Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

On the rainy night of October 30, 1978, 21-year-old Michael Myers escaped from Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium, where he had spent the previous 15 years of his life after murdering his 17-year-old sister, Judith, at the age of six, and made his way back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois in the stolen car of his psychiatrist, Sam Loomis. The next day, on Halloween, he managed to track down his now-17-year-old sister, Laurie Strode, who was only a baby when he murdered their older sister and she was subsequently adopted by the Strode family. After killing her two best friends, Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok, along with Lynda's boyfriend, Bob Simms, Michael pursued Laurie and subjected her to a night of trauma that would forever alter the course of her life, but thanks to the miraculously timed intervention of Dr. Loomis, who intuitively knew that his former patient was the personification of pure, unadulterated evil, Laurie was able to survive the night. Mentally, however, she would be left with a lifetime of irreparable scarring. 

In the previous installment, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, Michael was revealed to be a pawn in the Cult of Thorn, who put some ill-defined curse on Michael at the age of six that compelled him to murder every last member of his bloodline for God knows what reason. It remains one of the worst installments in the Halloween franchise to date, a marriage of a laughably nonsensical storyline and a pitch-black, humor-free, stone-faced tonality. What is a filmmaker to do when they want to pay a contribution to a horror franchise whose first installment remains one of the most influential horror films of all time, but whose last sequel let the cat out of the bag regarding its initially enigmatic antagonist in the most unfulfilling and incoherent manner imaginable? Why, you erase said atrocious sequel, of course! You pretend it never happened. While you're at it, why stop at the erasure of one subpar sequel? 

Nowadays, the horror genre has embraced the unlimited freedom of what is clunkily referred to as the "requel," a sequel that positions itself directly after the events of the inaugural installment of a franchise while retconning those of the previous sequels that fail to align with the current filmmakers' vision. With Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, the seventh installment in the Halloween franchise, screenwriters Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg pioneered the ingenious technique of continuity disruption by crafting a sequel that transpires 20 years after the events of Halloween and Halloween 2 while turning a blind eye to the subsequent four chapters. In doing so, they unshackled themselves from two burdens: the emasculating Cult of Thorn reveal that applied a misguided method to Michael Myers' supposedly undefinable and unmotivated madness and the death of original final girl Laurie Strode. The latter paved the way for the return of Jamie Lee Curtis in the role that jumpstarted her career as a Hollywood icon in general and a top-ranking scream queen in particular.

As the title suggests, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later picks up two decades after Michael Myers' 1978 Halloween night massacre that concluded with the explosion at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital that seemingly killed both Michael and Dr. Loomis, who was willing to sacrifice himself so no more lives had to be threatened by his incurable former patient. Unfortunately, Michael (Chris Durand) managed to survive the explosion—with nary a single scar on either of his exposed hands, oddly enough—and has decided to go trick or treating on Halloween 1998. (Why he chose to wait 20 years before making his comeback is never explicitly detailed.) 

After breaking into the home of Marion Chambers-Whittington (Nancy Stephens), Dr. Loomis' former nurse prior to his passing, to obtain the files of Laurie Strode (Curtis) that expose her whereabouts, which results in both Marion's murder and that of her two teenage neighbors, Jimmy Howell (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Tony Alegre (Branden Williams), Michael steals Marion's car and makes his way to Summer Glen, California, where Laurie lives under the alias of "Keri Tate" and works as the headmistress of Hillcrest Academy High School. A single mother to teenage son John (Josh Hartnett), who just turned 17 himself, Laurie has spent the last 20 years of her life psychologically handcuffed to her supposedly deceased older brother and remains paranoid that he's waiting to come after her to finish what he started. To suppress her PTSD, she has become a "functioning alcoholic" and pill popper, and steadfastly refuses to celebrate or even acknowledge the titular holiday. 

