Halloween in 2018: Michael Myers’ Absent Creepiness and Why Halloween Sequels Are Hurting the Franchise

So, because I’m really into horror culture, I consume a lot of media that deals with all things horror movies. One of my favorite outlets for this is the Dead Meat channel on YouTube with James A. Janisse. This channel most notably features the Kill Count, which breaks down horror movies with James’ commentary, points out the number of kills in that movie, and makes note of the best and worst kills. Also on the channel are editing and gaming live streams, and podcasts with James and his girlfriend, Chelsea, where the two review and discuss movies, interview key horror personnel, and generally discuss anything horror from various angles. In James’ and Chelsea’s review of Halloween (2018), I finally heard James directly say that he doesn’t care much for Michael Myers or the Halloween franchise because he finds it kind of boring and up its own ass with all its references to the original in every sequel, which is fair. I say “finally” because I was able to tell that this franchise might not be his favorite considering how he covered a lot of major horror touchpoints in the Kill Count’s earlier months like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, and Scream without making much reference to Halloween even though it fits right in with all those other movies. When he finally got around to covering the series, it seemed as though he did it because he had to since a lot of horror fans were likely demanding to see it on his channel and it was also a way to welcome the 2018 installment.

Now, this is in no way an effort to bash James or his opinions about Halloween. My intentions for mentioning James’ take on this franchise is to point out how even though a lot of horror fans know to show respect for Michael Myers’ and Halloween’s place in the horror/slasher genre, his opinion that Halloween is kind of boring isn’t an uncommon one. Since I was shown Halloween (1978) when I was about 7 years old, I have been obsessed with Michael Myers and that franchise first by having nightmares about the white-masked stalker taunting me and cringing whenever I heard the movie’s chilling original score, then by falling in love with it as a part of the horror genre as a teenager. Similar to my experience with Michael and Halloween, my longtime best friend was equally in love and obsessed with Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Even though my friend seems to also respect Halloween, he always kind of hmm’d and haa’d about the lack of kills or gore in the original movie, which indicated that he most likely doesn’t think that my favorite movie is as good as his, but there was no use in fighting about it. However, this opinion was also expressed by season four RuPaul’s Drag Race winner, Sharon Needles in an episode of “Hey Qween” on YouTube when she mentioned how much she adores the campy nature of 80s horror movies and slashers who can speak as opposed to those who are silent and boring.

These shared opinions about a franchise that is so near and dear to me have lead me to reassess why I like the Halloween franchise and Michael Myers as much as I do even though this opinion isn’t as popular. So, I decided to write this overview of Halloween, which isn’t so much a defense for the Halloween franchise, but just an assessment of the movie’s je ne sais quoi that I see and love and maybe other audience members don’t recognize or appreciate. I also think that an outline of what sets Michael Myers apart from other horror slashers can inform my take on Halloween (2018). There will be a few spoilers for Halloween (2018) when I get to the review portion, so beware if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

Where does Michael Myers stand as a horror icon?

As I mentioned above, Halloween (1978) seems to get a lot of flack for not nailing a lot of kills or showing much blood. I think that most people who are familiar with the creation of the original movie know that it was basically an independent film with a small budget and a small cast and crew that basically filled several roles. I remember seeing something about how the entire cast, Jamie Lee Curtis (who was a new actress) included, had to help pick up dead leaves from the set that made South Pasadena, California look like a midwestern town in autumn. The lack of body count and gore may have been a budget issue, but the styling of the movie worked because the overall filmmaking and score were still impactful. An interesting thing to note about Halloween’s simplicity is that it kind of bridged the gap between the “real-world” grittiness of 1970s slasher movies and what we would later recognize as the larger-than-life movie slashers from the 80s.

