It all started with John Carpenter’s iconic 1978 original, Halloween, opening with the haunting premise of a six-year-old Michael Myers stabbing his sister to death with a kitchen knife. Much like a majestic tree being sapped of its nutrients, Carpenter’s Halloween birthed a wide range of spinoffs and sequels - some delightfully thrilling, others, not so much - leading to an uneven, yet unforgettable franchise in the horror genre. David Gordon Green’s direct sequel to the original, 2018’s Halloween, picked up 40 years after Michael’s killing spree in Haddonfield, ending with a chilling post-credits scene that harkened back to the beginning of the end: Michael Myers is still alive. Naturally, Michael is back in Green’s latest sequel, Halloween Kills, egged on by an urge to slash through as many people in his path, leaving dozens dead in his wake. Shot frenetically with delightful gore sequences, Halloween Kills adds no real path for Myers' saga and crumples beneath its own misdirection.

Halloween Kills picks right up after the events of its predecessor, wherein a grievously injured Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) manages to trap Michael Myers (Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney) in the basement of her home and set the house on fire. While Laurie is being rushed to the hospital by her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), Michael bludgeons his way through the first responders, emerging unscathed from the fire. This shot, in and of itself, is a testimony to the film’s frenetic editing and atmosphere, offering split-second thrills undercut by its own intensity. Green proceeds to tie in the sequel directly to Carpenter’s original via characters like Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the kid Laurie was babysitting on that momentous night in 1978, along with those who survived Myers over the years, such as Lindsey Wallace, Marion Chambers, and Lonnie Elam.


While the survivors come together to celebrate and commemorate the many lives lost at the hand of Myers over the decades, it is only a plot contrivance for them to be set up for slaughter on Halloween night. Meanwhile, with Myers on the loose, and the local police perplexed and incapable of handling the situation, town-wide panic erupts, descending into mindless mob mentality that ends with the death of an innocent man. A severely wounded Deputy Hawkins (Will Patton) is rushed to Haddonfield Hospital by a distressed Cameron (Dylan Arnold), wherein the former shares a ward with Laurie and reminisces about the past with her. While these sequences are intended to grant more weight to Michael’s trajectory, along with the trauma undergone by the characters over the years, the clunky dialogue does little to enrich the film’s mythology or add meaning to the narrative as a whole.

Suspension of disbelief can be a wonderful cinematic tool, especially in the horror genre, when navigated in a nuanced manner while keeping audiences on the edge of their seats. Halloween Kills twists the knife of disbelief a little too blatantly into the viewer’s gut, as it introduces a chain of events that become increasingly implausible to fathom, especially towards the end. While it is clear that Green intended certain narrative threads to highlight the pitfalls of mob anger and tunnel vision, and the absolute evil of Michael Myers that turns even the best men into monsters, the result is a hollow, incoherent mess with too many dead-ends.


Nothing can salvage the questionable decisions taken by most characters, who manage to commit the most illogical of errors in the face of a mass murderer on the loose, hounding them with knives, broken tube lights, and chainsaws to their imminent deaths. Narrative implausibility and muddled storyline aside, the central perplexity of Halloween Kills arises from how underused Curtis’ character is in terms of the plot, as she spends most of the film doing absolutely nothing, owing to her grievous injury and failing health. While it is understood that Laurie’s character is bound to bring things to a climactic finish in the upcoming sequel, Halloween Ends, the film feels more like a filler episode that rushes to accelerate events towards the intended finish line.

Greer and Matichak's character are given more autonomy in terms of their involvement in the plot, but that too ends in tragedy as there are no real protagonists to root for, especially with so many bodies piling up by the end. Heads are brutally twisted, eyes are gouged out with inhuman force, and even a child is murdered off-screen - but the violence in Halloween Kills, no matter how expertly shot, offers no genuine thrill. It also doesn't amount to anything in the end. All told, it seems the telltale cycle of violence has no reasonable or foreseeable end.

Halloween Kills is playing in US theatres as of October 15, 2021, and is also available for streaming on Peacock. The film is 106 minutes long and is rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language, and some drug use.