6) Halloween Kills
David Gordon Green’s 2021 sequel to 2018’sHalloween leans heavily on nostalgia, bringing back multiple characters from the original film and even giving us an extended flashback to that fateful night in 1978 from a different point of view. While a badly injured Laurie Strode recovers in Haddonfield’s hospital, Michael continues his killing spree—and the entire town, led by Laurie’s onetime babysitting charge Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall)—rises up to hunt him down. The overall tone is pure fury and anguish, and Halloween Kills is brimming with themes about mob justice and the lingering effects of trauma, which is hammers home with the subtlety of a butcher knife to the torso.
It’s weird to have a Halloween movie where Laurie and Michael don’t share any scenes—and it’s even weirder that all of a sudden, the script wants us to believe that Michael hasn’t been obsessed with killing Laurie all these years; he’s just trying to get home, you see, and can’t help himself from slaughtering anyone who gets in his way. While Halloween Kills might not quite clear the bar to become one of those “elevated horror” movies that audiences have come to expect in 2021, it’s still better quality than a lot of the Halloween sequels. It is also very likely the goriest film in the entire series, which is not anything to sneeze at.
