It’s a really great time to be a horror movie buff. This weekend brings the release of Hereditary, one of many films that has been hailed as “the next Exorcist,” but perhaps the only one that lives up to the hype. The final half hour of the movie is pure nightmare fuel that also keeps up A24’s weird streak of scary naked old people going that began with It Follows and The Witch. (Old naked people: never not scary.) Earlier this year, A Quiet Place’s horrific, Do Not Speak Unless You Want a Razor-Toothed Alien Creature to Impale You premise was an endurance test for its characters that no actual person could reasonably survive. And last year, Get Out gave the genre some long-overdue prestige, nabbing an Oscar for Jordan Peele’s original screenplay, while It finally gave the haunting Stephen King book the big-screen treatment it deserved.
For the genre’s next banger, how about a sequel to a cult classic? Blumhouse—the folks behind Get Out, Split, and Sinister—is bringing Halloween back from the dead. The first trailer for the reboot dropped Friday morning, and ya know, it looks really good!
The original John Carpenter film was special and certainly a product of its time—in a good way. Everything from the scares, Michael Myers’s mask, the slow-building plot, and even the iconic piano theme were deceptively simple: horror that went big by going small. The same can’t be said of … any of its many, many (terrible) sequels. Thankfully, the new Halloween is literally pretending all of the sequels never happened. In the reboot’s universe, Myers has been behind bars, while Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode has spent the past 40 years preparing for his eventual return. That also means that Myers is no longer Laurie’s brother, as was revealed in Halloween II. “Wasn’t it her brother that murdered all those babysitters?” one teen asks in the trailer. “No, it was not her brother,” another replies. “That was something that people made up.” Meta and sassy!
The new Halloween pays deference to the original film in several other ways. Myers himself will be portrayed by giant human man Nick Castle, who played the killer in the first film. And, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis is back, no longer the unwitting high schooler having the worst night of her life. Laurie Strode’s been preparing for Myers for 40 years in the way you’d expect someone who survived a horror movie would.
But a Halloween movie is only as good as its Michael Myers, and the big question is: Can a giant man in a mask still be scary after all these yea—
OH MY GOD, WHAT THE FUCK! HE CARRIED HUMAN TEETH INTO A BATHROOM AND DROPPED THEM INTO A STALL! [Kevin Harlan voice] Michael Myers with no regard for human life!
The good news: My Hereditary-induced nightmares are gone. The bad news: I can no longer go into public bathrooms. Halloween will hit theaters—shocker!—in October.