Fed up with living under his mother's seemingly irrational paranoia, John resolves to make this year the first in which he'll celebrate Halloween via throwing a clandestine party at Hillcrest with his girlfriend, Molly Cartwell (Michelle Williams), best friend, Charlie Deveraux (Adam Hann-Byrd), and Charlie's girlfriend, Sarah Wainthrope (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), after the rest of their peers ride off to Yosemite for the weekend, inadvertently granting Michael the ideal opportunity to meet his nephew and indulge his long-suppressed teen-slashing impulses.

The first gargantuan correction that screenwriters Zappia and Greenberg apply to the Halloween franchise is retconning the events of Halloween 3-6, consequently and efficiently undoing the nonsensical and incoherent Cult of Thorn explanation that absolved Michael of a degree of his culpability in his own horrid actions: it wasn't entirely his fault, he was under the control of a powerful druid-worshipping cult. In the process, the writers restore agency to their horror icon. Michael Myers is once again the living embodiment of pure evil, irrationally hell-bent on murdering his baby sister and anyone who stands in his way of doing so. Why? There is no explanation. He isn't acting on the demands of a cult. These murderous impulses are deep-seated within him. Michael is a human shark, acting on his own free will according to his undefinable instincts, and he works alone. 

For better or worse, because they accept the events of Halloween 2 as canonical, Zappia and Greenberg maintain the kinship between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. They are still brother and sister, and for whatever reason, Michael is driven by the primary goal of killing the baby sister who got away two decades prior.

In a thoughtful move that lends a layer of psychological drama to their teen-slasher framework, Zappia and Greenberg carve out space to examine the psychology of Laurie in the aftermath of the 1978 Halloween night massacre which left both of her closest friends dead, a slash in her upper right arm, and a much deeper slash in her psyche that has yet to fully heal. In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Laurie is revealed to have died in a car accident. Zappia and Greenberg utilize that write-off to kick-start their revisionist history, deciding that Laurie actually faked her death in an automobile accident, relocated to Summer Glen, California, and started anew as the headmistress of a prestigious boarding school called Hillcrest Academy. 

In this timeline, rather than a daughter named Jamie Lloyd, Laurie has a teenage son named John, whose absentee father is an "abusive, chain-smoking methadone addict" who, ironically enough, left Laurie. Referred to by John as a "functioning alcoholic," Laurie uses excess alcohol to drown the trauma and survivor's guilt that she's been unsuccessful at grappling with, despite having "tried everything," from self help to group therapy. She's in a relationship with Hillcrest's guidance counselor, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin), and lives a financially prosperous life, but nothing can fully erase the memories of that one Halloween night or the visions (premonitions?) of Michael approaching from behind. Making matters more toxic, Laurie's paranoia of her brother's resurrection has made her overprotective and suffocating as a mother, soiling her relationship with her son.

Unfortunately, when Zappia and Greenberg transfer their focus from Laurie onto John and his social clique, they revert to the teen-slasher clichés that were brilliantly and lovingly satirized by Kevin Williamson in Scream: a quartet of teenage besties remain in their high school to put together a clandestine Halloween party; Charlie says, "I'll be right back," before taking a dumbwaiter upstairs to search for a corkscrew, brazenly defying Randy Meeks' most emphasized rule of how to survive a horror film; every light switch conveniently refuses to turn on; every telephone in Laurie's house turns up dead the second she wants to call John; Jimmy exploits an opportunity to rob his neighbor of her beers; Molly accidentally drops the keys through a gap in a locked gate, behind which she and John are trapped; and most offensively, police officers finally arrive hours after being called, and of course, they arrive at their recipient's house while she's next door having her throat slashed. 

Taking a page from Kevin Williamson's self-referential playbook, Zappia and Greenberg scatter callbacks to the original Halloween throughout their script, along with sly references to two interconnected horror films: Scream and Psycho. Regarding the latter, the connections are obvious: Halloween was inspired by Psycho, as evinced in its emphasis on suspense over graphic carnage; the name "Sam Loomis" was directly stolen for Michael's psychiatrist; and Janet Leigh, the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis, played Marion Crane. In a case of art begetting more art, Scream was inspired by Halloween, which is no doubt why Casey Becker chooses it as her favorite scary movie in the opening scene. Halloween H20 is a celebration of its franchise's far-reaching lineage. 

