40 Years Later, ‘Halloween' Slashes Again

With hollow eyes and sagging cheeks, the flabby white mask of Michael Myers is horrors great blank slate. Project your fears here, it says. Myers doesnt speak. His movements never rise beyond a deliberate gait (well, aside from all the stabbing and strangling). Even his name is purposefully bland.

Decades after John Carpenter’s slasher landmark, David Gordon Green has resurrected the faceless Boogeyman of “Halloween” and set him loose on another Halloween night, 40 years later. Time has done little for Michael’s personality. He is still a poor conversationalist. (He hasn’t uttered a word in the intervening decades, says a doctor at the sanatorium that holds him.) He is still handy with a knife.

There are no roman numerals in the title of Green’s film, nor any of those dopey subtitles like 1998’s “Halloween H20,” which presumably delved into the very real fears of dehydration.

As if to draw closer to the original (and to ignore the nine sequels and reboots in between), this “Halloween” has simply taken Carpenter’s 1978 title. And with gliding cameras, Carpenter’s score and original cast members Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle (the man under the mask), it has tried very hard to take much more, too.

But while Green’s “Halloween,” which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — what makes his “Halloween” such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor.