slashers

Popcorn (1991)

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The 1991 novelty slasher Popcorn has a fairly straightforward premise: What if William Castle was a serial killer? That setup makes for a much meaner, zanier William Castle homage than Joe Dante’s Matinee, one where Castle’s signature theatrical gimmicks get directly involved in increasingly silly kills instead of being deployed as mood-setting kitsch. The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen stars as a film school weirdo whose struggling department decides to raise production funds by hosting an all-night horror marathon in a traditional single-screen theater. They figure they can charge extra for tickets by bringing back the original theatrical gimmicks from the 1950s creature features they’re screening, like ziplining a giant mosquito prop over the audience during the atomic-age sci-fi parody Mosquito (an effect they call “Projectovision”, modeled after Castle’s “Emergo!” gimmick) or zapping the audience in their seats during key shocks of The Amazing Electrified Man (“Shockoscope”, modeled after Castle’s “Percepto!” gimmick). Only, a mysterious killer is loose in the theater and is picking off the film school students & staff one by one. The mosquito is rigged to crush an unsuspecting victim; the seat buzzers are cranked to lethally high voltage; the “Aromarama” gas deployed during The Stench is, of course, poisoned. While Schoelen’s softspoken auteur-to-be should be worried about what ridiculous retro-schlock gimmick is going to eventually be wielded against her, she’s instead perversely excited by the deaths’ potential as inspiration for her next screamplay, keeping the mood defiantly light despite all of the violence. Popcorn is a wonderfully silly 90s slasher with a wide range of imaginative kills and a fun all-night-party atmosphere, one that panders so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s an easy instant favorite for any genre-literate horror nerds.

Popcorn is pretty blatant about its William Castle homages, which range from the more obvious go-to references (like hiring a uniformed nurse to issue life insurance policies in the lobby, in case the audience dies of fright) to the deeper cuts (like its “Shock Clock” prop referencing the “Fright Break” countdown in Castle’s Homicidal). That’s what makes it so strange that Castle’s name isn’t mentioned once during the hours of bonus features on the film’s recent Synapse Blu-ray release. The retro horror parodies that fill out the movie theater’s all-night schlock marathon are referred to as broad homages to 1940s & 50s horror classics on the disc’s commentary track and in the accompanying feature-length “Making Of” documentary, without ever specifically mentioning Castle’s legendary gimmickry as an influence on the text. That concept-to-screen disconnect is likely a result of the film’s tortured history of authorship, with its final cut encompassing the work of three different directors working towards three different ends. The story goes that Popcorn‘s first hired director Alan Ormsby was really into shooting the 1950s creature feature parodies, at the expense of shooting the 1990s wraparound slasher that contains them. When he was fired from the project, Ormsby was drastically behind schedule but had delivered a group of highly detailed, reverential homages to vintage horror schlock. Producer Bob Clark (who had collaborated on Dead of Night with Ormsby, a friend he lost to that business decision) was reluctant to put his name on another horror project after becoming a more mainstream commercial director, so he hired one of his trusted actors from Porky‘s, Mark Herrier, to take the reins. Cast & crew have since confirmed that Clark essentially shadowdirected the picture, guiding a lot of Herrier’s day-to-day decisions and shooting substantial amounts of B-unit footage to get the project back on schedule. You can feel Clark’s influence throughout, especially in scenes where he voices threatening phone calls from the anonymous serial killer villain, just as he had in his breakout slasher Black Christmas. You can also feel the film’s divided authorship in how its obvious original intent as a William Castle homage has been lost in the handovers, like a game of telephone.

Luckily, the William Castle throwback gimmicks aren’t the only thing Popcorn has going on. The killer who weaponizes those gags is suspected to be a filmmaker of an entirely different era: a hippie freak who made ritualistic art films of the Kenneth Anger & Anton Lavey variety. Our hippie Satanist first appears to Jill Schoelen in a sweaty, Ken Russell-inspired nightmare sequence, calling out to her through the psychedelic afterlife. The second she wakes up, she starts scribbling details from that nightmare into her journal, insistent that it would make a great film. It turns out what she was dreaming was already a film, a scratchy 16mm short from the 1970s titled Possessor, which its director Lanyard Gates concluded by committing in-the-flesh murders during its climax at its premiere. Gates was apparently radicalized by audiences’ tepid reaction to his art films, deciding to get violent revenge on crowds who would rather watch goofy genre fluff instead of real, meaningful cinema. That hostile artist-audience dynamic continues from beyond the grave, when the film school’s all-night horror marathon is interrupted by a renegade screening of Possessor, which the captive crowd boos off the screen. The question of whether the long-dead Gates has supernaturally returned to this mortal plane to get his violent revenge on that audience or if his work is being continued by a more plausible, in-the-flesh suspect is answered in such a bizarre, spectacularly convoluted way that I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. What’s more important than who’s doing Gates’s work is what that work represents. Years before Wes Craven was interrogating horror audiences’ disconnection with the meaning behind their go-to genre’s violence & narrative tropes in New Nightmare & Scream, Clark & co. were already calling out the horror-hungry masses for not sincerely engaging with the art behind their entertainment. The art of cinema and the cheap thrills of horror gimmickry are directly opposed here, with open resentment expressed over how the former needs a little of the latter to earn its funding. That’s what makes reading Bob Clark’s authorship into the text its most satisfying angle, even if the truth is more of a three-way compromise.

