The Movie Room

Halloween II 1981, directed by Rick Rosenthal

Rating: 9/10

Coming out only a few years after Halloween, Halloween II picks up immediately after the first movie ended, and so spends a lot of time in the hospital while Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is recovering and where we learn more mythology of Michael Myers. This movie is definitely not as classic as the first one, but I have a real soft spot for it.

This movie is basically all the reasons I love horror sequels and franchises. You have deepening mythology, expanded character development, and more chance to go camp. For mythology here we have the revelation that Michael Myers is Laurie’s brother and that his spree in the previous film was specifically targeted at her. I know a lot of people don’t like this twist, or really the increasingly weird mythologies in horror sequels, but I am not in that group at all. I don’t love all mythology additions (I get annoyed when new eras of Godzilla films introduce aliens, though I know it will always happen eventually), but Michael and Laurie being siblings I can get behind. It is the right kind of fun twist, for me. For expanded character development we have Jamie Lee Curtis showing why she would later go on to win an Oscar as she gets to further inhabit the Laurie Strode part and show her reacting to all the trauma she literally JUST endured and having to go through it again. Jamie Lee Curtis has had the great opportunity in multiple timelines (perhaps as prep forEverything Everywhere All at Once) to play Laurie Strode with PTSD—here, in H20, and in the newest line of legacy sequels, each Laurie with her own distinct brand of trauma and it is a testament to Curtis’s acting prowess that each Laurie feels realistic and lived-in but separate from the others. And for camp, we have Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis; with each sequel he is in, Dr. Loomis becomes increasingly frantic and I don’t blame him. The man is a doctor who presumably wants to have a good practice and life, but is all of a sudden thrust into over a decade of just chasing down one lunatic, constantly warning people that he is on the run and them never believing him. By his last appearance, Pleasance is mostly just screaming at children and using them as bait for Myers, but here he is just starting to embrace the campy side of his role. 

The newest batch of Halloween movies erased this one from the timeline, seemingly as a means of making Michael and Laurie no longer siblings, but in doing so just showed what this movie brought to the franchise. Halloween Kills, the second in that new trilogy, also spends much of its time in a hospital which necessarily brings this one to mind (it also features an angry mob, which is very Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, but that’s another story). While seeing Kills in theaters, I kept thinking about how it was trying to erase Halloween II, but just offering such a subpar replacement. Jamie Lee Curtis was still giving a great performance, but they really incapacitated her in the hospital in that one so Laurie feels powerless, while here she is supposed to be powerless but shows that her determination is so strong that she is able to overcome Michael, which is what we (or at least I) want to see.

Halloween II is not to everyone’s taste; it’s bloodier, campier, and kookier than the first movie and its twist about Laurie and Michael being related is definitely up for consideration, but I love it. Sometimes a movie just really gets me going, and this is one of them, so I almost always pop it in right after the first one so that I can watch “the night he came home” in its entirety.