Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later (1998)
Or How I Learned to Stop Cowering & Axe Back
Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later—that’s a mouthful, and the first indication of a film that might be doing too much. There is a compelling story in here, about a woman who can’t shake the Shape that hunted her 20 years ago and haunts her to this day. As viewers, we might also be haunted by the strange and terrible turns this franchise had taken in its first two decades, as well as the decades to follow. Which means more layers to a film wearing an A-shirt under a T-shirt, then a waffle shirt, a couple sweaters, a hoodie, a blazer, and an overcoat in case it gets chilly. Never mind we’re not in Haddonfield anymore.
Anyway, everyone’s favorite slasher installation artist is back. Or is he? No one believes Laurie Strode—who’s going by the obvious fake name Keri Tate as headmistress of a private academy in NoCal—that her brother (o, brother) Michael is a) alive and b) still after her. Though to be fair, there’s the whole incognito assumed identity thing complicating her story. Keri/Laurie has a drinking habit, which doesn’t so much compromise her credibility as it fails to address her PTSD and makes her edgier and more erratic. Sure, she sees Shapes where other people don’t, but that’s always been her thing, and that’s what makes her The Final Girl. Final Woman, now.
And here’s where all those additional layers get stifling. This film is incredibly uncanny, but isn’t on top of its effects. So like, Keri’s secretary, Norma Watson, is played by Janet Leigh, who gave birth to both Jamie Lee Curtis and, as Marion Crane in Psycho, Laurie Strode. This is not to say Marion Crane was a Final Girl—we didn’t have them in 1960, and the decidedly un-feminist Alfred Hitchcock certainly wasn’t going there (though maybe we could read something into The Birds that he definitely did not intend). This is to say Psycho is a proto-slasher even if the female lead had not yet been allowed to fight back. Laurie Strode definitely saw Psycho and learned that lesson.
OK, so there are all these gratuitous but kind of fun Psycho references and winky that’s her mom stuff going on, which somehow feel less forced than the Oh look what’s on TV gesture toward the giant Ghostface in the room. The Halloween franchise does better with internal references befitting the hermetic small-town at its heart—the TV gag was more effective in Season of the Witch, when we were watching Halloween in the background and Michael Myers was both there and not there all along. There are also lots of anachronistic gestures, mostly involving the suburban opening sequence and conspicuous car casting. There’s a whole car discourse going on here with the Shape’s vehicular choices, Keri/Laurie’s rides, Norma/Marion’s old classic, etc., and this writer is not the one to unpack all that with you (but here’s hoping Labor Kyle gets into it on a future ep of Horror Vanguard).
We are still talking about uncanny extra layers, though, and the big one is the score. Oh, this fucking score. Which will lead us soon to the fucking mask, but let’s slow down for a moment to opine on the mess this film makes of one of the great, iconic horror scores. It is not necessary to mess with John Carpenter’s Halloween score, unless you are John Carpenter, in which case you can do whatever you want. We will find out in another 20 years (from 1998), that John Carpenter can effectively riff on his own score until the Shape comes home, and we’ll fucking like it. In 1998, though, we find out that an orchestral variation on a synth score, with conventional emotional swells, is a very bad idea (as is the re-recorded Loomis audio montage voiceover). It kind of wrecks the viewing experience, reminding us over and over that something isn’t right in a bad way. If there were a Blu-ray extra where they replace this horrid score with John Carpenter’s music, this would be a better world. Please, for the love of Laurie Strode, pay John Carpenter to do that. This movie is not good, but it would be quite good, probably, if the score was correct.
Except that there is a mask problem here, and it’s not just a poor costuming choice. It’s a sign of a serious flaw that only gets redeemable at a layer removed from the actual film.
With all due respect to Laurie Strode, who has been through a lot, and is quite awesome, even if she’s been reduced to ordering a decoy glass of chard while her date goes to the restroom so she can chug the first glass:
That’s not Michael Myers.
Of course, this gets complicated by what we might learn four years later in Halloween: Resurrection, but we can’t confirm that because we won’t be watching any film where (uninformed spoiler!) Laurie Strode dies. OK, so maybe (uninformed spoiler!) Michael Myers spooked an EMT into silently Shaping up in his mask and iconic coveralls, so that wasn’t Michael Laurie beheaded at the end of H2O. But that’s not what we mean when we state resolutely that this Shape is not that Shape. The mask is part of it. The mask is bad, and Michael Myers would keep on shopping if he found that thing. Pretty much everything about the Shape is wrong here. Walks wrong. Carries himself wrong. Wrong body type. Does research (reconnaissance mission to steal a file on Laurie Strode at Loomis’ joint, where for some reason the deceased psychiatrist’s former nurse lives?). Is kind of twerpy, even with all that uncanny strength? This is not Michael Myers, and even after a few glasses of chard and a few more slugs of freezer vodka, Laurie Strode would clock that right away.
If the film weren’t so incompetent in key ways, we’d be able to ride this out and have fun with fake Michael Myers, or even maybe buy into a shapeshifting Shape. Instead, we have to do all the work, while fighting off inappropriate soundtrack cues.
Fuck. This film could be good. We like hanging out with adult Laurie Strode and all her adult problems. Jamie Lee Curtis does her best with the script and still feels like a real person surrounded by some real people and some not-so-real people (as in the original, where we get a delightful mix of uncanny knowing quasi-teens who are nonetheless real people with interiority, hilarious caricatures of cops and shrinks, and the embodiment of evil; now we have empty, irritating teens, a good adult boyfriend who is a real person with compassion and thoughts, an inattentive security guard with an adorable passion for romance novels, a character who exists only as a voice on the phone but is remarkably well drawn, and someone cosplaying the Shape). The way the story attends to grown-ups in a slasher film who are coming to terms with being in a slasher film is remarkable, as is the inversion of the horror trope where adults don‘t take teens who see the monsters among us seriously. The Shape, whoever he is, has a funny habit of kitty-scattering papers and luggage, which is a highly endearing Revenge of the Creature cranky monster gag in need of one more iteration. Even the tacked-on final encounter between Laurie Strode and not-Michael has potential. But none of it really comes off. The vibe is just wrong, and not in a good way. And this all starts with the score. And the mask. And the location. And the overproduced dream sequence that feels like the intro for a supernatural TV show for kids rather than Laurie Fucking Strode’s scream-inducing nightmare. If it scares her, it better scare us.
This film is a lot more likable after it’s over, and maybe that means it will improve on subsequent viewings, when we can focus on what works or almost works. But there’s nothing we can do with the score unless we come up with a theory of the uncanny double that the film doesn’t internally support. And yet, we believe Laurie Strode. Which is another layer adding to our discomfort. 2.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.
—J †Johnson