Horror Fest Day Three: Halloween 4

What would a Halloween Horror Fest be without a Halloween movie?

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers only really sells because it tries to do something none of the sequels that came after it did: keep the story going in a way that movies the mythology of Halloween forward.

In the wake of Season of the Witch, the very unsuccessful attempt to continue making Halloween movies without Michael Myers, producer Moustapha Akkad took the rights to the series back and decided to get things back on track with a sequel based on what worked about Carpenter's original. Unlike Halloween II (or any subsequent Halloween film) Halloween 4 is low on nudity, low on explicit gore, and generally more about tone than cheap scares. Instead, it picks up the story ten years after things left off, in Haddonfield, on Halloween.

What really works about Halloween 4 is that writer Alan B. McElroy tries two things that you don't really see in sequels: 1) a concerted effort to make Michael Myers scary again, and 2) showing us how the town of Haddonfield would react if Myers ever came back. The police force only doubts Dr. Loomis for about thirty seconds when he marches into headquarters raving about "the evil" being back, and very quickly the town goes into lockdown, with only a handful of vigilantes on the street looking to take out Myers themselves.

Halloween 4 borrows a lot from the original, but in a way that doesn't make you think "oh yeah, wasn't that better then?". And taking a cue from Friday the 13th Part 4, there's a nice twist at the end about passing the torch of evil from the boogeyman to a younger protege (in both cases one of the victims), much to Loomis's chagrin.

But not everything about Halloween 4 works. In order to buy that Jamie (Danielle Harris) is really Laurie Strode's daughter (get it? her name's Jamie because Jamie Lee Curtis was Laurie!), we have to assume that Laurie had here right after the events of the first Halloween. It's also a little weird that the local teenagers don't all seem to know about Myers since Tommy Doyle was about their age when it happened the first time. Also, 4 takes the idea of Michael being nigh invincible to new levels, although never quite as ridiculous as in 6, 7, or 8. Still, the gas station sequence is a little straining on credibility, and shouldn't he be totally atrophied if it was true he'd been in a coma for ten years?

Ah, but I quibble too much. The truth is that Halloween 4 at least tries to break the "sequels always suck" rule of horror films, and by and large it succeeds, moreso than any other that followed it.