Popcorn is not only disjointed in its directorial vision and its art-vs-schlock sentiments, but it’s also disjointed in its setting. The story is set in the suburbs of Smalltown, America, but the production was shot entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, making extensive use of an abandoned old-style movie theater located there. Some of the Jamaican touches to the production are subtly underplayed, like how the majority Black cast of extras are made to appear more diverse by wearing Halloween costumes to the horror marathon. Others are less subtle, like how this is the rare slasher that features an all-reggae soundtrack (including a movie-themed reggae parody of “Under the Boardwalk”). The illusion really breaks down when the power goes out during the marathon and a local reggae band is invited on stage to entertain the crowd by flashlight, turning the theatrical audience into a dancehall dance party. Like the rest of Popcorn‘s behind-the-scenes production anomalies, the chaotic relationship between its setting and its shooting location is just part of the fun. This is a pizza-and-beer VHS rental to be enjoyed with your nerdiest horror-loving friends, so you can all be poked fun at by a movie that doesn’t take you or your preferred genre seriously. As lovingly recreated as the vintage William Castle segments feel in Ormsby’s movies-within-the-movie vignettes, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in Clark’s overall hostility to the fun-loving, novelty-seeking horror audience who wouldn’t turn up or fund more serious art. If nothing else, Clark’s reluctance to put his name on the project betrays some kind of lingering, Gates-style resentment for the artistic limitations of the genre. He doesn’t let that professional bitterness get in the way of throwing a good party, though, just like he doesn’t sweat the logical details of how that party should be soundtracked.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest feature from director Jane Schoenbrun, following A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow. In the film, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, an indie darling director whose most recent project—the last third of which “remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”—brought her to the attention of the studio in possession of the rights to the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Following the breakout commercial success of the first Camp Miasma flick, the film’s killer Little Death and their inexplicable air vent-shaped helmet became horror iconography on par with Freddy Krueger and his glove or Jason Voorhees and his machete. The drive to produce endless sequels led to creative rot (like the late sequel Little Death Takes Manhattan), gimmicks (like Camp Miasma 3-D), and diminishing monetary returns. Kris now finds herself at the helm of Camp Miasma reboot, which the studio wants to ensure is “elevated” in order to align with current horror film trends. The purpose is two-fold: the studio hopes to reinvigorate interest in a once-lucrative intellectual property while also redirecting attention away from the original film’s transphobia by hiring Kris, a queer woman. Supposedly seeking inspiration, Kris tracks down reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma’s final girl, who invites Kris to meet with her at her home, which turns out to be the same abandoned campground where the first Miasma picture was filmed. Of course, Kris’s motivation to meet Billy has additional undercurrents that she herself isn’t fully cognizant of, stemming from an epiphanic experience she had while watching Camp Miasma as a child. 

The text within the film, the Camp Miasma franchise, is wonderfully detailed stuff: the mounting number of sequels on VHS that bear the distinct typeface of the Friday the 13th film series, from which Camp Miasma takes most of its aesthetic cues; the watering down of the genuinely menacing Little Death until they start to appear in 90s anti-drug campaigns; the moral outrage from concerned citizens’ groups, leading to picketing of the movie, resulting in even more attention from the public. It’s window dressing, but it’s so thoroughly realized that one can’t help but gawk in amazement at the level of attention to detail. It’s referential through reinterpretation and reinvention, rather than just recreation. Besides the Friday the 13th films, the most obvious inspiration is Sleepaway Camp. Instead of simply recreating that film’s twist ending, the original Camp Miasma’s Little Death (Jack Haven) was an avenging spirit of a genderfluid child who was killed by several other campers. This allows Schoenbrun to grapple with the transphobia of that film by using it as a vehicle to criticize the ignorance that led to its creation, while also playfully poking fun at the large amount of cinematic non-criticism that, instead of grappling with a text’s successes and failures, relies solely on pointing out older media’s flaws without anything more substantial to say. 

