Summary for March 2025
Some Hallows’ Eve
There is a reason the original Halloween is a classic. It’s straightforward, and it knows what’s important: giving the audience characters they care about. It’s very well done: beautiful shots, good music (what might have been an unusual choice), natural acting. It can be seen as simple, even at the time, a vanilla ice cream, if you will. But it is as good as vanilla ice cream can be.

I decided not to watch everything, but to go with Blumhouse continuity (1978 → 2018 → Kills → Ends). So I don’t have all the knowledge and feelings and whatnot as someone who’s seen it all, but even I can get how nice 2018’s Halloween works as a bookend. It’s arguably a bit much, it loses that simplicity with what feels like a deliberate aim at sequels, but it works emotionally.
Elephant in the room: Are these movies another in a line of bad mental health portrayals? Having only seen 4 of them, I can say that… they don’t want to deal with it. Which is bad in itself, because they clearly use the imagery. But you could argue that it’s a pretty realistic portrayal of what happens in such a situation: the unexplainable gets shoved under a rug, and in this case that rug is a mental health institute. Still not great, not great at all, but it is what it is.
But then there are two other movies… Halloween Kills kind of lost me. There are some interesting ideas, and I can’t completely dismiss it, but I’m pretty sure those ideas can easily be squished into the second and fourth movies without losing anything important.
Halloween Ends complicates things even more. I think it’s good, I liked it, but it does a bookend thing again! And with another layer of meta-commentary. I won’t say what it is, but the first layer was about the movies themselves: bookend was about the characters and the franchise.
Gruta is a fairly short game that looks like a Game Boy game, plays also like that, and tells a story in still images.