“Michael Myers is flesh and blood. But a man couldn’t have survived that fire. The more he kills, the more he transcends,” Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) explains from her hospital bed in the trailer for Halloween Kills, which looks to pick up right after the events of 2018’s Halloween.
While the trailer plays up the “Kills” part of the sequel’s title, so much of it also harkens back to 1981’s Halloween II. From Laurie’s admittance to the hospital, to a Haddonfield on edge and looking for justice by way of a mob, to the suggestion as mentioned above that Michael Myers might be an inhuman embodiment of evil.
Halloween II was the sequel that birthed Michael Myers’s franchise-long quest to eradicate his bloodline, as well as opening the door to dabbling with Celtic mythology…
The Halloween holiday draws influences and origins from Celtic harvest festivals, most notably Samhain. So, it’s not surprising that the Halloween franchise would also draw from Samhain. While Halloween II was the first film to make the connection, the original Halloween novelization by Curtis Richards includes an entire prologue set in 500 B.C. that followed a Druid clan preparing for Samhain festivities. Thanks to a humiliating rejection, the bonfire festivities get derailed by a teen’s murderous vengeance. It culminates in the tribe’s brutal form of justice, with the shaman cursing the teen’s spirit to roam restlessly on Earth for eternity. The author chronicles how Samhain evolved over the centuries before introducing young Michael Myers on that fateful Halloween night; the implication that the restless, cursed spirit resides now in his little body.
The prologue’s characters and events never get brought up in the film franchise, but the series did incorporate druids and Samhain in other ways. Halloween II offers the first notable explanation behind Michael Myers’s indestructibility by tying him to Samhain in a pivotal scene set at Haddonfield’s elementary school. Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) learns that Myers broke into the school earlier and accompanies police to find a drawing of a family with a knife through the daughter and “Samhain” written in blood on the chalkboard.
“You see that on the blackboard back there? Samhain. To appease the gods, the Druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane-animals-were burned alive. By observing how they died, the Druids believed they could predict omens of the future. Ten thousand years later, we’ve come no further. Samhain isn’t goblins or evil spirits. It isn’t witches or ghosts. It’s the unconscious mind. We’re all afraid of the dark inside ourselves.”
Sam Loomis muses upon the origins of Halloween upon seeing the single word in blood. It seems not much more than the mystifying ramblings of a crazed Ahab chasing his whale, all but forgotten by the film’s ending thanks to the discovery that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’s sister. With one simple word and an eerie speech by Loomis, Halloween II manages to keep Myers’ background obscured enough to remain terrifying while offering up a kernel of explanation behind this unique evil.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch attempted to shake up the series by leaving Haddonfield behind and going all-in on the Celtic roots of the holiday. The eponymous “Witch” is Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), a modern druid seeking to bring Halloween back to its bloody origins by creating a massive sacrifice through his Silver Shamrock masks. The popular latex jack-o-lantern, witch, and skeleton masks are the season’s most coveted costume items, each implanted with a chip that includes a piece of Stonehenge. A flashy Silver Shamrock commercial activates the chip, causing the mask wearer to succumb to a gruesome death. Cochran is a modern druid with a knack for technology blended with mysticism; his distaste for what Samhain has become is a clear motivator for his elaborate mass sacrifice.
After the following two entries of the series, in which Michael Myers hunted his niece with help from their bizarre psychic bond, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers tied the Celtic origins to his familicide. It introduced the Cult of Thorn, an ancient cult of druids whose details change a bit depending on which cut of the film you watch. The core mythology behind this druidic cult is that one family would be chosen to be cursed by Thorn to appease Thorn and spare the tribes from catastrophe. The one cursed and possessed by Thorn was granted indestructibility and inhuman strength, and they would slaughter their entire family on Samhain. The theatrical cut shows a much more corrupt cult, who’ve lost control of Thorn’s chosen one, Michael Myers.
By ignoring everything after 1978’s Halloween, the 2018 reboot expunges any familial connection between the horror icon and his Final Girl and the increasingly convoluted explanation behind his familicide along with it. But Laurie Strode’s haunting line in the Halloween Kills trailer teases a strong possibility of returning to Celtic mythology. The Silver Shamrock masks also make their return, now seen in the trailer on the bodies of the doctor and nurse costumed couple Michael Myers passed in the previous film. The imagery of it, of three brutally dispatched bodies left on a merry-go-round, is suggestive that the Silver Shamrocks are more than a simple Easter egg here. Why would Michael Myers go out of his way to put masks on his victims?
More than the insane body count teased in the Halloween Kills trailer, the tease toward larger mythology presents the most significant takeaway. The gruesome and enlarged body count is always welcome in a slasher. Still, the most intriguing question now isn’t how many will die, but what those deaths mean for Michael Myers, a Samhain-centric boogeyman that’s just impossibly survived a raging fire. Long ago, Samhain festivities included burning sacrifices in bonfires to appease deities, making Michael Myers emergence from the blazing Strode home all the more curious.
Just based on the trailer alone, Halloween Kills seems to present a rewrite of Halloween II, one that gives us a much angrier Haddonfield and may fully embrace the Celtic origins of Halloween.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3672590/halloween-kills-celtic-mythology-halloween-franchise/
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