“Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1998) is my favorite Halloween sequel, and the only installment that I first saw on the big screen. It considers “Halloween” (1978) and Halloween II”(1981) as canon, which means Michael Myers is Laurie’s brother and disregards the rest. Laurie Strode faked her death, changed her identity to Keri Tate, had a kid, John (Josh Hartnett in his film debut), got divorced from an “abusive, methadone addict” and became a headmistress/English teacher at a California boarding school. Suffering from PTSD, nightmares, and visions of her brother, she is overprotective of her son, dependent on prescription medicine and a functioning alcoholic, but just because she is paranoid, does not mean that her brother is not after her and her son. It is Halloween. John turned seventeen, the same age that Judith and Laurie were when Michael decided to kill them. Will Laurie be able to protect John?
Initially I was worried that Laurie would take a back seat to her teen costars, and Michelle Williams’ character, John’s girlfriend, Molly, would be the new final girl, but no, this installment was not a shameless effort to pass on the baton and revive the franchise (looking at you, “Halloween: Resurrection”). It cared about the mythology of this franchise, the integrity of the characters and did not treat its new characters like canon fodder. If Michael Myers is around, people are going to die, but they are largely likeable, nice people, not even slightly annoying. People do smart things like call the police or leave when they suspect that he is in a location.
Laurie is still in the metaphorical closet. She has a prophetic dream of the denouement hallway confrontation with her brother. Her desk has a plaque with her fake identity name and title and a framed photograph of her son. A clock strikes midnight, and the date changes to October 31st. A classroom door opens to a closet, which triggers a memory, a flashback to the closet scene from “Halloween.” When she emerges, a chef’s knife is stuck in the photograph. A blackboard has her real name on it. It does not take a psychologist to decipher her dream. Her greatest fear is that her identity will be revealed, and Michael Myers will find her and kill her son. Because it is shot from her point of view, it is reminiscent of the opening sequence in “Halloween” when Michael Myers stalks Judith outside and through the house before murdering her. By confronting her greatest fears in her dreams, it is a dress rehearsal for real life.
John’s nightmare is having the responsibilities of an adult, caring for his mother, without the freedoms. He is the first character who looks at his reflection in the mirror then hits the framed side of the mirror. Casting Hartnett is brilliant because he does resemble the William Shatner mask, complete with the brown hair that sticks out. This resemblance reminds viewers of Michael and Laurie’s similarities and makes us ask which traits John inherited from them. He wants to go on a field trip, but Laurie is too scared for him to be outside of her range of protection, which unintentionally results in putting John in danger.
At the beginning of the school day, Laurie looks outside a window at her son and other students walking. Like the first scene when Michael emerges from the shadows to attack Laurie in “Halloween,” she sees Michael next to her reflection in the window. She closes her eyes and counts to herself until his reflection fades. It is a coping technique to remind herself that he is not real. After all, Laurie has taken tons of measures to keep herself and her son safe. She lives behind an iron gate with a security guard (LL Cool J).
[On a random side note, this scene and the first scene of Michael in California reminded me of “Candyman” (1992) and “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” (1995). In the first film, Candyman or someone borrowing his moniker to intimidate people, is rumored to castrate a mentally disabled child in a public bathroom whereas Michael spares a mother and child in a roadside men’s bathroom with a glance in the mirror directed at the mother as if he is saying, “Stay inside, and I won’t kill you.” Michael Myers is more merciful than Candyman and does not kill children or mothers if they are not related to him so while he is evil, he does have reason and boundaries. Again we have a theme of people being able to face themselves in the mirror. We know that he will kill people to get clothes and vehicles, but he is not a monster. In the second film, Candyman threatens the protagonist’s mother in the dark portion of a balcony window’s reflection which visually resembles Laurie’s first delusion.]
So how does Michael find her? “H20” begins with Nurse Chambers discovering that her home has been ransacked, and Michael discovers Laurie’s alias and location. He kills her and the neighbor’s kids who protected her to cover his tracks. He then sees Laurie and John in town. Laurie sees his reflection in a jewelry store window, but when she turns around, it is her coworker, the school guidance counselor, and lover, Will (Adam Arkin). She confesses to fears of losing John because of her unresolved trauma then bumps into John who snuck off the school grounds. Neither of them notices the hearse like car, which Michael is driving, as he follows them home. John asks her to admit that Michael is dead. He is the first of many men who try to reassure her that Michael is dead and stop Laurie from being in protector mode but are wrong.
Molly is the first one to notice Michael as Laurie did in “Halloween”-during a literature class that Laurie is teaching about Frankenstein, but the lesson is not for Molly. It is for Laurie. Molly teaches Laurie to confront Michael before she loses everything like Dr. Frankenstein. ”Victor should have confronted the monster sooner.” At this point, Laurie realizes that she needs to let John go literally to not lose him. Norma notices how nervous Laurie is and advises her, “The trick is to concentrate on today.” Though she is advising her to take it one day at a time, the advice has a gloomier meaning since it is Halloween. Stay vigilant!
Michael decides to invade the school after most of the kids leave for the field trip and has the good taste not to kill the only black man in the film. Michael only monitors him to see if he has successfully cut the phone lines. Laurie is the first one to notice Michael on the school grounds, but she thinks that it is another hallucination, closes her eyes a couple of times but he won’t disappear then Will scares her again. Will then notices Michael retreating into the shadows. Michael decides to kill John’s friends first as he killed Laurie’s friends in “Halloween” and creates a tableaux including a Jack o Lantern with one friend’s body to scare John. John, being Laurie’s son, hightails it out of there with Molly, but Michael catches up and grabs Molly, who is not on the track team. Apparently John took boxing because he is officially the only teen boy big enough to square up on his uncle and starts punching him in the face. If Michael was a normal human being, John would have been a man that day and beat up his first adult, but he is Michael fucking Myers, and he has a knife so he stabs his nephew’s leg. Molly apologizes to John for slowing him down by cracking Michael in the head with a huge rock, which only slows Michael down for a hot second. Then the only unrealistic scene in the film is every woman’s universal nightmare of finding the right keys to get away from a killer. If you are a girl or a woman, you’ve practiced this. She also manages to drop them outside the gate so Michael can open it.
