Halloween II (dir. Rick Rosenthal, 1981)
This is an ingenious approach to slasher material which would ordinarily have to explain how the killer came back from the dead, and explain where they have been in the intervening years. No intervening time means that we can skip right to the mayhem we’re so eager to see. Michael (Rick Warlock) is still on the loose, Dr. Loomis is desperately trying to find him, and Laurie is recovering from her trauma late at night at the hospital. The bulk of Halloween II takes place in the hospital.
There is, sadly, an irony to this ingenious approach, in that the story can’t really move anywhere. If we’re stuck in the same night, and we’re still following the same mayhem, there’s going to be no slow build, no drama, no establishing of the characters. It’s not as frightening as Halloween, but Halloween II does certainly up the mayhem. The kills are more creative and the body count is higher. The victims are pretty random, and Michael begins to succumb to the classical Transporting Killer Syndrome (i.e. he seems to be in several places at once, stalking several victims at the same time). There cannot be, in this approach, any sort of dramatic reveal or meaningful climax, because we’re just re-using the same setup as from the previous movie.
Actually, there is one (particularly dumb) dramatic twist. Laurie, while convalescing, has a few brief dreams wherein she remembers going to a hospital as a little girl to visit a mysterious little boy… Could it be? Yes, Halloween II pulls an Empire Strikes Back on us, and reveals that the villain and the hero are actually related. These familial twists are always immediately shocking, but rarely stand up to any sort of logical scrutiny after the fact. It turns out that Laurie Strode was adopted, and her older brother was Michael Myers. Myers, then, was not motivated by evil, but by some weird need to eliminate his own family members.
Jamie Lee Curtis is clearly wearing a wig in Halloween II. I’m guessing she had already converted to her now-iconic short hairdo. It would have been nice, though, if the wig matched the color of her hair in the last film. She is now a blonde.
And what of the nurses and friends and several other people that Michael murdered? I guess he did those for fun. See what I mean about making Michael less interesting by giving him a motivation?
The Halloween movies were notoriously brutal at the time, killing teenagers and dogs, and, in this film, an innocent boy is accidentally killed by a cop. Their violence seems downright tame today, but they’re still pretty effective. Halloween II ends with Laurie shooting Michael in the eyes (which only blinds him, and does not kill him) and his corpse being burned up in a fire. I think it’s pretty definitive that he’s dead. But as later films would teach us, definitive death means nothing in a slasher movie, and he’ll be back in two films’ time.
Next week, I’ll start off with the bonkers departure in the Halloween series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which leaves Michael and all the other characters aside in favor of a new supernatural tale. It has its own following, and I, uh, have never seen it. So be sure to come back next week to read my findings.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
