In 2018, David Gordon Greer, a director and producer primarily known for his comedies, started what would become a new trend for him - rebooting beloved classic horror films. He reimagined the Halloween franchise as a trilogy - Halloween, Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends - and most recently, starting with The Exorcist: Believer, he has begun reimagining the The Exorcist franchise as a fresh trilogy as well.
Green's horror reboots receive mediocre reviews from film critics and are disliked - even hated - by hardcore franchise fans. We could explain the reactions as 'fanboys gatekeeping,' which may be at play here, but I think the reaction to the films has more to do with the 'American Psyche' or the values of the American film industry viewer than it does the actual quality of the films.
I think Green plays with egalitarian and nonhierarchical themes while also carefully avoiding the typical pitfalls so common to these kinds of storytelling elements, chiefly the reduction of complexity to a liberal or neo-liberal pastiche.
To understand what I mean we have to go back to Hegel's unpublished essay from 1804 - no just kidding. To understand what I mean we need to look at the values implied in the narratives and characters of the original films and see how the reboot they deviates.
In the original Halloween, Michael Myers is a killing machine, and there is no rhyme or reason to his violence. Then in the sequel, they began to retroactively write in an occult story - that there was some sort of family link, some sort of curse. This curse / sibling story line took over the remainder of the original Halloween franchise, even incluing original Halloween movies that were themselves reboots.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_(franchise) |
Notions of occult evil rituals (the Salem witch hysteria of 1800s, the devil worshipper hysteria of the 70s and 80s, etc.) and family ties are kind of 'molar' or normative story telling elements. They imply a pure child was corrupted by an evil source that spoiled the protective layer or function of the family, and now as a result, there is violence inside the family (the incest taboo). Very capitalist.
The only force that can reckon with Michael is his psychiatrist Dr. Loomis who once thought he could contain or heal Michael, but now realizes he cannot... and this is why he carries a .357. So the only force that can wrangle the incesstual / violent evil is a fearless male mental health / psychiatry through force. First as control, then as violence. Very phalic, very capitalist.
In Greens Halloween Michael Myers loses the shallow occult stuff, and keeps the family stuff only for it to be subverted and shown as impotent. Additionally, the chief narrative elements from the original franchise(s) lose their centrality or phallic / capitalist nature. What do I mean by this? Michael Myers becomes less of a corrupted human type character and more of a bigger than life legend-type aura that lingers and haunts the town of Haddonfield. He is disembodied, abstracted, and becomes an idea more than a person. Through disembodying the character, he comes to truly embody or re-embody the boogeyman, which is the whole goal the original franchise set out to achieve. Everyone lives in the shadow of this boogey man in the closet. Michael's shadow is part of the community and town itself. Even when he is not around, his presence lingers and affects the behavior of all (trauma? ideology? anyone?). Dr. Loomis - and all individuals as we will see - alone are powerless against his aura of fear, and even more powerless when Michael actually returns in the flesh. This is no longer a story about an good being becoming corrupted into an evil being that is eventually triumphed over by a lone good guy (or girl), nor a story of an isolated family cursed by a cult, it is now a story of how a community understands their shared history, and how they heal from it through overcoming an abstract negative shape.
This communtiy aspect becomes more evident in the second and third installment of the triology where a mass hysteria takes over the town causing people to begin rioting and killing one another out of fear that one of them may actually be Michael Myers. It is not invididual actors that solve this problem, the problem is only solved when a group of different thinkers come together to work out a more effective way of overcoming their fear. In the end - spoilers - Laurie (Lee Curtis) can't even kill Michael on her own, she needs the assistance of the entire town who throw his body into a meat grinder, signifying the absolute destruction of his myth (spirit) and body.
Green's Halloween trilogy is about a community that overcomes a fear and trauma routed in its material history, a fear and trauma that compels them to take the easy way out, that of dividing and attacking each other, a community that overcomes all of this and joins together to heal. Here Green succeeds where horror icon and legend Stephen King does not. For King, it is often the case that the 'real' and 'material' (domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child neglect and abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.) are manifestations of bad and evil spirits (The Shining). In more sophisticated horror, it is precisely the opposite - it is the mundane real and material events, lacking in any metaphysical obscurity or depth, that are horrifying. I've mentioned this in another blog): when the patients in my mental ward thought the place was haunted I reminded them that real life is scarier than any ghost.
