Boy Movies #4
Boy Movies weighs in on Halloween Ends
You’re reading Boy Movies, which is sometimes a newsletter in which I say vulnerable things and is sometimes a newsletter in which I actually discuss movies. Today it’s the latter. If either of those things speak to you, consider telling a friend to subscribe and helping me on my journey towards getting acquired by a major corporation.
The other night, I asked my graphic design team (Sarah) what I should write about in this week’s edition of Boy Movies. After a few minutes of bouncing ideas around, she said, “If you write about Halloween Ends, I’ll photoshop Michael Myers into a picture of the Beverly Hills reunion.” I agreed, because I am beholden to the wishes of my (unpaid) employees, friends, and subscribers, and Sarah belongs to all three of those groups, and also the thought of Michael Myers taking Andy Cohen’s place as moderator of a Real Housewives reunion was an image so powerfully funny to me that I could not pass up the opportunity to see what it looked like. “Done,” I told her. One thing no one can say about the team over at Boy Movies, LLC is that we don’t have our fingers on the pulse.
Rage and trowma
It’s crazy to imagine that anyone doesn’t know this, but RHOBH OG Kyle Richards is somehow, like, the third most-enduring presence in the Halloween franchise. And something you need to keep in mind is that while filming Halloween Ends she was caught in the middle of some very confusing, kind of boring drama with her sister Kathy Hilton and her co-star Lisa Rinna. (She also wore fake bangs… if you even care.)
“Very confusing, kind of boring” sums up the general mood right now. It’s cold in New York, but it’s also sometimes hot, and then there’s the rain — oh, the dreaded rain. My non-COVID illness turned into a sinus infection, which has been manifesting via daily headaches. I keep staying up too late for no reason at all, and when I do sleep my dreams are unsettlingly bizarre. Look, as loyal Boy Movies readers know, October is a rough month for me personally; every year, I try to drum up the same enthusiasm for this season that everyone else seems to have and every year I come up empty. There’s a dreariness in the air that sinks into my bones, making me feel tired and listless.
That’s part of the reason John Carpenter’s Halloween is so good. I watched it for the first time last year amid one of these somber periods and was taken by how much it was not what I was expecting at all. I loved its gloomy slow burn and appreciated how it earned climax by spending time effectively building up tension with silence and distance and vibes. I had a similar feeling watching Carpenter’s The Thing (boy movie) for the first time this year (please clap for how brave I am), which was, “Oh, got it, every movie just wishes it was this one.”
I guess I’m not “proud” to admit that Kyle Richards is probably 20% of the reason I decided to brave Halloween in the first place, but I’m not ashamed of it either. The other 80% is that I adore Danny McBride (I would not be the CEO of Boy Movies if I didn’t), who co-wrote all three Halloween reboot movies, and I needed the context of Carpenter’s original in order to properly support him. (Throw tomatoes at me or whatever you feel like you need to do.) I thought I’d enjoy the 2018 Halloween more after listening to people, boys especially, rave over it. It’s fine, I guess, but I was disappointed by the way it turned Carpenter’s material into gruesome, gory schlock, stripping it of the simplicity that made it unique. Its sequel, Halloween Kills, is even worse, an extended fart of a film with a rancid message about mob justice, although I do think about the gays who lived in Michael Myers’ house once a week, minimum (RIP). After those two flops, I expected nothing from Halloween Ends. As I texted my friends upon leaving the theater, “well halloween ends was amazing. jk,” and I was jk, but the longer I sit with it, the more I think it might actually be… if not good, then certainly better than the two before it.