The meta-textual nature of the narrative draws comparison (even within the text itself!) to “Frightmaster Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” but an equally applicable comparison would be to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that loves horror of a bygone era the same way that Galaxy Quest loves Star Trek. Of course, what was lacking from those films was a character using their media obsession to examine their sexuality or the nature of desire. Camp Miasma reflects, I imagine, what it feels like to experience sexual arousal only when it’s part of a fantasy mediated by a screen, rather than being aroused by touch, sensation, or intimacy. Kris admits to Billy that she’s allowed herself to be coaxed into opening up her relationship with her partner because she’s unable to meet their sexual needs because, like Owen in TV Glow, she’s more interested in TV/movies than she is in real life, and more comfortable with experiencing sexuality through the distance that a lens creates. Where this differs from Schoenbrun’s previous film is that the ending of TV Glow is considered a bleak, downer ending by most audiences, while Miasma feels like a much more celebratory endeavor, like Schoenbrun got out all of their negative feelings in Glow so that they could tackle the inherent eroticism of the slasher genre in a more fun, positive way. Owen’s narrative is one about what happens when one consigns themself to a box, while Kris’s is one that teaches her that it’s totally okay to be obsessed with a one hit wonder scream queen and only get off through fantasy — even a violent one, because that’s the point of fantasy, it’s not real. As the advertisements for the home video release of the original Camp Miasma note, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” 

The major detriments largely come in the form of visuals. This is a film that is largely unconcerned with making sense of time. The on-screen date given in Roman numerals for the release of the original Camp Miasma is 1980, which would make Billy a solid decade older than she is said to be, and the area around the campground moves from winter to summer over the course of a single night. One can accept that as artistic license, and one must accept it when considering that, when we get to see Little Death’s rampage from the end of Camp Miasma, it’s set to “Long December” by Counting Crows, which was not released until 1996. One could even chalk that up to the idea that we’re not seeing that scene as it was in the film, but as Kris remembers it. What I can’t accept about that scene is how badly done the special effects imagery is. There’s a fun little homage to one of Jason Voorhees’s most famous kills, the sleeping bag scene from The New Blood, wherein Little Death picks up a camper and slams them against a tree, but the kill is farcical rather than sincere, because the victim flies apart and falls to pieces like a mannequin. This same “error” occurs throughout the Little Death massacre, and it’s distracting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to represent Kris’s point of view, as it’s made abundantly clear that she finds slasher film death arousing in a way that she doesn’t understand, but if it’s supposed to be funny, it falls apart. There are several special effects “failures” throughout that have intentionality and are open to interpretation (like the Thomas Kincaid-esque winter scenes, which also look awful but have narrative purpose), but this rampage feels as if it were generated using AI. I’ve searched high and low for confirmation of this and can only find minimal discussion of it from others who get the same feeling, but please bear in mind, dear reader, that if it eventually is revealed that this is the case, disregard the star rating above and consider this film radioactive, with a big thumbs down. With nothing proven at this time, it’s still a negative, as it looks like hot garbage, but it’s not enough to ruin what is otherwise a delightfully fun movie. 

Einbinder and Anderson have absolutely excellent chemistry. Anderson puts on a delightful Southern drawl for the character, and every one of her line reads is magical. During their first meeting, Billy intentionally gives Kris a tiny fright, and the following morning, she encourages Kris to enter a room where a Little Death costume is on display, cackling like a cartoon witch when her prank succeeds. What fun! I don’t eat fast food, but Schoenbrun’s choice to shoot Billy and Kris digging into KFC in pornographic, erotic close-up meant that I ended up getting some myself less than 48 hours later. I also had my biggest laugh of the year when Kris is word vomiting about the problematic elements of art from previous generations; when she mentions a Mickey Mouse racial caricature, Billy responds “Mickey did that?” and I laughed until I choked. When watching Camp Miasma together, Kris excitedly says “This part’s transphobic!”, prompting Billy to merely shush her, even though this is the scene that gave the film its macabre, thoughtless, hilarious tagline, “They killed him. They had to.” Sleepaway Camp has been derided in the intervening decades for its blatant transphobia, but like Rocky Horror Picture Show (as we have been reminded by the think pieces that have sprung up in the wake of the death of Tim Curry), it was also transgressive, and those who may be part of the demographic that has the right to be offended by dissonant values of older media are also capable of finding something meaningful within it. Rejection of art that was, intentionally or unintentionally, textually or subtextually, and positively or negatively queer in eras past prevents us from examining them within the context of their time, and how people lived in that time. It’s not a defense of antiquated portrayals, but it is an invitation to do something more than have a knee-jerk reaction to the past. Schoenbrun certainly has, and I was pleased to join them on their journey. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

#271: Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) & Summer Camp Slashers

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Welcome to Episode #271 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026)
05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead
13:15 Popcorn (1991)
17:00 Nightborn (2026)

24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988)
40:43 Madman (1981)
57:50 The Burning (1981)
1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

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The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).

That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.

My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.

Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Heart Eyes (2025)

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Christopher Landon has his heart set on reviving the slasher, and he only has one plan on how to pull that off. In Happy Death Day, Landon combined the slasher with the time-loop Groundhog’s Day comedy, hoping to bring some novelty to a horror template that’s been stale since at least the late 1990s. In Freaky, he combined the slasher with the 80s body-swap comedy, and now, as a producer & writer on the latest slasher-mashup Heart Eyes, he has repeated the gimmick by combining the slasher with the mainstream romcom. All of these novelty mashups have a killer logline premise and a few amusing individual gags, but they’re not doing much to revive the slasher on its own merits. If anything, by comparing & merging the slasher with other genres decades beyond their own respective expiration dates, Landon is making a dispiriting admission that it is an effectively dead medium. It’s like improvising a full meal out of several incongruent, insufficient portions of leftovers before they get tossed out or mold in the fridge. Sure, it’s filling, but it’s also desperate and ultimately unsatisfying.

