Stop Making HALLOWEEN Movies

And TV shows. A HALLOWEEN TV show??

This week we learned that Miramax won the TV rights to the Halloween franchise, and that the deal was envisioned as part of a larger cinematic universe. Not only that, the deal was won in an intense bidding war, one in which the other parties were A24 and Blumhouse. It’s not clear what was paid, but it must have been a buck or two (for comparison, Universal recently shelled out $400 million for the rights to The Exorcist. I doubt this was as costly as that, since it’s just TV rights). 

News like this for the Halloween franchise immediately elicits one specific question: what the fuck is going on here? A Halloween TV show?

Now look, I’m not dumb. I know what some people are going to ssy: what if it’s some kind of fun anthology show, like the old Friday the 13th show that had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees? People love to point out that John Carpenter apparently wanted the franchise to go anthology starting with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (the number one movie that people pretend they liked before it became cool to like it). Or what if it’s spinning out of Season of the Witch, and it’s all kinds of weird druidic Silver Shamrock stuff?

It won’t be. I do not believe that when a property like this gets bought the buyer is thinking about exploiting the least commercial aspects of it. You don’t buy Halloween for Silver Shamrock, you buy Halloween for Michael Myers. It’s the only thing that makes sense. 

And it’s the reason why it’s a bad idea. In fact, it’s a reason why every single Halloween sequel and reboot featuring Michael Myers has been a bad idea, ever since Halloween II. Michael Myers should never have come back. 

In fact I want to make a bold statement that might get people mad at me: pound for pound Halloween is the worst slasher franchise. But that judgment is weighted; if the series didn’t begin with Carpenter’s Halloween I think it would be a pretty middle of the road, okay slasher franchise. But with Halloween at the front…

The original Halloween is a masterpiece, and not just a genre masterpiece either. Carpenter is executing at the highest levels of craftsmanship in that movie, and the result is an iconic and perfect movie. It’s just a great work of 20th century cinema, full stop. When you have a movie as good as that the only direction the sequels can go is down. 

Compare that to Friday the 13th, a series whose first film is a fun exploitation movie. With the first film Sean S Cunningham laid the groundwork for a dozen sequels that could be juvenile, silly, weird and over the top. That first movie is not a great film by any objective standard, but it’s a movie that works and it establishes a very, very simplistic formula that is fun to play around in.

Halloween, on the other hand, is a movie that plumbs the very depths of modern American fears. It’s a movie of post-60s anxiety, a movie that is weighted with the existential dread of the post-Vietnam 70s. It’s a movie that posits the idea that evil exists, and it is real… and it’s not coming from somewhere else. It isn’t lurking in a rice paddy or hanging on a street corner in crime-riddled New York City. It grew up in the house next to yours in the suburbs. It played on the carefully manicured lawn. And it has no origin, no reason for being. It just is. 

This is why the blankness of Michael Myers’ mask is so perfect - he is nothing except malevolence. And this is why every sequel has been a fundamentally bad idea - what else is there to say on this subject that Carpenter didn’t already say? If the premise is that Michael is truly evil, what do we gain by returning to him again and again? He wants nothing, He feels nothing. The terror in Halloween is that there is no reason for his killing spree; he simply returns to his childhood home and continues what he began that Halloween night fifteen years earlier.  Even sharks have a reason to kill; Michael Myers does not. 

The other slashers do; Jason is running around as a moral arbiter judging and slaying the kids at Camp Crystal Lake because Crystal Lake teens let him drown (although he also does kill random-ass people in some of the films, especially Part III) and Freddy is peeved off about being burnt alive and so he’s kind of taking out an eternal vengeance on that neighborhood. These aren’t the grandest of motivations, but they’re motivations. Michael has none. 

Again, that’s the point. The series eventually tried to give him motivations when the Thorn Cult was introduced in the post-Season of the Witch sequels, which are not very good and kind of get skipped over in everybody’s minds. At any rate, depending on which version of which movie you’re watching, Michael Myers is tied to an ancient Celtic cult that is dealing with a curse and a chosen one and all kinds of nonsense. And then Rob Zombie made the absolutely awful decision to plumb the depths of Michael’s traumas, an idea so misguided that his movie has joined the Psycho remake in the halls of redos most people think were terrible ideas. 

No, Michael’s mom can’t be a druggie stripper. She has to be a PTA mom, a regular lady who lives with her husband and their second child in a normal house and has a normal life. The Myers family has to be just as perfectly regular as you could hope for, because the terror is that from this suburban perfection springs an almost chthonic evil. 

In many ways Michael Myers foretells the coming of school shooters - often regular suburban kids who suddenly explode in a torrent of violence, meaningless and aimless as they target anyone who walks across their path. School shootings are frightening on a lot of levels, but one of them is that you can’t really understand them; we try to weave narratives around them but too often they’re just senseless and horrific, and that’s something we don’t like as a species. We’re a storytelling species, and so as long as there’s a narrative around a situation that we can understand we can handle it. But when something just makes no sense, has no reason - that’s when we start to get itchy in our brains. 

That’s the space Michael Myers lives in. I’d say the only Myers-featuring Halloween sequels that get this are David Gordon Green’s Halloween/Halloween Kills, where Laurie Strode is convinced Michael has come back to finish the job but in reality he couldn’t care less about her. In Kills he’s simply a body count machine, and it’s how the town of Haddonfield reacts to his presence that drives the narrative, not Michael. I quite like Halloween Ends, but Green kind of gets away from this understanding of Michael in that film. 

So what do you make a TV show about? What’s the cinematic universe here? You have a character whose whole appeal, whose whole raison d'être is mindless, purposeless killing, whose scare factor is premised on his utter emptiness, the nihilistic void that peeks out through the eye holes of his mask. What do you do with this? 

I think a lot of sequels have shown us: nothing good. Any further exploration of Michael undercuts what makes him special. The universe of Halloween itself isn’t very ripe for exploitation - Laurie Strode is perhaps the only interesting character to follow. Maybe you could do a Loomis TV show where he has a bunch of psychopathic patients who keep escaping? I find it hard to imagine Miramax shelling out money so they can do a series about the Thorn Cult, although I guess weirder shit has happened in the era of Peak TV. 

The solution to all of this is to let Halloween go away. Just let it be. John Carpenter got it correct the first outing, and we’ve gone back to this well a shocking number of times, generally with diminishing returns. There’s no there there, nothing to work with, and the more you try to find something to work with the more you undercut what made the original movie work in the first place.

Now hey, maybe I’m wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe I just can’t see what the visionaries at Miramax see, can’t imagine the exciting new directions they’ll be able to take this worn out property. I’d love to be wrong! Nothing would make me happier than to have a Halloween TV show that I actually loved and looked forward to every week. It just doesn’t seem likely.