It’s now November, and hopefully, you have already taken down your Halloween decorations and are bracing for the coming holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas (though, please don’t put up your X-mas tree, it’s far too early). But this year’s Halloween felt a bit…anti-climatic. Not only was COVID preventing a typical trick-or-treating season, but we didn’t get the highly-anticipated “Halloween Kills” in theaters. And according to star Jamie Lee Curtis, not only is ‘Kills’ a great sequel to the 2018 reboot, but it’s a timely film that would have fit perfectly in 2020.
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If you’ve seen the 2018 “Halloween,” you know that the film ends with Laurie Strode (Curtis), in the ultimate act of catharsis, “killing” Michael Myers by burning him alive in her house-turned-fortress. This is after the film focused on the immeasurable trauma that Myers caused her in 1978 after he went on his killing spree and was unable to kill her. Curtis said to “The Jess Cagle Show,” in a recent interview, that ‘Kills’ picks up where the 2018 film left off but focuses not just on the PTSD of Strode but of the various other people that were affected by Myer’s violence.
“What we were seeing around the country of the power, of the rage of voices, big groups of people coming together enraged at the set of circumstances, that’s what the movie is,” explained Curtis. “The movie is about a mob. And so it’s very interesting because it takes on what happens when trauma infects an entire community.”
She continued, “And we’re seeing it everywhere with the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re seeing it in action and ‘Halloween Kills’ weirdly enough, dovetailed onto that, preceded it, it was written before that occurred. So when you see it, it’s a seething group of people moving through the story as a big angry group, it’s really, really, really, really, really intense. It’s a masterpiece.”
Horror films have a long history of pulling from political turmoil and society’s ills for plots. Dating back nearly 60 years, when George A. Romero made the first “Night of the Living Dead,” the filmmaker clearly had a political message under the surface of his zombie plot. Now, it appears that filmmaker David Gordon Green has created a film that somewhat inadvertently has turned into a timely discussion of the rage the United States feels right now. It’s a damn shame that we won’t be able to see the finished product until October 15, 2021.