To be specific, Heart Eyes combines the early 2000s third-wave slasher with the 2010s straight-to-Netflix romcom, inadvertently calling attention to how long both genres have been culturally dormant (and how dire of a state they were in when they were most recently relevant). The romcom plot at its center is purposefully tropey as a They Came Together-style parody of the genre, complete with verbal references to decades-old relics like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Olivia Holt (doing her best Kate Hudson) stars as an over-worked, under-compensated marketing professional whose latest, failed ad campaign has put her job in jeopardy. Mason Gooding (doing his best Ryan Phillippe) co-stars as the hotshot ad agency hunk who’s threatening to take over her job but, wouldn’t you know it, they end up falling for each other despite the professional conflict. Of course, this swooning reverie is broken when a masked maniac who only kills lovers—only on Valentine’s Day—interrupts their meet cute with meaty cuts, hunting the unlikely couple during their first after-hours business meeting together while they desperately insist that it is not a date.

If there’s any thematic justification for this clunky genre mashup, it’s based in a cynicism against modern romance, as annually escalated by the cultural Valentine’s Day ritual. Heart Eyes ties its slasher-romance premise to a longer violent-romantic literary tradition, citing Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde, and Jack & Rose as iconic couples who meet a violent end in their respective stories. In practice, though, its only real commentary on the nature of romance is mired in current, derisive assessments of love in the internet age, as typified by social media envy, dating apps, incels, kinks, throuples, etc. It’s a rallying cry for anyone frustrated with the state of modern romance, offering ironic, gory counterprogramming for people who groan at the very mention of Valentine’s Day, an emblem of a great societal failure. Thankfully, the mascot of that counterprogramming is at least well designed: a leather-hooded figure with glowing hearts for eyes and a full arsenal of deadly weapons, including some Cupid arrows for the sake of holiday-specific branding. The reveal of that mysterious killer’s identity is a bit of a letdown, but the mask is memorably distinct and the kills are memorably brutal, which is more than most rote slashers deliver.

Speaking of romantic traditions, the Valentine’s Day slasher is a subgenre with its own history of unrated gems, namely Valentine & My Bloody Valentine. If Heart Eyes has a permanent place in the greater horror canon, it’s as a novelty to be watched on that specific holiday, the way dedicated horror nerds plan their calendar around titles like April Fool’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil. That seasonal context is much more forgiving to its charms than the context of Christopher Landon’s career project of saving the slasher through an ongoing series of genre mashups. As a blending of the slasher and the romcom, Heart Eyes feels disappointingly out of date and insincere, especially when compared to more conceptually thorough mashups like last year’s slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature. So much of the modern slasher’s current state is defined by nostalgia for past successes, with recent revivals of Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Slumber Party Massacre being typical examples (along with broader pastiches like Ti West’s X trilogy). Tying that revival to other long-stale genres like the romcom and the body-swap comedy doesn’t exactly imply progress or innovation; it’s a lateral move at best.

-Brandon Ledet

Thanksgiving (2023)

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Thanksgiving is, unfortunately, unlikely to be remembered very fondly in the years to come. I was enticed to the theater after reading a review that compared it to Scream, which was like catnip to me. And while I suppose I can see what that critic was alluding to, I’m not as warm to its charms. 

The film starts off with a strong opening: Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), proprietor of Right Mart stores, is convinced by his new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche) to open his store on Thanksgiving evening with Black Friday deals. This means that Mitch Collins (Ty Olsson) must leave his family Thanksgiving with his beloved wife Amanda (Gina Gershon) to open the store when another manager calls in sick. Over at the Right Mart, the crowd has gotten quite rowdy, and their agitation only increases when Thomas’s daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) succumbs to peer pressure and lets herself and her friends in through a side entrance. When dipshit jock Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) taunts a teen from a rival high school through the glass of the store, things reach a tipping point, and even the presence of local sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) can’t prevent the shoppers from surmounting a barricade and pressing against the glass doors of the store until they break, causing a stampede that crushes and maims many people, with poor Amanda, who had come to the store to bring a late Thanksgiving dinner to her husband, being crushed to death. 

This opening sequence is the best thing about the movie, with frenetic action, rising tension, and spectacular violence, all in pursuit of a free waffle maker that is promised as a prize to the first hundred customers. From there the film becomes a little rote, and it’s not helped by the total non-presence of teen characters. Jessica is our viewpoint character and thus we never feel any real tension regarding whether she will make it out, and she’s the most undeveloped final girl that I think I have ever seen, just sleepwalking through this movie with only the thinnest of characterizations (a dead mom). Her best friend Gabby (Addison Rae) is virtually indistinguishable from her in motive and action, with the only real difference between them being that Gabby is dating the aforementioned Evan. Evan himself is sketched out more clearly, but he has not a single redeeming characteristic, as he filmed the Right Mart riot and posted it online for the viral fame while later denying that he had done so; he also bullies a smaller student into performing his classwork and then breaks his word to pay him for doing so, and he mocks Jessica’s new boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim) behind his back but accepts gifts from him without reservation. Rounding out our little gang of shits are two more likable members, Evan’s teammate Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and his girlfriend, Yulia (Jenna Warren). The issue is that we never really care about any of these people; even Jessica, with whom we are supposed to sympathize as the lead, is completely forgettable. 