Cici Cooper's death scene in Scream 2 plays on Molly and Sarah's TV in their dorm room. In the original Halloween, Laurie urged Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace to "go down the street to the Mackenzies' house." In the opening of Scream, Mr. Becker told his wife to "Get in the car, drive down to the Mackenzies'." As a subtle way of saying, "You stole our name, so now we get to steal yours," Laurie demands that John and Molly "drive down the street to the Beckers'" to call the police and an ambulance. When Molly refuses, Laurie says, "Do as I say now!" Almost word for word what she said to Tommy and Lindsey. Sitting in English class, Molly looks out the window and sees Michael watching her behind a gate. Her attention is redirected when Laurie, this time the teacher herself, asks her a question about the book they're discussing, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Molly manages to summon a thoughtful, detailed answer, then when she looks back out the window, Michael's gone. 

Janet Leigh cameos as Norma Watson, Laurie's secretary who tries to offer her "maternal" advice about focusing on the present rather than miring herself in the past. Leigh also gets to resurrect Leigh Brackett's famous quote from the original: "It's Halloween, I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare." Her character is named after Norma Watson from Carrie, who was played by P.J. Soles, who later played Lynda, one of Laurie's best friends, in Halloween. H20 is replete with full-circle moments like these. 

In a subversion of the original closet scene, Michael, assuming Laurie is once again hiding in a closet (the passage of 20 years hasn't dulled his memory), stabs his knife repeatedly through the locked door, and Laurie sneaks up behind him and slams a fire extinguisher on his back. Furthermore, a costume prop of Butterball from Hellraiser is seated on the porch bench of Jimmy's house. 

Taking over the reigns from original director-co-writer John Carpenter is Steve Miner, the director of Friday the 13th Part 2 and Friday the 13th Part 3. In a remarkable deviation from the nonstop bloodletting of his previous aforementioned horror sequels, Miner exhibits restraint in depicting the relatively few kills (six altogether) of Halloween H20, three of which occur off-camera and are unveiled in their bloody aftermath: Jimmy's corpse rocks back and forth in a chair with an ice skate lodged in the middle of his face; Tony's corpse falls face down at an open doorway with a kitchen knife implanted in his back; and Charlie's corpse is seated in a dumbwaiter with a slash across his throat. For the other three members of the body count, Miner depicts their deaths on-screen, but elects to imply the violence, rather than linger on the grotesque details, before quickly cutting away. For Sarah's death, Michael thrusts his kitchen knife up and down four times to suggest penetration in her back. In Miner's most visually violent kill, Michael stabs Will in the back, elevates him off the floor, and holds him in the air for a prolonged moment of torture, in which Will convulses while bleeding internally from his mouth.

Aside from his restrained portrayal of bloodshed, Miner hearkens back to the atmospheric, bloodless magic of Carpenter's direction via emphasizing patiently crafted suspense over an abundant body count, never in a rush to speed to the next murder or chase sequence. Unfortunately, because Miner allows so much time to pass between Michael-oriented set pieces and kills, the pervasive effect is one of tedium and tameness rather than genuine dread-inducing suspense. Furthermore, Miner relies too much on the cheap technique of employing false scares to paint an eye-rollingly inauthentic portrait of PTSD. Specifically, he directs his actors to repeatedly sneak up on each other. 

Two of these incidents involve Will, who, being a guidance counselor, should be smart and sensitive enough to know not to sneak up on a victim of PTSD. On the first occasion, where Laurie meets Will at a restaurant for lunch, she visualizes Michael's reflection in the window, standing behind her. Spinning around in fright, she's relieved to see that it's simply Will. Later that night, while walking home alone, Laurie sees a silhouette of Michael slowly approaching her in an alleyway. Rooted to the spot in paralyzing paranoia, Laurie closes her eyes and reopens them to find that he's still walking toward her. Again she closes her eyes, this time keeping them closed longer, desperately hoping that when she opens them, there will be no one there. Then a hand touches her shoulder. She lets out an instinctual scream and opens her eyes to see that, once again, it's just Will. 