Michael as a Bridge Between 70s and 80s Horror

In the 70s, a lot of American horror movies became kind of down-and-dirty to reflect the real-world horrors that were depicted in Vietnam footage and news coverage of real serial killings like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy. Movies like Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973), Deliverance (1972), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) seemed to try getting away from the spectacle of 1950s and 1960s horror and sci-fi movies and take a more grim and realistic tone instead. The shock value that came from scenes with sadistic cannibals, hardened criminals, and ruthless rapists on the screen seemed to replace the hanging plastic skeletons that flew over theater audiences and under-seat buzzers that zapped them during William Castle movies, which might explain why a lot of these movies weren’t really revisited until their remakes came out in the early 2000s because once the initial shock wore out, there wasn’t much else to return to. In the early 2000s, the numerous 70s horror movie remakes coupled with the Saw-torture-porn era appeared to be a Vietnam-like reaction to the violence of the war in the Middle East with a more contemporary perspective and up-to-date special fx. So, when Halloween (1978) came out at the end of the 70s, its simplicity didn’t appear to be an issue and might have been what made this movie so re-watchable to audiences decades after its premiere. Although it wasn’t as gritty as the other 70s movies mentioned above, Michael Myers fit in with other 70s slashers in the sense that he was not superhuman in the original movie. The first Michael Myers had an average build like Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) and wasn’t huge and lumbering like Rob Zombie’s version of the slasher that was played by a pro-wrestler. Instead, he just kind of blended in with the overall spooky atmosphere of Halloween night, and his strength was more in suspense than in body count or gore, which harkins back to the Hitchcock era.

About two years after the first Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980) came out and basically set the scene for 1980s slasher horror because it used the general formula that was observed in Halloween (1978) and took that a bit further with Tom Savini’s state-of-the-art special fx makeup for more over-the-top and brutal on-screen kills. Unlike Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980) didn’t seem to have much of a plan from the movie’s onset. In one of the franchise’s documentaries, it was stated that the creators had a poster and a vague trailer for the original movie before anything was ever filmed or written. All that was promised in Friday’s earliest marketing ploy was that the movie was going to be scary and unlike anything else audience’s have seen. When it got to production, it seemed as though the creator’s top priority was establishing amazing on-screen kills that haven’t been done before that point and actual story kind of took the back seat on everything.Therefore, the primary focus for the rest of the Friday the 13th franchise seemed to be on various, random kills, which made it relatively easy to make a lot of campy sequels throughout the decade when there wasn’t a lot of time spent on central characters or storylines. This inspired the trend for different horror franchises to make multiple sequels. With so many kills and so many sequels, something that set Jason Voorhees apart from his slasher counterparts is his massive body count and creative kills. Jason was often depicted as large and intimidating, and even though his signature weapon is a machete, he pretty much used anything to kill people.

After Michael set the stage and Jason beat a path to that stage, A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, which birthed a series that set an even higher bar for special fx, showcased a slasher who was charismatic and demented, and made people scared of sleep. Although Freddy Krueger didn’t claim as many victims or have as many sequels as Jason, he carved his was into 80s pop culture with his puns and one-liners. What made him terrifying was the fact that he was capable of infiltrating his victim’s dreams, thus taking advantage of them when they were most vulnerable and he was almost omnipotent. Being covered in burns, wearing a green and red striped sweater, a fedora, and his signature glove with knife fingers also add to Freddy’s repertoire because it created a distinct line between his looks and that of his masked counterparts. Freddy’s ability to talk and make jokes also contribute to what makes him memorable because unlike a lot of other slashers, he had a distinct personality.

Close to the end of the 80s, Child’s Play (1988) came out as a way of taunting those who have a fear of dolls. Chucky, a Good Guy doll, resembled a ginger toddler with chubby, freckled cheeks, red hair, and big, blue, animatronic eyes. However, even though he used a voice box to say his Good Guy lines in a child-like voice, he spoke in a foul-mouthed adult man’s voice whenever his cover was blown about being a possessed doll, which added a humorous juxtaposition with his appearance. Chucky’s kills were also inventive and full of 80s special fx goodness, but he still didn’t land as many kills or sequels as Jason. As a child, I remember being slightly creeped out by Chucky because I think that it is most kids’ worst nightmare to imagine that their toys can be alive and out to kill them. I think since Chucky lacks in size and omniscient abilities to control people’s dreams, a unique advantage he has is the fact he can just pretend to be a regular doll to make his victims look crazy whenever they’re found trying to kill him. This allows Chucky to subvert his way out of trouble and into people’s houses to do his bidding.

This brings me back to Michael Myers, who re-appeared on the screen for the first time since Halloween 2 (1981) in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in the same year of 1988. By this point, Halloween producers realized that slasher franchises need a consistent slasher in every sequel, which made them put a lid on the anthology idea they had for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982). Even though I like Halloween 4 because it kind of brought the franchise back to its basics of just having Michael wreak havoc on teenagers on Halloween night, it didn’t exactly capture what made the original installment that came out a decade earlier special. Michael had a higher body count, some of the original score, and 80s special fx, but something about him in this and every other Halloween sequel that followed seemed to miss what set him apart from his slasher counterparts. Afterall, aside from differences in storyline and indiscriminate, random kills in Friday the 13th movies, what really set Michael Myers apart from Jason Voorhees? Once it was established that Michael was superhuman and couldn’t be killed, numerous kills and sequels followed thereafter, and Michael even started bulking up a bit to look less average and more intimidating. Even though he still lurked around on Halloween night with other masked ghouls and goblins, his presence was a bit more threatening and no longer blended in as seamlessly as he did in 1978.