I’m not making the argument that we need to care about any of the characters in a slasher for it to be effective. Most slashers released in the wake of Halloween (which did have a relatable and likable main character in Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode) didn’t realize that part of that film’s capturing of lightning in a bottle was in the fact that we cared about Laurie and her friends. A Nightmare on Elm Street also understood this, making Nancy Thompson (and to a lesser extent Kristen and Alice) very relatable; even Child’s Play and its sequel wouldn’t be as memorable without Andy or Kyle. The characters in the Friday the 13th series are largely indistinguishable and interchangeable, which is why any discussion of characters from that series takes the form of “the one played by Kevin Bacon” and “the one played by Crispin Glover,” with the only character name most people remember being “Tommy Jarvis.” Still, most slashers don’t bother with that level of character work and are still fun, but this overall shallow dimensionality of the players here is to the film’s detriment. I mean, we’re on to the second page of this review already, and I haven’t even mentioned the killer or his schtick, that’s how thinly this whole thing is drawn. 

The slasher here is called “The Pilgrim,” and wears a mask of John Carver, who is credited with the composition of the Mayflower Compact and who is a local hero in the Plymouth setting. I suppose that the Scream connection comes in that the killer is adept at using the phone (and by extension, social media) to scare the local teens and convince them to do what he wants as he seeks vengeance on those who participated in the Black Friday Massacre the year prior. The mask is almost too silly to be truly scary, and the inconsistency in the Pilgrim’s spree undermines what could push this into being a successful horror comedy. Several kills are clearly based on Thanksgiving traditions, like when he stabs one of the teens through their ears with corn-on-the-cob holders, or when he gruesomely cooks a person alive to serve as the turkey-like centerpiece of the final act unmasking. Other kills are consistent with the Pilgrim’s message, but don’t have much to do with the holiday. In fact, his first kill is of a waitress at the local diner who was one of the first in line at the store and was the one whose cart got caught on Gina Gershon’s hair and pulled away part of her scalp. The waitress runs for her life and almost makes it but is chased down and struck by her own car, which launches her into a dumpster, its swinging lid coming down so hard it severs her in half at the waist. The lower half of her body is left on a Right Mart sign that advertises “half off.” It’s not as funny as it thinks it is (not even getting into the fact that the killer couldn’t possibly have planned for that scenario to play out that way), but it feels like the movie should have chosen whether it was going to go all-in on Thanksgiving themed murders or excised them and instead just gone for puns. Failing that—and I thought this was where the film was going—there should be two killers. One of the great failings of the Scream franchise is that it has never made a film where the two Ghostfaces are operating at cross-purposes or are unaware of the other. Given that Spyglass is being spineless in their eviction of Melissa Barrera from the series over her comments regarding the Palestinian genocide (and that Jenna Ortega was announced to have left the project the following day, with most of the internet believing that she walked in support of Barrera, although we can’t know for sure), that series is effectively dead, and if it continues, it’s dead to me. There’s a scene here in Thanksgiving where it makes it almost obvious that there are two killers, with two separate murders that are too far apart from one another to have happened in the time that we are shown it to have occurred, and yet this isn’t part of the resolution.

Where the film does succeed, outside of the first act, is in the ingenuity of its kills and its variety of red herrings. With regards to the latter, there’s no shortage of potential killers; Ty Olsson’s bereaved widower with a grudge against the Wrights is a front-runner, joined by Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), a promising baseball player whose career is waylaid when his pitching arm is broken during the Right Mart stampede, and there’s even a newly appointed deputy that some of the townsfolk are mysteriously hostile toward for never-explained reasons. The best kill in the film, however, isn’t even at the hands of the Pilgrim, at least not directly. Several characters are participants in the town’s local Thanksgiving parade, specifically riding a float in the shape of a boat. When the Pilgrim disrupts the parade, leading the truck towing the float to stop short, sending the bowsprit of the ship straight through his head, much to the horror of his two elementary-aged granddaughters who were in the vehicle with him. It’s the film’s best joke, too, and it needed to land several more in order to really pull off a sufficiently campy tone. I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone, but director Eli Roth prioritizes shock value over comedic timing, and the film suffers for it. Stronger performances from the teen characters or characterization invested in making them more interesting, better and more frequent jabs at the genre and comedy in general, and a little more consistency throughout would have made this film more like a valid cinematic release and not like a misplaced episode of Hulu’s Into the Dark. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Massacre at Central High (1976)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).

