to death in the basement as planned. Instead, with firefighters came the chance for Michael to flee, and so The Shape prowls the streets of Haddonfield once again. The Strode women are having none of it, and band together to defeat the evil rather than wait for it to come home.
Here's the official synopsis for "Halloween Kills" from Universal:
Minutes after Laurie Strode (Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) left masked monster Michael Myers caged and burning in Laurie's basement, Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor.
But when Michael manages to free himself from Laurie's trap, his ritual bloodbath resumes. As Laurie fights her pain and prepares to defend herself against him, she inspires all of Haddonfield to rise up against their unstoppable monster. The Strode women join a group of other survivors of Michael's first rampage who decide to take matters into their own hands, forming a vigilante mob that sets out to hunt Michael down, once and for all.
Evil dies tonight.
Run! Go home now, before he kills us all!
This "Halloween Kills" clip appears, without context, to be a run-of-the-mill Karen bothering some trick or treaters enjoying their spoils after a successful neighborhood crawl. But the wild-eyed woman in their personal space is none other than Lindsey Wallace, that sneering apple-cheeked doll from Carpenter's original, played once again by Kyle Richards. A pair of kids see her as some lady bothering them, not a harbinger of doom, and promptly taunt and dismiss the adult — until they glimpse Michael Myers staring at them from across a park. One wonders how they'd fare against young Tommy Doyle's bullies in '78 "Halloween," but that would probably be a bloodbath too.
Every time somebody's afraid, the boogeyman wins.
A lot of horror pokes and prods at grief and shame via its survivors, whom they hound from sequel to sequel, milking the character for all of the subtextual treasures its writer can pull out. The Green-McBride timeline is, so far, one of the most interesting of the franchise in the places it honors the Carpenter-Hill spirit.
With an embattled Laurie Strode visiting the hospital bedside of Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), the pair discuss how evil Michael Myers truly is (answer: truly) and affirm to each other that "it" needs to die. "Halloween Kills" sees the entire town of Haddonfield at nuclear levels of anger, and they're done bolting their doors. Lindsey is back, Laurie is back, and the town, according to past teases from Curtis herself, has their back.
There's always the unwary, as the novelization says. Myers has had a buffet of unassuming, ignorant victims through directors and timelines. But what of the wary and the enraged?