Green's Halloween trilogy captures the horror of a real community doing bad things reacting to a shared event that occurred. How does this 'realism' (though the movie itself is a kind of fantasy, not realism) and its nonhierarchical story telling elements not succumb to liberal pastiche? The liberal pastiche version of this is when characters resolve their differences quickly, without process, and project all the 'bad' tension or conflict into the 'bad' force or person outside of the community. In Greens Halloween universe, the characters do not suddenly 'realize they were alike all along,' and that 'Michael is the source of their problems,' but rather, they realize they are fundamentally different than each other while being fundamentally alike in one way - what they all share in common is some aspect or another is that they can be, under the right circumstances (Fear), killers just like Michael Myers. This is not to be confused with the right wing rhetoric of 'everyone is a killer if given the chance, it's a dog eat dog world.' Rather, what we're seeing with Green is what Melanie Klein would call 'the integration of the good and bad object without the split off projected object.' The community members do not resolve their differences, but recognize how their differences play with one another, and the members do not see Michael as an 'other,' but as a part of their individual and collective selves that needs to be reconciled with (what Jung might call 'the shadow' - Michael is after-all referred to as 'the shape' who lurks in shadows in the original film).
This move from individualism to community response is not only evident in the Halloween franchise, but also the first installment of the new Exorcist franchise.
In Exorcist: The Believer the daughters of two different families - one black, the other white, one a believer in God, the other one who once believed has since lost his faith - become possessed by a demonic force. The opposed families must come together and utilize their varying persepctives and life histories to save their children. Like Halloween, in The Believer, the story does not stop at two lone parents, as the conflict spills over into the community which then plays a larger role.
When the church refuses to get involved, the neighbors of the families step in to help, resulting in a kind of DIY (Punk) exorcist. At the last minute the priest from the catholic church is persuaded to join but - spoilers - his neck is almost instantly snapped by the demonically possessed girls and he is killed. Again, the individual expert cannot solve the problem, only the community members with no formal expertise can by coming together.
The community exorcises the girls successfully because they believe, but also because they did not take the easy way out. This 'easy way out' motif, present as well in Green's Halloween, is the inverse of egalitarian and non-hierarchical approach. It is a bargain with the devil.
In The Believer the demon, mid-exorcist via the possessed girls, gives the community members a choice - it tells one father 'I'll let your child go if you stop the exorcist' meaning one girl would live and the other die. This is of course a classic demon riddle or tempting bargain - if you do something evil against your neighbor I will give you what you want. This mirrors the choice that the main character (not the character being given the choice by the demon during the exorcist, but the other father whose child would die) has to make at the beginning of the film: his pregnant wife is injured, if she gives birth the baby will live but she - mother - will die. He must choose to cut the baby out and let her life, or let her give birth, and let his wife / the mother die (this is the origin to his lost faith).
In Halloween, as mentioned earlier, the 'easy way out' or bargain with the devil is fear. To live in fear beneath the shadow of Michael Myers is easier than fighting to heal or escape its grasp; to attack one's neighbor in a bout of mass hysteria, fearing that the neighbor is Michael, these are all easier than overcoming fear.
This is the classic trope that fear divides people, and when people are divided into a 'dog-eat-dog' 'survival of the fittest' mentality, they take the short-term reward over the long term benefit.
Capitalism is and always has been about time preference. Those few who come out 'on top' supposedly are able to take the long term benefit over the short term (investment business ontology - work hard now so you don't have to work at all later), and those supposedly poor and less worthy who feed into the machine grab up the short term reward over the long term (consumerism - shitty fast food, drunks, alcohol, porn, media now, don't think about tomorrow).
Whether Green is this or that political alignment is not in question here. Whether his movies accidentally tap into a complex social critique that was not present in the original films could be the question - I think they do. I think his films remind that capitalism is always a deal with the devil.