00:00 Welcome

03:23 Hot Shots! (1991)
11:22 A Haunting in Venice (2023)
19:11 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
26:55 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
32:55 Curse of Chucky (2013)

38:55 Massacre at Central High (1976)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Scream VI (2023)

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Being born on the day that I was made for an interesting way of keeping track of time with regards to school when I was a kid. One of my dearest friends was born on October 27th, which meant that she spent her childhood believing that her favorite movies, which were all Halloween-oriented, came on television in honor of her, which leant her younger years a little bit of magic that was sorely needed. My birthday always landed during or after the last week of school, so much so that I turned 18 the day after I graduated from high school, and my college graduation was also exactly one day prior to my birthday. I know this will finally be the thing that dates me after I’ve played so coy over the years about how old I am, but I finished fifth grade in 1998, and one of my classmates came home with me for a birthday sleepover. My next-door neighbor, a girl a few years older than I was, secretly snuck me a VHS tape of a movie that she had recorded off of HBO, for us to watch on the tiny TV/VCR combo that I got for my birthday that year. I didn’t know it, but my whole world was about to change, not because I was turning 11, but because an extremely meta horror film was about to stab me in the brain and change everything that I thought I knew about how movies worked. It’s been 25 years, and I’m still just as in love with it, as well as (all but one of) the sequels it spawned in the intervening time. What’s your favorite scary movie … franchise?

Scream VI is a delight. After a fairly decent return to the world of Ghostfaces and voice changers in 5cream, this new installment lands on its feet despite the departure of the franchise’s main lead, Neve Campbell. Don’t get me wrong; I love Neve Campbell, and I love Sidney Prescott. In fact, I went to two separate screenings of Scream VI just 48 hours apart because I overbooked myself, and I wore a different Sidney Prescott t-shirt to each one, which is a testament to the fact that she is my favorite final girl. Somehow, despite her leaving this series after the last film, Scream VI manages to not only soldier on in her absence, but feel complete in spite of it; in fact, her absence is barely felt at all. This loss is mitigated by several mentions of her and the agreement between the lone veteran of the first film, Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and new lead Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) that Sidney “deserves her happy ending” with her husband and children far, far away from whatever Ghostface copycat shenanigans are happening in New York, to which I also whole-heartedly agree. It’s a shame that the studio wasn’t willing to meet her salary requirements (a friend asked me how much Campbell asked for and I have no idea what her fee would have been, but she is worth every penny that they refused to pay), but if she’s not going to be in it, I’m hard pressed to think of a kinder send-off than she got. The news that VI would bring back fan-favorite Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) was the only thing that kept me from writing this sequel off when it was in development last year, and her return is one of countless elements that make this film feel like it’s living up to the franchise’s legacy in spite of the loss of its star. 

It’s been a year since the events of the last film, in which Sam Carpenter returned to her hometown of Woodsboro, a town that’s rapidly heading towards overtaking Cabot Cove as the murder capital of small town America. After years of running from her past after discovering that the man who raised her was not her father and that she was actually sired by infamous serial killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich)—who, alongside Stu Macher (Matt Lillard) went on a spree in 1996 that formed the plot of both Scream and its in-universe adaptation Stab—Sam returned to the town to protect her sister from the latest killer(s) to don the Ghostface mask. In the intervening twelve months, she has become the subject of a widespread online conspiracy theory that she, as Billy Loomis’s daughter, was the true mastermind behind the 2022 Woodsboro spree and that she framed the guilty parties. Now living in NYC with her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), who attends Blackmore University as a freshman, Sam is struggling not only with PTSD but the fact that it felt good to kill her tormentors, and she’s worried that it’s her father’s legacy still living inside of her. Also at Blackmore are Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), twin niece and nephew of Sidney’s friend and classmate Randy, originator of “the rules.” Aside from these characters, introduced in the last film, we also meet: Quinn (Liana Liberato), the sex positive roommate of the Carpenter sisters; her father, Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), who transferred to the NYPD when Quinn went off to college because of his guilt over the loss of his son, her brother; Ethan (Jack Champion), Chad’s shy, nebbish roommate; Anika (Devyn Nekoda), Mindy’s under-characterized girlfriend; and Danny (Josh Segarra), Sam and Tara’s neighbor, whom Sam has been snogging in secret. 

After a fun and effective twist on the opening scene formula that I won’t spoil here, Sam becomes a primary suspect in the slaying of two of Tara’s classmates, including “chode” Jason (Tony Revolori), a noted Argento freak (he even dies wearing a 4 mosche di veluto grigio shirt). The sympathetic Bailey is heading up the investigation and reveals that the killer left a Ghostface mask at the scene of the crime, which forensic evidence indicates was one of the masks used by the killer(s) in the previous installment; he gets an unexpected assist from Atlanta-based FBI agent Kirby Reed, who shows off the scars that Ghostface 2011 gave her. Despite some bad blood between herself and the Carpenters as the result of portraying Sam as a “born killer” in her latest book, a major crack in the case comes from longtime Ghostface opponent Gale Weathers, who finds a shrine to all of the previous killers and their victims in an abandoned theatre. From there, bodies start to rack up and more Ghostface masks are left behind at the scenes like Easter eggs, counting down from the killers in Scream 4 to 3 to 2, etc., leading up to a climax where no one is safe and no one can be trusted. 

