Good morning 🐣

Before we dive into this week’s feature presentation, I’d like to make a quick detour into the refreshingly demented mind of claymation animator Lee Hardcastle with one of his newest shorts, “Dreaming Child.” It’s less than three minutes long, but much like his short film that we featured last year, it’s funny, violent, and over-the-top, filled with beautiful colors and lovingly textured clay.

Now watch this 👀

A year ago I wrote about the original “Halloween,” the story of Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), an innocent girl who happens to survive Michael Myers’s random killing spree on “the night he came home.” Whereas that movie had a beautiful gradual transition from daylight to evening, “Halloween II” covers one entire long night, picking up right after the ending of the first film. It actually starts with a recap of the first movie’s ending, where Michael gets briefly unmasked while fighting with Laurie, then Dr. Sam Loomis (Michael’s doctor, played by Donald Pleasence) shoots him and he falls out the window. What about that medical pledge to do no harm, Sam? Guess Michael’s a lost cause.

So Big Mike falls from the second story balcony, but disappears, leaving behind only a bloody outline on the lawn.

Laurie: “Was it the boogeyman?”

Loomis: “As a matter of fact, it was.”

In the first movie, Little Tommy warns that “you can’t kill the boogeyman.” Michael is a force of nature: unknowable, unstoppable, outside the bounds of human conception. But unmasked for that brief second, and reinforced to an undermining effect in this sequel, we now know deep down he’s just some 21-year-old punk.

Cue credits: A glowing jack-o-lantern slowly peels open, revealing a skull inside.

Laurie gets rushed to the hospital as she begs not to be put to sleep, then spends the majority of the movie drugged up and bedridden. Meanwhile Michael is roaming the city, peering through windows, wandering in and out of homes without people noticing. You know Michael isn’t “all there” because he keeps wearing his mask even when it’s so easily recognizable now. The cops are looking for it! Blend in, man! Or perhaps he doesn’t care. Perhaps he’s flaunting it, indifferent to life and death, including his own. Michael really has only one mission: to kill. And poor Alice is the first victim this go around, stabbed with a kitchen knife as her friend tells her about the murders over the phone. We can only imagine what’s going through that friend’s mind when she’s met with silence.

“Halloween II” focuses a lot on the aftermath of his killing spree from the first film. The town is angry, throwing rocks at the old Myers house. The cops are looking for him and mistakes are made. People aren’t thinking straight. People are also oblivious, like in the last film. It’s a messy and chaotic time.

You don’t know it from the opening scenes, but this movie’s a little more crazed than the original, a little more titillating, with nudity and blood, and a whole lot less subtle. The men hunting Michael discover that at some point he broke into a school, wrote “Samhain” in blood on the blackboard, and stabbed a child’s drawing of a happy family. Real mature, Mike. There’s also a long-lost sister plot line that is totally unnecessary. All this backstory and childishness contribute to making Michael Myers more human and less cosmic. Like I said, he’s now just some 21-year-old punk.

It also doesn’t feel as tight as the first movie. The reason for all this is that John Carpenter, who wrote and directed the original, just plain didn’t want to make it. It involved a deal to also be able to make his next movie, “The Fog,” so he wrote, produced, and composed the music for this, but did not direct. He’s even quoted as saying: “They want me to do the same movie again. No. There’s no more story. Sorry. It’s over. It was over when I finished with the first one. There’s nothing left to say. Michael goes away and he comes back and kills someone. Oh, please. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”

He described his writing process on this as “a lot of beer, sitting in front of a typewriter saying ‘What the fuck am I doing? I don’t know.’”

But it’s not a bad movie! (Just not the genuine masterpiece the first film is.)

What I like is that it expands on the theme from the first movie that really resonated with me: when Laurie went running down the street, banging on doors, begging for help, but all her neighbors ignored her.

“Halloween II” emphasizes the dereliction of duty:

• Loomis failing his patient,

• a doctor coming to work drunk,

• a sheriff failing his daughter (and really the entire town),

• a security guard not noticing Michael on the surveillance camera,

• a nurse neglecting the newborns for a quickie, and

• a mother not seeing the giant razor blade in her kid’s candy.

And then there’s just the general obliviousness:

• THE KID HIMSELF SOMEHOW NOT NOTICING A GIANT RAZOR BLADE IN HIS OWN CANDY. I MEAN WTF, MAN. THAT ONE’S ON YOU.

• Another kid listening to the radio, wandering the streets, then bumps into Michael and just keeps walking, oblivious to the fate he’s narrowly avoided.

• Laurie crawling on the ground, crying for help, while Dr. Loomis and the U.S. Marshal walk into the hospital, not noticing her at all.

This is what I think is the true horror of “Halloweens I and II.” Not the big scary man, but the obliviousness, the indifference, the ineptitude, and the cowardice of the entire town. It’s easier to lock your door and draw the blinds than it is to help someone in need. It’s an intangible force of bullshit, a monolith to selfishness, something you can see and recognize, but is far too big to wrap your mind around. Michael Myers may be called The Shape, but the true horror of these films is a shape without form.

Happy Halloween! 🎃