Michael Myers: The Creepy Stalker, Not the Supernatural Slasher

Unlike Michael, Freddy and Jason didn’t really need to stalk their victims because they were already out of their usual elements and either found themselves in Jason’s territory of Camp Crystal Lake or Freddy’s realm of the nightmare and his boiler room. Even though we see the remains of the Myers’ House in Halloween (1978), not much happens there because Michael is too busy stalking babysitters in a nearby neighborhood, which isn’t a very controllable environment. Not until Halloween’s latest sequels did victims invade the Michael Myers’ territory of his childhood home to meet their demise, which seemed to be added as a knock off to Camp Crystal Lake and the boiler room. To make matters worse, the only upper-hand Michael was given for killing people in his house was the fact that he knew all of the ins and outs of the property, while Freddy had the omnipotent power to control people’s dreams and allow their imaginations and fears be what kills them and Jason could walk under water and basically had nature on his side with the seclusion of a dark forest and intense rainstorms that conveniently took place during his murder sprees. Michael’s lack of a consistent area to control, along with his newer superhuman abilities and extensive body counts, is a symptom that the 1978 Michael Myers has been lost and the newer slasher that emerged tried to keep up with his 80s counterparts, but couldn’t really measure up to them.

I believe that even though so many of Halloween’s sequels reference and pay homage to the original installment, they all lose the complicated and nuanced thing about Michael that gripped audiences in the 70s and separated him from the slashers that he predated, which was his “creep-factor.” At first, Michael wasn’t so much about looking obviously scary like burnt-up Freddy Krueger or big-and-burly Jason, but was about appearing just as any man in a mask with the malicious intent of spooking people. He wasn’t as much about stalking and brutally killing his family as he was about giving people “one good scare” that they were entitled to, whether or not it resulted in someone’s death. Getting back to Michael’s lack of having a consistent, controllable environment like his counterparts, the only advantage that Michael had was his ability to drive, which is kind of dumb compared to 80s slashers. However, this detail made it easier for him to stalk people in an uncontrolled environment and it also helped him blend in easier as a regular person instead of giving it away that he was some lumbering creep in a mask right off the bat. This makes me think of how people treat me like a weirdo-creep for not owning a car and being okay with walking or taking public transportation to get where I need to go because of how normative having a car has been in America. Michael’s driving was one of his ways of challenging people’s ideas of normalcy because he was an evil, enigmatic shape of a person that was capable of passing as a normal human, allowing him to bypass people’s sense of danger and alarm. He was capable of disarming people to make it easier to scare them, which can be heightened by threatening their lives, but didn’t always need to result in killing.

In fact, when I had nightmares about Michael Myers as a kid, the fear of him killing me wasn’t really what terrified me out of sleep for the rest of the night. What primarily scarred me and gave me anxiety at such a young age was the fear that Michael was going to fuck with me. Like how Pennywise mostly sought to terrify the main cast and not kill a lot of people throughout most of IT (1990), Michael Myers seemed to get off on spooking teenagers who were desensitized to all kinds of pranks before killing them. When you really look at it, Halloween (1978) can be seen as an example of how constant practical joking can make kids increasingly skeptical of the dangers that await them, which makes them more susceptible to getting murdered. Since all of the kids in the original movie live in a world where “people like playing tricks on each other” for fun, boys lock girls in the boys’ locker room, and even good old Dr. Loomis finds amusement in scaring children away from the Myers’ House, they are kind of tainted out of the naivety that the world is a nice place but also still take it for granted that the world is a safe place. In other words, since these characters seem to have been conditioned for a world that has fun at their expense, they don’t appear to realize that actual danger exists. They seem to die because, as young people, they assume that they are immune to dangers that can be more sinister and not as playful as their peers. Perhaps, Michael is just playing with the main cast of the original movie to get scares out of them, but like Frankenstein’s monster, he enjoys playing along without fully realizing which lines he should cross. I think that this is where Michael’s creep factor is rooted because he isn’t necessarily intimidating as a killer, but he is mysterious and unknown and he just wants to scare you.