What is your favorite scary movie franchise? Obviously, mine is Scream, but that wasn’t always the case. For many years, I was a Nightmare on Elm Street kid, through and through. What Craven’s earlier franchise had that made it stand out from so many other slasher empires was an increased focus on the continuity of characters between entries. Even though Nancy Thompson didn’t make it out of Dream Warriors alive, she effectively passed the baton to Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette in Warriors, Tuesday Knight in Dream Master), who passed it on to Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), who becomes a final girl par excellence, in my opinion. The Scream franchise has remained one of the most consistent with regards to its core cast and with its content, with every film (other than Scream 3) being good-to-great and subverting the trend of recasting characters between films that was common in earlier slasher series (see above, re: Kristen Parker, but also Tommy in the Friday the 13th films, Andy in the Chucky movies, Mike in the Phantasms, Angela in Sleepaway Camp 2, and on and on). People didn’t go to the movies to see Jason Lives because they cared about the characters from A New Beginning; they went to see Jason Voorhees kill a bunch of teenagers. Scream isn’t about that; it’s about commenting on that phenomenon, and as a series, it’s important to remember that the ever-changing killer behind the infamous mask allows for Scream to reinvent itself by evolving its storytelling and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the genre of which it is both text and annotation. Nightmare laid this groundwork by straddling this line, with Nancy and Alice as characters that one cared about alongside the primary franchise driver in the form of Robert Englund’s Freddy. Scream is this concept in culmination; 5cream being willing to kill off Dewey (David Arquette), a character who has been with us since 1996, not only reiterated that no one was safe but also that horror isn’t just about fright and suspense and terror and surprise, but also about sorrow. I won’t spoil anything, but Gale takes some real hard hits in this one, and because I’ve known Gale since I was a child, I felt a profound sense of possible loss, which isn’t something you can say about Dream Child or Jason Lives (or Hellraiser: Hellseeker or The Curse of Michael Myers or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, etc.). 

In the year since 5cream, one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen about the film had to do with Melissa Barrera’s purported lack of acting ability, and although I never participated in the spread of that complaint, I must admit that I agreed. I’m happy to report that I have no such complaints about her performance in Scream VI, where she really shines. Last time, Sam was wooden, unyielding, and didn’t seem to have chemistry with a single one of her co-stars; this time around, a large part of the film’s emotional weight requires a real sense of sisterhood between Ortega and Barrera, and the latter brought her A-game to the table this time. There’s a veritas and a humanity to the way that Sam worries about her younger sister’s refusal to process their shared trauma, and there’s just as much honesty in the way that Tara feels smothered by her long-absent sister’s overprotective return to her life; it would be easy for either character to seem unreasonable, but neither does, and that’s good conflict to find in the middle of this latest slasher sequel. It’s interwoven beautifully with the actual text as well, as, in the finale, both girls’ survival demands that Sam literally let Tara go, which is a nice touch. 

Overall, this is a strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

David Gordon Ween

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Just like all other major entries in decades-running horror franchises, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was sharply divisive among genre fans as soon as it hit theaters in 2018.  Even so, its reputation has only declined in the five years since, especially as it has become the go-to, defining example of mainstream horror’s current “legacy sequel” trend.  Not only does the Halloween reboot have to answer for its own revisions of Laurie Strode & Michael Myers lore, but it also now carries the weight of horror nerd complaints against more recent offenses like 2019’s Child’s Play, 2021’s Candyman, and this year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  It’s also been reduced to a scapegoat trendsetter for the Trauma Metaphor Horror wave that has followed in its wake, while artsier, standalone titles like Hereditary & The Babadook have maintained much steadier, more prestigious reputations in the same context.  It doesn’t help, of course, that Green has diluted his Halloween legacyquel with two follow-up films that have only alienated the Michael Myers purists even further as the series stumbled along.  I opted out of the David Gordon Ween discourse when Halloween Kills opened to white-hot angry reviews last year, but now that his theatrical mini-series is over and the online vitriol has been directed elsewhere (mostly at Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which is practically a legacy sequel to Stepford Wives), it finally felt safe to return to Haddonfield to see how his take on Halloween has evolved.