Is this guy some kind of psycho? Why, when he was standing at the opposite end of the alley across from Laurie, didn't he address her? "Hey, Keri, it's me." No, this moron elects to silently walk up to her in the blackness of night. If I were a victim of PTSD, I'd cross this borderline psychotic idiot off my list of both potential companions and guidance counselors. 

Miner doesn't limit the sneaking-ups to Will: both John and Charlie sneak up from behind their respective girlfriends and embrace them in a gesture of adrenaline-pumping romance. In Miner's standout moment of suspenseful misdirection, Charlie accidentally drops a corkscrew down a sink and reaches a hand down the drain to fish it out, and Miner raises the gruesome expectation of Michael turning on the garbage disposal. Instead, Michael allows Charlie to retrieve it. Then once he turns around, Michael appears in front of him, the terror of his manifestation soiled by the hideous artificiality of a bizarre CGI mask. 

One of the secret weapons of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween was the former's presentation of Michael Myers. On a technical level, Halloween is an outright masterpiece, thanks in large part to Dean Cundey's innovative cinematography that made impeccable use of lighting and camera angles to shroud Michael in an aura of otherworldly mystique, filming him in over-the-shoulder shots and extreme wide shots that silhouetted him against porch lights. This man truly was the American boogeyman writ large. 

In an earnest attempt to pay tribute to Carpenter's original artistry, cinematographer Daryn Okada employs a visual style evocative of Cundey's, framing Michael Myers in wide shots as a ghoulish silhouette, surreptitiously standing behind unsuspecting victims. As Marion walks through her invaded home in the dark, armed only with a flashlight, Michael appears behind her in an open doorway. After Charlie accidentally turns on the garbage disposal, signaling his own presence, Michael appears behind him in the kitchen doorway. 

Okada has a lot of fun with Michael's imposing shadow, projecting it on walls or the ground and allowing it to precede the emergence of its actual owner. Okada utilizes this technique on two separate occasions when Michael pursues Sarah and Laurie, and it accomplishes two goals at once: building a mood of anticipatory dread and returning Michael to his original portrayal as a physically and symbolically shadowy boogeyman. 

In one of the best sequences that doesn't climax with a murder, a mother on the go named Claudia (Larisa Miller) takes her young daughter, Casey (Emmalee Thompson), to a highway rest area to use the bathroom. The women's room is locked, so they're forced to go into the men's room, which appears to be empty. While mother and daughter seclude themselves in adjacent stalls, Okada limits our vision to Claudia's field of view. From the gap beneath the stall door, a hand swiftly snatches Claudia's purse. Okada zooms in for a close-up of her petrified face, immersing us in her breathless anxiety. Claudia peers through the gap between the stall door and the frame, and through her spying eye, Okada captures a glimpse of Michael staring into the mirror, as though he's looking straight at her and defying her to challenge him. "You want your purse? Come and get it." 

After Michael leaves, Claudia slowly turns the lock to her stall, debating internally whether she wants to open the door, until a scream from Casey forces her to make up her mind immediately. Claudia bursts out of her stall and into Casey's, only to find, to her immense relief, that she's shaking spiders out of her hair. This represents the sole clever false alarm in Halloween H20. Okada captures the claustrophobia of feeling trapped in a bathroom stall while showcasing a merciful dimension to Michael's personality. He has no interest in killing a defenseless little girl or leaving her motherless. He just wants the keys to their jeep because his original stolen car has suffered a flat tire. 

In the second most tense set piece of Halloween H20, after Molly and John lock themselves behind a gate, Michael slashes his knife at their throats through the gaps between the bars as the couple presses themselves desperately against the door, screaming for someone to let them in. Looking down, Michael picks up the keys that Molly dropped and begins testing out each one in the lock. John and Molly scream for help and bang on the door, then just as Michael finds the right key to unlock the gate, Laurie and Will conveniently show up just in the nick of time to let John and Molly inside. Michael's assault is psychologically driven, playing on the fear of being cornered, slashed at, and having to scream for help that doesn't appear to be arriving—and Hartnett and Williams do a phenomenal job of conveying full-throated panic, helplessness, and desperation—but the nerve-racking tension is somewhat spoiled by a rescue that arrives rather pat.