Even though it was about a decade late for this, the simple and overall creepy nature of Michael Myers in the original Halloween seems to harken back to Hitchcock-era suspense. It wasn’t as graphic or explicit as other 70s slashers, even though Michael subtly reflected how the sadistic serial killers on the news were somehow able to adapt into normal society in spite of how monstrous they were on the inside. Regardless of how much filmmakers tried to make Michael adapt to the larger-than-life 80s slashers, the lack of subtlety that became characteristic of the 80s killed the nuance that had once established Michael as scary. I believe that the Psycho-esc suspense was probably already dated by the time that Halloween (1978) came out, but John Carpenter’s touch rejuvenated it for an audience that was probably fatigued with the gratuitous shock that came from the more realistic slashers in movies from earlier in the decade. Unfortunately, just because suspense is simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy to achieve. Even more difficult to achieve would be continued suspense that would last throughout sequels because suspense relies on the unknown, and if franchises continue to grow without explaining anything, audiences will lose interest and check out. Therefore, I think that the demand for more in terms of gore fx, kills, and sequels during the 80s is what killed the Halloween franchise even though it kept going. New standards for what is scary had been set, and the Alfred Hitchcock-type suspense from the 50s and 60s was gone almost as soon as John Carpenter brought it back. Halloween filmmakers fought desperately to keep Michael Myers alive, but all they wound up doing was imitating other slasher movies while alluding to the original movie and forgetting about Michael’s ultimate strength in creepiness. If the original Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street are cheap knock offs of the original Halloween for using the same general formula, then every Halloween sequel is a cheap knock off of the other franchises not only because they came first, but because their sequels were able to utilize those slashers’ strengths for the most part while sequels in the Halloween franchise mostly riffed off of installments from other horror franchises, thus making Michael Myers more generic to fit in with his counterparts.

In 1996, Scream seemed to rejuvenate Halloween and the slasher genre as a whole, but it still didn’t bring back the creepiness that gave me Michael Myers nightmares. Scream (1996) paid a lot of respectful homage to Halloween and other older horror movies, while cleverly connecting the established self-awareness that horror movies exist with the acknowledgment of real serial killers. This sort of bridged the gap between the fantasy killer sprees of movie slashers and the killing sprees of real-life people, which is what characterizes Billy Loomis because he seems to be creating his own horror movie by killing people at his high school and basing his reality off of horror movies, but still realizes that what he’s doing is more like Jeffrey Dahmer and less like Michael Myers. So, like a real-life serial killer, Billy Loomis dies because he’s human and not a traditional slasher. Therefore, even though Scream (1996) had a huge influence on Michael’s return in H20: Halloween Twenty Years Later (1998), which was still a good installment to the franchise, his creep factor was still missing. In my opinion, I don’t think that the Myers-esc creep factor has really appeared in a slasher movie again until The Strangers came out in 2008. Like the original Halloween, this movie is kept relatively simple with a small cast, little-to-no graphic violence or gore, and people in masks who simply wanted to terrify their victims. They taunted their victims by knocking on the door in the middle of the night and taunted audiences by establishing that they were able to sneak into the house without the main characters knowing. The kills are few-and-far-between, but the creep factor comes from the fact that the masked killers just wanted to terrorize their poor victims just because they could, which put killing on the back burner. This creep factor was seemingly short-lived in slasher movies that came after, but kind of stayed alive for demon/ghost movies to come.

Halloween 2018 Review

I think that if you’ve made it this far, you probably have some idea of what I’m going to say about Halloween (2018). I’d like to establish that even though I’ve been hard on the Halloween sequels, I don’t completely hate them. I do think it’s a good installment to the franchise, the way that I think that Halloween 2 (1981) and H20 (1998) are good installments. Even though there’s a place in my heart for Halloween 4 (1988) and Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), I don’t believe that those are quite up there. The main things I liked about the newest installment was everything that connected to the original, like the title card and opening sequence at the beginning with the rotten jack o’lantern coming back to life, the modified version of the original music score, and John Carpenter’s and Jamie Lee Curtis’ involvement. I also liked how the other sequels were acknowledged, which made hunting for the little references and Easter eggs fun, and the dynamic and dialogue between Vicky and Julian was hilarious.

