Halloween Kills, the follow-up to 2018’s remake and reboot Halloween as directed by David Gordon Green, will be released October 2021 with the sequel Halloween Ends slated for release in 2022 which will make Halloween Ends effectively the 13th installment in the Michael Myers series. With such a portentous number for the forty-year-plus horror franchise just around the corner, it’s interesting to reflect back on a sequel coming up on its own twenty-year anniversary. A sequel that attempted to layer in the themes of the decade and alienated almost the entire fanbase in keeping with the Halloween tradition of Michael never dies. 2002’s Halloween Resurrection.
The year was 1998. Twenty years earlier the first Halloween, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and Nick Castle as the soon to be iconic Michael Myers, had been released to theaters as written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill and directed by Carpenter. In 1981 the first sequel Halloween II, also be written by Carpenter and Hill but directed by Rick Rosenthal, was produced with the intention of closing the story of Laurie and her brother Michael Myers. This was the 70s into the early 80s before a horror franchise was as common to a general audience as it is today, and subsequently 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch would have nothing to do with Michael Myers at all while sequels 4, 5 and 6 would bring back Michael but focus on Jamie Lloyd, Laurie Strode’s daughter, and “the curse of Thorn”. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth installment and starring Paul Rudd as Tommy, came out in 1995 and introduced more Strode extended family and convoluted supernatural science elements such as Samhain and experimental fetuses of evil.
So the fandom was pretty psyched for 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later which completely retconned out the Jamie Strode/Trilogy of Thorn continuity in sequels 4, 5 and 6, (while all installments consider Halloween III: Season of the Witch outside the continuity) picking up at the end of Halloween II and brought back Scream Queen turned well-regarded actress Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie. The seventh installment in the franchise was a huge success and still considered one of the best sequels in the series. Doing away with the overcooked “cursed” origins of Michael, H20 returned to the pacing of the original while updating the premise for a late 90s audience. Part of Jamie Lee Curtis's deal for returning was her desire to end the story and, thus, Laurie finally kills Michael. A moment twenty years in the making and one that satisfied a general and cult audience alike.
Until Halloween Resurrection in 2002. Almost every entry from Season of the Witch to Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake Halloween has its fans but Halloween Resurrection is by far the most reviled. And how could it not be? Taking place immediately following the events of H20 and not only undoing the power moment of Michael Myers death but killing off Laurie Strode, again played by Jamie Lee Curtis, in the first fifteen minutes, Halloween Resurrection was doomed from the start.
Being produced in the early aughts meant Resurrection was so completely inspired and dependent on the trends of the internet’s honeymoon period following Y2K, it was almost titled Halloween H2K and Halloween: MichaelMyers.com. This was 2002, two years after Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows crashed and burned trying the same gimmick, and even horror films written to be the gimmick were barely remembered. Resurrection’s plot of teens entering the old house of Michael Myers while an audience watches live on the world wide web failed to be as interesting to anyone as it was to writer and director Rick Rosenthal.
The intent was to keep the Michael Myers series going but after the reception of Halloween Resurrection, all further sequel plans were killed until the 2007 Rob Zombie remake. Not weird enough for apologists and not big enough for the die-hards, Resurrection fell further back in favor as the series moved forward. There’s something meditative about the Halloween series. No matter the environment, no matter the decade, Michael marches like a murderous metronome. Halloween Resurrection attempted to combine that detached atmosphere with the antiseptic mood of the 2000s but unfortunately, the end result was a film that felt wholly disinterested. A mild sequel but a mild sequel that only grows more charming with age.
Halloween Resurrection is a scrapbook for a confused and tumultuous age. Along with a full investment in the face-paced technology of the time, like PDA messaging and internet live feeds, is a cast representative of other iconic early aughts films of the decade. Thomas Ian Nicholas of Amercan Pie fame drops dead from an attic while Sean Patrick Thomas of Save the Last Dance and Barbershop is stabbed three times into a door. Tyra Banks dies off-screen but Busta Rhymes literally saves the day and offers the best lines of the film like “Michael Myers is a killer shark” and the often maligned “Trick or treat, motherf***er".
The eighth installment of the Halloween series is never going to top any lists. But Halloween Resurrection is worth a revisit at least to reminisce with the series now shifted firmly forward in time. Michael Meyers is hardly the scariest thing on the internet anymore.