In one instance of cinematographic dishonesty, Okada projects a moving shadow onto a wall that matches the physique of Michael, only to suddenly transform into that of heavyset security guard-slash-budding erotic fiction author Ronny Jones (LL Cool J) once he's shot at by a trigger-happy Will. Speaking of Ronny, it's weird how Michael chooses only to stalk him when he has a perfect opportunity to kill him. After Ronny steps outside his office to investigate the sudden arrival of an empty jeep, Michael slinks behind him. Then Ronny returns to his office to continue a phone call with his wife, and Michael stalks him from outside the window. As soon as Ronny turns around, detecting a presence, Michael has vanished into thin air.

Miner does a good job setting up a tense buildup, but cuts to the next scene without providing the expected payoff. It's really kind of dull. Michael may be a soulless serial killer, but at the very least, he decidedly isn't a racist one. Throughout much of the 86-minute runtime, Michael merely stalks his targets, including a POV shot of him watching John and Laurie at the front gate through the windshield of his jeep.

The last time Laurie Strode had been involved in the Michael Myers saga up until this point was in 1981's Halloween 2. The four installments thereafter killed her off (off-screen) and shifted the focus to other surviving members of Michael's bloodline and Laurie's adopted family, most prominently her parentless daughter, Jamie Lloyd. For the first time in 17 years, Laurie has been resurrected from the dead, so to speak, and what better actress to play her than the one who originated the iconic—and career-defining—final-girl role at the age of 19? John Carpenter may not have returned behind the camera for this 20th anniversary, but Jamie Lee Curtis has returned in front of it to reclaim the role that made her a star, and she's easily the greatest asset of Halloween H20. 

On a superficial physical level, Curtis is drop-dead gorgeous at the age of 39, trading her 19-year-old straight, shoulder-length, feathered hairstyle for a short, textured pixie cut that complements only a physique as thin as hers. In tracing Laurie Strode's arc from an introverted, happy-go-lucky, innocent teenage babysitter and high school student in 1978 to a traumatized single mother in 1998, Curtis portrays her evolution with poignancy and ferocity. From her first scene, she emphatically reaffirms her status as the quintessential scream queen via marking her reintroduction with a sustained, ear-piercing scream owing to a nightmare. After tranquilizing herself, Curtis presents Laurie's exterior as quiet, composed, and stern, particularly in her unyielding refusal to allow John to attend Yosemite with the rest of his class. 

Despite Laurie's posh appearance and prestigious career, Curtis' eyes betray vulnerability, paranoia, and shame. When confronted with the hard-hitting truths she's spent the last 20 years suppressing, Curtis looks downward, unable to sustain eye contact with her scene partner. In fact, she does quite a bit with her eyes throughout, closing them tightly and reopening them in an attempt to vanquish her hallucinations of Michael, assuming they are just hallucinations. Curtis can transition from tranquility, sporting a sensual whisper and alluring smile, to heavy-breathing panic in the same scene. She captures Laurie's inner conflict between sheltering her only son from the potential horror of his undead uncle and encouraging his growth and independence as a 17-year-old individual seeking to carve out his own place in the world.

As Laurie sits by herself at lunch after Will steps out, Laurie calls over a waiter to ask for another glass of chardonnay. The waiter looks down to see a whole glass in front of her and hesitates. "Today!" Laurie says, her voice edged with venom, embarrassed of his observation of her alcoholism. As soon as he leaves to fetch her order, she downs the entire glass in one shot. After the waiter returns with her refill, Laurie reverts to kindness and appreciation. 