The kills overall were good. Unlike most Halloween movies, Michael didn’t rely on his knife as much, which kind of lead to more of them being extremely brutal. However, I found it odd that so many of them didn’t happen on the screen. There was a lot of extreme close-ups with a slightly off-centered focus from some of the kills as they happened, then the dead body would come into focus after the fact. I also liked the consistency of Michael staging the dead bodies of his victims, primarily the two cops in the car with one of their heads hollowed out with a flashlight stuck inside of it to make the head look like a jack o’lantern. However, the staging of Vicky’s body was kind of lame. I now realize that putting her under the sheet was part of the reversal thing the creators were going for (which is why the girl was dressed as a ghost instead of Michael), but there should have been more of a surprise when the sheet was lifted. I admired the reversal/switching thing that they went for with Laurie kind of replacing Michael as the crazy grandma, Alysson and her boyfriend being a gender-switched Bonnie and Clyde for Halloween, and the idea that Laurie seems to be hunting Michael more than Michael hunts her. As stated by another reviewer, the twist with Michael’s doctor almost makes it seem as if Michael was just having fun killing without any real intentions of finding Laurie and only wound up in her path because of the doctor’s involvement. Something I’m kind of torn about is the Halloween night sequence that heavily references the beginning of Halloween 2 (1981) because I love the reference, which was really close to the original while still being new and fun, but the pacing was a little too fast and random.

This kind of fast pacing is one of the major things that bothered me about this movie. Given what I said about Michael’s creep factor and Halloween’s (1978) Hitchcock-like suspense, the quick and random kills were out of character for Michael and they seemed more like what Jason would do in Friday the 13th. Again, I believe that Michael’s primary MO is scaring people and the rapid kills happened too fast for victims to even react about what was happening. Even though the original movie only had a chase scene with Laurie, some of the more iconic scenes from the franchise were the scenes when a victim is terrified and running and/or fighting for their life, but Michael gets the upper hand on them. Getting back to my Myers nightmares as a kid, the anticipation I felt concerning if he was going to catch up to me and what I would do if he did catch up to me, when Michael was after me, is part of what fueled my anxiety more than anything he would have actually done to me. I think the closest thing we got to a chase scene in this movie was the female podcaster’s death scene in the restroom. It was not only a nod to the restroom scene in H20 (1998), but there was some actual terror in the scene from Michael taunting her by knocking on the stall, then dropping the mechanic’s teeth in front of her, to her trying to escape by crawling under the stalls until she’s caught and killed. The suspenseful build-up was good, but more importantly, it showed how Michael’s intention was to terrorize her, then kill her.

Beyond just what I think are the good qualities of Halloween (2018) coupled with what I think are the bad qualities, I think this movie is fairly disjointed and not at all as concise or consistent as the only previous installment that it directly recognizes, Halloween (1978). Again, I believe that the newest installment is good, but I think it’s because there’s a lot of parts that I like about it that don’t really work in the movie as a whole.The family dynamic between the Strodes is interesting and captures a realistic element of how most American families operate, and having three final girls of different generations with no men to help them combat Michael is a plus and something that I hope sets a new standard for future horror movies; however, the excessive amount of pointless kills kind of sets horror movies back a little. The kills are good, but Michael seems more focused on killing than invoking fear in his victims. The kill sequence on Halloween night that seems to be mostly in one tracking shot is really cool, but Michael is just mindlessly killing people who aren’t really in his way, which just seems like an attempt to rack up a higher body count. I hate to say it because I have enormous respect for comedians and comedy writers and directors, but this is where I think Joseph Gordon Green’s lack of horror credentials becomes apparent. This effort to establish more random kills reminds me of what non-horror fans often assume about slasher movies: that they are just about seeing some deranged psychopath ruthlessly murder a bunch of innocent people until he is stopped with no deeper implications or meanings. So, having Michael behave as a newly escaped wild animal who needed to make up for all the kills he didn’t do over the past 40 years in Halloween (2018) kind of shows an outsider’s shallow perspective of slasher movies that carries the implication that slasher movies are shallow.