Meanwhile Laurie reveals her entire traumatic history to Will after looking at herself in the same bathroom mirror after drinking vodka out of the bottle. At that moment, she figures out Michael’s pattern and realizes that John is in danger because he is seventeen. Does Michael feel compelled to kill because he knows that family shares his power through their blood, and he must eliminate them to remain invulnerable? She realizes that the phone lines are cut, and John never went on the field trip. She grabs her gun, and Ronnie alerts her to the car at the gate while Will tries to calm everyone.
At one hour four minutes, “H20” turns iconic. Laurie opens the door to let them in, closes it, and through the round door window, she faces neither her reflection nor a delusion, but Michael Myers! She is not crazy. She is right. Once again, they are two sides of the same coin. He is the Boogeyman, and she is the protector. John and Molly becomes Tommy and Lindsay as she goes into protector mode. People in danger freeze, fight or fawn. She briefly freezes, but she has lived through this trauma before, and her dream has prepared her for this moment. Will tries to be chivalrous, but only ends up thinking that he killed the black man in a horror film, proved that guns are not the answer, is no Dr. Loomis and becomes the third school victim.
In a moment of great humor, Laurie retreats and opens a closet door. “Oh fuck.” Nope, not again. She tricks Michael and hits him on the head, which only slows him down. She retrieves the teen couple, gets them off the grounds then traps Michael with her on the school grounds by destroying the thing that opens the gate. It is so bad ass that somewhere in space, Ripley is pleased. Laurie has taken some classes because she breaks the glass case containing an ax with a single kick, walks up the road then screams, “Michael!” as if she is Norma in Psycho and telling him that he has been a bad boy. For the first time, the “Halloween” theme song does not cue Michael. It cues Laurie!
“H20” makes tons of movie references to “Psycho” with the car models and Janet Leigh as Laurie’s assistant, Norma, and the “Scream” franchise with clips from the film and characters dressed as that killer for Halloween. There is a sly dig at Jason from the “Friday the 13th” franchise, but Michael beats Jason in the image of the neighbor kid who wears the hockey mask and threatens him with a hockey stick.
Best of all, Laurie is properly dressed for this encounter. Her hair is short. She is wearing jeans and a comfortable sweater. Fabulous and practical. Michael lowers himself single-handedly from a beam in the ceiling. They both get their licks in. She hits him in the shoulder with the ax, and as he did in Halloween, he slashes her left arm. Their hide and seek style are similar. She retreats under the tables, and he jumps on top of them. In many ways, they gradually change positions. She is not trying to get away. She is trying to kill him too. At some point during the denouement, it switches from focusing on Laurie trying to evade but looking out for Michael with the viewers not knowing where he is to Michael pursuing and looking for Laurie and the viewers not knowing where she is. She becomes the killer. During this sequence, Michael gets visibly frustrated and stops using equal parts brain and brawn. He flips tables because she turns the table and gets irritated when his knife gets stuck in a drawer.
If I’m irritated by one thing in “H20,” it is when Ronnie stops Laurie from continuing to butcher Michael’s body. Let her be great! She grabs the ax with one hand and steals a gun with the other hand, steals a coroner’s van with Michael’s body and waits for him to rise again, which he does. She hits the brakes to eject Michael’s body, hits him with then pins him with the van. During her homicidal moments, Laurie is not like Michael, an emotionless killing machine. She feels sorrow and kinship each time she contemplates landing the final blow. At the end, she even seems to communicate with him as he holds his head and pulls at his mask then they reach for each other and almost touch fingertips, but she does not hesitate to behead him.
Now when the writers penned this scene, they knew the beginning of “Halloween: Resurrection” so a guy who survives being ejected from, hit by then pinned by a van is not Michael Myers. OK. Is he cousin because what? Then Laurie is put in an insane asylum for killing an innocent man among other things. This revision is necessary because contractually the franchise is not permitted to kill Michael Myers, but this contract has no artistic merit. It irritates me because it erases a critical point of this movie. Michael Myers is a real threat, and Laurie’s response was rational.
“H20” ends perfectly. Laurie keeps getting told to get over her trauma as if it is a thing from the past when it is not. It is the ultimate reason to do the told you so dance. High on prescription meds, wine, vodka and adrenalin, Laurie proves all the well-meaning, decent men wrong in her life and must protect them because they are unprepared to exist in a horrible, unimaginable world. She refuses to get over it, abandons all acceptable societal solutions, does not expect to be rescued and chooses to confront herself and an outsized, supernatural competitor and wins! Laurie goes through the mirror. She goes from a hysterical babysitter who can’t wait to return to normal life to a grown woman who knows that normal does not exist and accepts the monster within. She embraces her role as the antidote to the Boogeyman, the Protector, his mirror image. She delivers on the implicit threat in the song that Michael heard when he first saw her, “I wish I had you alone. Just the two of us.” She is the Reaper! To achieve emotional stability, she must accept family traits that she shares with Michael. Joseph Scott, a fan of the franchise who survived a violent encounter asked himself, “What would Jaimie Lee Curtis do?” Watch this movie and find out.