When the inevitable 20-year reunion between brother and sister materializes, with Laurie and Michael standing across from each other face to face, separated by a locked door, Curtis' eyes widen with shock and horror. At this precise moment, Laurie rediscovers the backbone and toughness she never knew she could tap back into, and Curtis evolves her into the full-fledged fighter we only saw shades of in the original Halloween. This isn't the Laurie we witnessed in Halloween 2, sleeping in a hospital bed, crawling out of bed and into another room, where she falls asleep yet again, screaming for help at the top of her lungs only after help has shut the door on her. No, this is a matured version of the Laurie who knew how to use the objects at her disposal to fight back against this faceless force of evil, sticking a sewing needle into his neck, a clothes hanger into his eye, and stabbing him in the chest with his own dropped knife. 

Clad in a dark gray, long-sleeved knit pullover sweater and armed with a fire axe she retrieves by kicking in the glass panel of its cabinet, Curtis sets the image of a certified horror badass. Apart from her opening nightmare-influenced scream, she doesn't do any screaming this time around. At 39, Laurie is now more of a hunter than the hunted, and she's ready for Michael's return. On some level, she's been salivating for it, realizing that the only way to unshackle herself from her lifelong tormentor is by confronting him head on. 

Curtis commits herself thoroughly to the physicality of the role, making Laurie agile, resourceful, and quick-witted. She carries concealed, hiding a nickel Smith and Wesson Model 36 in her jeans and ready to pull it out when danger strikes. As Michael pursues her through Hillcrest's cafeteria, Curtis crawls under a row of tables with the swiftness and tactical ingenuity of a trained soldier, at one point kicking a chair on the opposite end from the one she's escaping to briefly distract Michael. In an effort to beat Michael at his own game, Laurie tosses several knives at him, all of which miss. When she runs out, she holds a drawer in front of her face to take Michael's stab. While his knife is stuck inside the wood, Laurie knees him in the groin. She stabs him repeatedly in the chest with not one, but two knives until he topples over the railing of the second floor onto a cafeteria table below. You can feel Curtis purging herself of 20 years' worth of bottled-up, righteous vengeance. 

If a remake of Friday the 13th had gone into production around this time, Curtis would have been the ideal candidate for Pamela Voorhees. Like Betsy Palmer, she has the short hair, the sweater, the fitness, and, most importantly, the fierce maternal instinct to protect her young at any cost necessary.

Two young actors making their big-screen debuts are Josh Hartnett as John Tate, Laurie's increasingly exasperated son, and Jodi Lyn O'Keefe as Sarah Wainthrope, John's best friend's girlfriend. Both leave a noteworthy impression. O'Keefe infuses her supporting character with energy and a cool-girl charisma. Aside from her God-given glamour, Sarah's most appealing trait is her unabashed love of—and endearingly frustrated hankering for—food, and in her final scene, O'Keefe garners sympathy for Sarah's helplessness, pain, and desperate, unheeded pleas for mercy. 

Josh Hartnett turned out to be a poetic choice for John Tate because he shares three things in common with his on-screen mother: (1) he was 19 during production, (2) he made his acting debut with a Halloween film, and (3) it paved the way for his career as a minor scream king, following up his performance with The Faculty a year later, 30 Days of Night, and most recently, Trap, in which he got to shake up his good-guy persona by playing a family man and part-time serial killer. 

Hartnett holds his own against the scream-queen legend, capturing the steadily boiling exasperation of being the only child of a mother whose life has been defined by a traumatic incident in her youth. John's uncle ruined his mother's life, and he feels as though he's paying the penalty for it. Hartnett plays John as a loving son who will rush to his mother's aid when she's screaming bloody murder in her sleep, but is determined to finally, at 17 years old, assert his independence and break free from her irrational overprotection and dictatorial control that's curbing his development. 

In Hartnett's best scene opposite Curtis, Laurie catches John wandering around town with Charlie during school hours, and while she lectures him on responsibility, Hartnett gradually loses his composure and finally explodes, raising his voice from a controlled tone to an anguished, jarring scream of pent-up resentment. When John's assertion that "Michael Myers is dead" is confounded, Hartnett isn't given a whole lot to do. Apart from getting in a few shots at Michael in defense of Molly, John is reduced to running, limping (after suffering a stab to the leg), and whimpering for his mother not to leave him. His penchant for repeatedly scaring Laurie notwithstanding, Adam Arkin is soft-spoken, supportive, patient, and understanding as her guidance counselor-cum-boyfriend.