Maybe I read a little too much into slasher movies, but in evaluating these kinds of movies, I like to refer to Scott Wilson’s quote in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) when Taylor indicates that slashers just get off on slaughtering innocent people, to which he replies that he and other slashers participate in “the business of fear.” He continues by saying that every culture has their monsters and that him and Leslie are slashers as a way of re-enforcing the order between good and evil. In this sense, I believe that Taylor’s assumption reflects that of people who don’t like horror movies because they think that they are just about the cheap thrills that come from seeing people getting chased, then mangled for no apparent reason instead of understanding that horror movies, like Halloween haunts and roller coasters, are generally about the fun of facing what we fear. Furthermore, unlike haunts and roller coasters, horror movies also tend to challenge what we think of as good and evil, as well as allow us to unpack our fears. I think that when given the opportunity, filmmakers who don’t understand or respect the genre could illustrate Taylor’s point of view by adding more shallow horror movies to the world. This is not to imply that Joseph Gordon Green doesn’t show respect for the horror genre, but maybe there was a difficulty with understanding the underlying thing that made the original Halloween so good. Beyond that, another issue I have with this installment is how it appeared to be simplifying the franchise by making Michael seem more human and not related to Laurie, and directly following the original movie; however, there appears to be definite intentions for another installment after this one since you hear Michael’s breathing at the end of the credits, which would return to Michael being a superhuman who is capable of surviving being incinerated. This return to Michael being more than just a calculatingly evil human makes the current movie seem like a mish-mash of the sequels, with all the nods and references, that will lead to another thread of sequels within a timeline where Laurie and Michael aren’t siblings. Although I like that this franchise is still being made relevant, I think it needs to end and that filmmakers of slasher movies should adapt what made Halloween (1978) good to more original concepts.

Conclusion

Since this post has gotten longer than I intended, I’ll make my closing brief. Even though the original Michael Myers and Halloween seem to have intentionally stood apart from the hyper-realistic, gruesome slashers of the 70s, the connection between Michael and other movie slashers that came in the 80s is somewhat forced. This could explain why Myers isn’t as popular with fans of Freddy, Jason, and Chucky. During a decade that was saturated with movies that explored the cruel, realistic depths that humanity could reach with cannibalism and rape, Halloween (1978) appears to have brought back the simplistic suspense that Alfred Hitchcock pioneered in his day, which was appreciated when the movie premiered, but that appreciation was lost when more spectacular horror franchises entered the market. If the lack of re-visiting the gruesome slasher movies of the 70s and their 2000s remakes taught us anything, it would be that shock value is useful for drawing crowds into movie theaters on opening nights, but fades away once the adrenaline wears off. In order to achieve more deeply rooted scares of a better quality, horror movies need to mean something and force their audiences to confront real anxieties. The surface-level fear that comes from gore, monsters, and death alone does not have longevity, but when that kind of fear is used to represent deeper things like the fear of losing self-control, being outright deceived as part of some deep conspiracy, or having to battle pure evil, the scares can creep into audience’s subconscious and nightmares.

After arguing so much for serious horror, I suddenly feel the need to say that this is not to discount the quality of camp in horror. Campy horror was probably at its peak in the late 80s with movies like Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988), Night of the Creeps (1986), and The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which are all movies that cleverly utilized gore with intentionally cheesy and quippy dialogue to make horror movies that are just fun to watch. Like some of their semi-serious counterparts, these movies might not cut too deeply in terms of lasting horror, but they seem to invite re-watching because the spectacular movie fx and comedic elements make these movies fun to revisit for horror movie nights. Not to mention, the comedy in campier horror movies tend to have hints of pre-Scream meta-awareness about the existence of horror movies and overall ironic, post-modernistic humor, which could also explain why these kinds of movies last longer than others.

When somebody is home alone and spooked by a sound that can either be a ghost or an intruder, their initial fear doesn’t come from the thought of “Oh shit! Someone is breaking in to slit my ankles, fry my eyeballs, and cut me open to play with my entrails!” Their actual thought would likely be “Oh shit! Someone is breaking in to do God-knows what,” which leaves the door open for the possibility that a potential intruder will try to rob you, rape you, injure you, startle you and leave, murder you, etc., because “real” fear comes from the unknown and endless possibilities that your mind creates. I’ve encountered some bone-chilling stories from listening to Let’s Read on YouTube. Some of these stories were supposedly real and some were just creepypasta fiction, but none involved any actual assaults, gore, or pain, just realistic terrors that people have apparently encountered. Although I would like to see a new era of good, campy horror some time in the future, I believe that the horror genre needs to return to the simple, yet effective terror that I experienced as a kid watching Halloween (1978). There’s a reason why Freddy never haunted my nightmares even though that was his territory. Nobody who isn’t Robert Englund could be Freddy Krueger, which keeps Freddy too tightly bound to the filmic world of fiction, but any prankster or malevolent asshole can put on a mask and stalk you. It doesn’t have to be Michael Myers per se, but any person or thing that is hellbent on creeping you out.