Halloween II picks up right where John Carpenter’s 1978 classic left off .. literally seconds after Michael Myers disappears into the darkness. The sequel takes us deeper into the same October 31st night, only now the screams echo through Haddonfield Memorial Hospital instead of quiet suburban streets.
The movie doesn’t wastes little time with new setups or character introductions; it just drops you right back into that same world, that same panic, that same cold air that hung over the end of the first film. You feel the chaos in the cold night.. even Mrs. Elrod screams as she makes a sandwich and finds blood–to this day we don’t know if her husband wanted mayo or mustard.
There a few interesting back stories to Halloween II almost .. one major point is that it almost didn’t happen the way we know it.
Carpenter himself didn’t originally plan a direct sequel and he envisioned the Halloween name turning into an anthology of different scary stories. He was YEARS ahead of his time on that thought process.
Moustapha Akkad sensed a hit… and it was time to capitalize ..
After the studio pushed for more Michael Myers Carpenter grudgingly agreed to write it. He’s even said he wrote the script with a six-pack of beer by his side, just trying to make sense of what would happen next. That might explain the surreal, dream-like pacing the film has. The movie is admittedly a little sloppy, but hazier, and far more violent than the first.
The mask was back. It was still the same Shatner face, but this time yellowed by chain smoking that Debra Hill subjected it to. Also the new inhabitant with a different face shape. Dick Warlock’s mug was rounder while Nick Castle was longer, hence the difference in appearance.
The new film also had more blood–Carpenter did that on purpose to match what audiences were then wanting. Akkad wasn’t overly happy with that because the TV broadcasts had to be tamed down ..
Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode became the face of the “final girl” trope. But in the sequel, she spends much of the movie confined to a hospital bed, drugged and traumatized, yet still somehow finds the strength to fight back. Donald Pleasence returns as Dr. Loomis, more unhinged than ever, shouting his famous lines about evil and destiny as he hunts Michael through sterile hallways. It is the hospital scenes that give the most feeling of the film. The fluorescent lights, the empty corridors, beeping heart monitors, all building to that fiery ending.
There were several points of Halloween 2 that feel like a docu-drama. You can feel the chaos and panic of the police in the movie–this is exactly how small town America police faced with a gory bloody scene of teenagers being killed would actually react. Now poor Ben Tramer got the brunt. Was it Loomis’ fault by the way? We never really get the chance to flesh that out..
Recently, Nightmare Nostalgia wrote about how II was the scarier sequel.
To us, not only scarier but quite frankly better. Halloween II seems to get better with each passing year despite Carpenter still unwilling to embrace the face that he and Hill either accidentally or unwittingly created a classic.
Perhaps the only pet peeve is that this movie could have been renamed ALL SAINTS DAY since it mostly took place after Halloween, mostly on November 1 if you think about the continuity.
It’s often overshadowed by the original, but Halloween II deserves more credit. It’s the movie that closed the story of Laurie and Michael (at least until later recreations), expanded the mythology, and gave us the twist that Laurie was his sister .. love it or hate it, it was a plot line that shaped the franchise for decades.
When Halloween ENDS came out, fans watched.. and never watched again. But they loved the opening 7 minutes that herald back to the original night he came home. There is lure in a way to what Michael Myers did in the immediate aftermath to Loomis’ six shots.
While ENDS gives us a perspective of a movie that Carpenter never made, we still love the one he did: Halloween II is better than Halloween 1.