Jamie Lee Curtis has seen the fucking meme, and you have too: Rage and trowma, PTSD, generATIONAL trowma, FEmale trowma… etcetera. It’s funny (“funny”) that it was Curtis’ big line when she was promoting Kills, considering that Halloween works best, and functions best as a boy movie, when it’s solely about Michael Myers as a purveyor of senseless violence. The Thing rules because Carpenter doesn’t waste time explaining why some alien is targeting that particular boys’ slumber party, only that it’s happening and they need to keep it contained, and the original Halloween works for a similar reason. There’s conviction in that type of filmmaking that reads distinctly boy to me: You don’t need a logical or emotional explanation, and you don’t need to attempt even a cursory look (and, man, is it cursory) into a family’s generational trauma, when everything else stands on its own. Sometimes detailed backstories work against the story you’re trying to tell. Sometimes horrifying shit happens at random and people have to figure out how to deal with it.
That said, I see what Halloween Ends is going for. The plot of Ends is that Laurie Strode (Curtis) is writing a memoir about all her Michael Myers-based trowma1 when a local boy (literally a guy named Corey) comes and messes everything up. Corey (Rohan Campbell) is a former babysitter (rare boy babysitter alert!) who ended up accidentally responsible for the death of a kid he was looking after. He gets cleared, but it ruins his life, forcing him to stay in Haddonfield forever, a place where everyone knows his business and hates him on principle. A sympathetic Laurie introduces him to her horny granddaughter (whose name is “ALLYSON,” which makes her my enemy), and things seem good until Corey meets Michael Myers, whose reemergence inspires Corey to start killing the people who have wronged him.
I do think it was a serve of McBride, director David Gordon Green, and their collaborators to veer away from the thing people presumably wanted to see — one last stand between Laurie and Michael — in this final installment and remove Michael from most of the movie. The two films that came before Ends claimed to be about trauma without actually digging into what that meant; mostly, Judy Greer just walked around looking sad about her mom being a doomsday prepper. (Far be it from me to begrudge Judy Greer a paycheck, by the way.) They’re boy movies in the worst way: empty, bloody, and politically murky. Ends shifts in a different direction that I don’t imagine many other late-franchise sequels would be willing to, turning into a sort of Outcast Man Becomes Bad story. That could be read as a trauma response, but Ends doesn’t explain Corey’s violence away as much as it tries to give context for it. Ends even lets Corey wear Michael’s mask, showing that evil is rarely one particular person, but a state of mind born out of resentment and cruelty, which can come from anywhere.
I like Halloween Ends as a Boy Movies subject because of how freely it flows between being categorized as a boy and a girl movie. Arguments can be made for both: Boy movies rarely star older women, and they rarely focus in any way on relationships between women, as Ends does on Laurie and Allyson. I’ll also say that it’s not easy to make a boy movie when you have a Real Housewife wearing a bang wig in the cast.
But Ends is the closest any of these three films gets to returning to the melancholic slow burn Carpenter established in 1978. So much of it is about the contrast of Laurie and Corey’s internal conflicts, and about how the inarguably rancid town of Haddonfield has managed to continue on after decades of tragedies. It’s still glossily ugly in the way many big studio films are, and it eventually devolves into gratuitous gore for the sake of gratuitous gore, plus the ending is so bananas that I was literally laughing out loud, but for a while, it attempts something cool by at least trying to examine the difference between how some villains are made (Corey) and some are just born (Michael). And no matter what: male rage is very boy.
Anyway, here’s Michael Myers moderating the Beverly Hills reunion
New Girl Talk banner courtesy of Sarah! A genius!
Two great songs about Michael Myers by Joe Iconis and The Mountain Goats. Men love Michael Myers!
Shoutout to the dude at my showing of Halloween Ends who, after watching Laurie and Allyson slice open Michael’s wrist during the final fight (one of the least graphic things to happen in this movie), made an audibly nauseated noise, loud enough for all fifteen-ish of us in the theater to hear. When we started laughing, he responded, “I hate that shit!”
I reviewed The White Lotus season 2, which premieres Sunday. Aubrey Plaza, you are always welcome to call me.
Every time Laurie stared pensively at her little Word document I was like, “Okay… literally me writing the latest issue of Boy Movies…”