Halloween H20 has two composers for the musical score: John Ottman and Marco Beltrami. The compositions contributed by Ottman far outperform those by Beltrami in terms of originality, if little else. Specifically, Ottman pays homage to John Carpenter's gorgeously unsettling synth-and-piano theme while adding his own somber undertone. Beltrami, on the other hand, blatantly recycles his own Scream score to accompany the chase and murder sequences without a shred of variation. It's too derivative and lazy to augment the intended dread, nor does it mesh with the tone of a straight-faced slasher as well as that of a tongue-in-cheek one. Beltrami's music reeks of a hasty post-production insertion.

While it's unrealistic that Michael's William Shatner mask would have survived the Haddonfield Memorial fire alongside its owner—it's as white and clean as the Halloween day he stole it from Nichol's Hardware Store in 1978—the costume designers recreate it with an adherence to Carpenter's deliberate simplicity. As in the first, second, and sixth installments, the mask is an expressionless, white canvas onto which one may project their worst fears. However, the size is too tight to properly fit Chris Durand's head and the eyeholes are too large. As a result, the mask stretches against his face and reveals his eyes. When we look at Michael Myers, the only thing we should see behind his mask's eyes are two pinholes of pitch blackness that represent a window into the black nothingness of his soul. Durand's eyes, often wide open, convey desperation, helplessness, pain, humanizing Michael in a way that detracts from his unknowability and inhumanity. 

If the original Halloween franchise had concluded with H20, it would have sent both Michael Myers and Laurie Strode out on a high note because the ending, taken on its own terms, is exhilarating, cathartic, and seemingly definitive. Smart enough to assume that Michael isn't really dead from a bunch of stab wounds to the chest and a fall onto a table, Laurie takes matters into her own hands. Still armed with her trusty fire axe, she snatches a gun from a policeman's holster and orders the coroners at gunpoint to load Michael into the coroner's van. Getting into the driver's seat, Laurie drives off, leaving John and Molly behind. As anticipated, Laurie notices movement in the body bag from the rearview mirror. Michael manages to wriggle out of the bag, and Laurie stomps on the brake, sending Michael crashing through the windshield and onto the street. "Come on, get up!" Laurie urges, knowing that he can't die with his body intact. Within seconds, Michael sits up, and Laurie drives into him, deliberately crashing the van down a hill. 

Laurie is lucky enough to fall out of the van unscathed as it tumbles down, while Michael is pinned by his back against a tree branch. Laurie approaches Michael, who grasps at his mask, and sternly calls his name until he faces her. Seemingly aware that he's reached the end of the line—he's completely immobilized, with no chance of escape—Michael reaches out a hand in a last-ditch effort for mercy, the same kind he's never offered to any of his victims. 

Curtis does some of her most nuanced facial acting in this scene. Without uttering a word, she conveys a degree of pity for her brother's first taste of helplessness, smiling through tears as she reaches out her own hand and grazes his fingertips, but then the realization crashes over her: even though this is her brother, he's the same man who ruined her life, murdered her best friends, tried to murder her and her son, and would still be aiming to finish the job if he had the mobility to do so. Her smile suddenly fades. 

Without warning, Laurie grabs her fire axe and decapitates Michael in one swift, ferocious swing. His head rolls onto the ground. Laurie stands still, panting with exertion and catharsis. John Carpenter's original theme plays on the soundtrack as the sirens of approaching police cars and ambulances sound in the distance. Once and for all, Michael Myers is truly dead. No matter how superhuman he may have been, there's no coming back from a detached head. Laurie can live out the rest of her long life liberated from the physical threat and psychological oppression of her brother, while knowing she obtained justice for her loved ones and every other innocent person whose life was stolen by him. It's a brutally poetic and viscerally satisfying conclusion to Michael and Laurie's 20-year-long odyssey—one that would be undone four years later by the most contrived, ludicrous, disrespectful, and character-assassinating twist in Halloween history.

5/10