Personally, I was really impressed with Green’s “original” Halloween in 2018, and I still think it holds up well when considered in isolation.  Regardless of its role as a harbinger for the next five years of mainstream horror trends, it still a really scary movie about self-fulfilling prophecies and obsessive thought spirals.  Okay, yes, Laurie Strode is haunted by the same metaphorical Trauma Monster that stalks most modern horror heroines (this time in a road-worn William Shatner mask), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any dramatic complexity to how that internal battle with trauma plays out.  We’re told that in the 40 years since Laurie was hunted by the infamous killer Michael Myers in the John Carpenter original, she’s been mentally stuck in the events of that one night in a way that has defined & limited every other minute of her life.  Faced with senseless violence from a heartless, near-catatonic killer, Laurie has attempted to make sense of her life’s story by convincing herself it’s fate that she will have a final showdown with Michael once he inevitably escapes captivity.  It’s the same way that doomsday preppers always appear to be looking forward to the apocalypse they supposedly fear.  So, when Michael does escape, Laurie (along with other Michael-obsessed weirdos like “The New Dr. Loomis”) does everything in her power to make sure she & Michael have their “final” showdown in her D.I.Y. death-trap compound at the outskirts of Haddonfield, even though that’s exactly what she’s been dreading for decades.  Michael just mindlessly kills whatever’s in striking distance; Laurie is the one that makes the confrontation happen, totally unaware that she’s willing the fight into existence.  It’s chilling.

Green’s Halloween trilogy loses its way in the 2021 sequel Halloween Kills, which zooms out the scope of Michael’s function as a Trauma Monster from his effect on Laurie to his effect on Haddonfield as a community.  I choose to interpret the word “kills” as a noun here, since this second entry is a feature-length montage of Michael slashing his way through the streets, homes, and pubs of Haddonfield while Laurie recovers from their “final” showdown on a hospital bed, listening in from the sidelines.  Michael proves the point of the 2018 film’s self-fulfilling prophecy arc by making no effort to visit Laurie’s hospital room; he just lumbers from kill to kill in the most mindless fashion ever seen from a slasher villain.  If Halloween Kills is “about” anything outside the monotonous rhythm of those murders, it’s in how the community of Haddonfield tries to make sense of Michael’s senseless violence by making themselves the collective hero of the “story.”  I very much appreciate Halloween Kills‘s disgust with small-town America’s fetish for gun-toting vigilantism, given how many ordinary, ill-equipped Haddonfieldians approach Michael with deadly weapons—the same way real-life gun freaks dream of personally intervening in active-shooter crises—and are immediately destroyed for their trouble, either by Michael’s knife or their own petard.  It’s just a shame the movie is spread too thin across Michael’s hometown to ever truly feel scary.  Its larger scope means that it keeps intercutting between the tension of individual scenes so that we’re never properly immersed in any one of them.  It doesn’t really matter that its political assessments of small-town America are goofily unsubtle; it could have easily gotten away with that if it weren’t so scatterbrained.

After the frantic scrambling of Kills, the more sincere, dramatic approach of Halloween Ends can’t help but feel like a relief.  With his final entry in the series, Green returns to the low-key indie dramas that first earned him name recognition before he started making major studio slasher sequels & stoner comedies.  Halloween Ends may not be as Great as the first film in its trilogy, but it’s at least coherently structured and (mostly) functions as its own standalone movie, which is an embarrassingly low bar that Halloween Kills does not clear.  It’s also custom-designed to alienate & infuriate die-hard horror fans the same way that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was when Carpenter was still actively involved in the franchise, since it also does not focus on the senseless killings of Michael “The Shape” Myers.  Instead, we follow an equally iconic horror villain: Cory, the lonely mechanic with a troubled past.  Cory is dubbed “the new Michael” by the surviving citizens of Haddonfield, who essentially radicalize him into becoming a mass murderer in their continued attempts to make a clear, sensical narrative out of Michael’s mindless violence.  Meanwhile, Cory keeps The Old Michael as a pet in the sewers below Haddonfield and “feeds” his bullies to the hibernating killer the same way little Jamie feeds his bullies to the “tra-la-logs” of The Pit.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who are frustrated by the tonal & narrative inconsistencies between each of Green’s Halloweens, but I do love that there’s still room in a post-MCU world for individual movies in a big-budget franchise to take unique directions from each other – even if it’s strange to get that from a series with a consistent creative team at its core.  Cory’s story isn’t nearly as compelling nor as scary as Laurie’s, but at least Green & company found a way to make Halloween intimately personable again after the aimlessness of Kills.

The bigger problem is not the inconsistency across this series; it’s that it didn’t need to be a series at all.  Laurie Strode’s story is so neatly contained & emotionally impactful in the 2018 Halloween that there’s no reason for her to return for two more entries.  Kills feels lost by comparison, aimlessly wandering the streets of Haddonfield in search of a new emotional hook.  To its credit, Ends finds that new hook (by conjuring a new central character out of thin air), but it has no chance of fully standing on its own, since Laurie is still hanging around Haddonfield, distracting from its new sense of purpose.  After Cory’s own storyline is neatly wrapped up, Laurie steps back in for another “final” showdown with Michael, as if they’re ultimate fight to the death was meant to be, undoing all the good work of Green’s “original” Halloween.  After two entire films of Laurie hanging around a hospital room (Kills) and absentmindedly narrating her memoir (Ends), that last minute return to her vendetta with Michael can’t help but feel like an afterthought that dilutes the impact of both her story and Cory’s.  That’s largely what makes Halloween ’18 a great film and Halloween Ends an okay one.  And the purposeless ambling of Kills only makes them both look stronger by comparison.

-Brandon Ledet