Jamie Lee Curtis has spent twenty years running from Michael Myers, and now she has finally found somewhere quiet enough to hide. Or so she thinks. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later drops Laurie Strode into Northern California, where she works as the headmistress of a private boarding school under an assumed name. The plan is simple: change the address, change the face, and never look back. The movie spends an hour and a half proving that neither one lasts.
Steve Miner directs, and Matt Greenberg and Robert Zappia wrote the script. This is the seventh film in the Halloween series, and it ignores the previous three movies entirely, picking up twenty years after the original. That decision comes with weight. It means the film can start fresh, but it also means it has to earn its place alongside the 1978 original and the 1981 sequel, both of which set a standard that few of the later entries could touch.
Trailer, via Miramax.
Laurie’s New Life
Laurie’s cover identity is Keri Tate, and she runs Hillcrest Academy with the help of Norma Watson, her secretary, and Will Brennan, the guidance counselor who is her lover. She has a son named John, and she has built a routine that keeps her from thinking about the night Myers chased her through Haddonfield. It does not work. The film opens with a sense of dread, and it stays there for the whole runtime.
Curtis plays Laurie as a woman who has stopped sleeping well and started drinking too much. Her fear is not abstract. It is a physical presence in the room, and Curtis sells it with a tight, controlled performance that keeps the audience rooted in her world even when the story drifts.
Myers Returns
The setup is simple. Myers escaped from Smith’s Grove, returned to his hometown of Haddonfield, and killed his sister. His body disappeared after an explosion at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital caused by Dr. Sam Loomis. For twenty years, he has been presumed dead. Then he finds Laurie again.
The film’s central trick is that Myers is not really dead. He has simply been waiting, and now he has discovered where Laurie has gone. The movie does not explain how he found her. It just shows him driving toward her, and that is enough.
A Broken File
The trigger arrives in Langdon, Illinois, where Marion Wittington, Loomis’ former colleague, returns home to the house they shared. She finds it broken into, and she discovers that the file on Laurie Strode is missing. Marion seeks help from her teenage neighbor, Jimmy, before both he and his friend, Tony, are killed by Myers. Myers slashes Marion’s throat and drives away in Jimmy’s car as the police arrive.
That sequence is the film’s clearest example of its problem. It wants to build tension, but it keeps cutting away from the main threat to follow side characters who get nothing. The deaths of Jimmy and Tony matter only because they let Myers get a flat tire and move closer to Laurie. They do not matter for their own sake.
The Car Chase
When Myers gets a flat tire, he steals another vehicle from a woman and her daughter who stop by a highway rest area. He leaves them unharmed but stranded. The chase that follows is the film’s best sequence, and it is where the movie almost earns its place in the series. Myers drives fast, and the camera keeps up with him.
The problem is that the sequence ends too soon. Myers gets close to Laurie, but the film pulls back before it can deliver a payoff. Instead, it cuts to John and Charlie Deveraux sneaking off campus, which sends Laurie into a heated argument with her son. The tension shifts from Myers chasing Laurie to Laurie arguing with John, and the momentum stalls.
The School Trip
Most of the faculty and students at Hillcrest Academy are preparing to leave for a trip to Yosemite. Laurie has forbidden John from going, worried that something will happen to him. That worry is the film’s emotional core, and it is handled with care. Curtis sells the fear, and the audience feels it.
But the plot keeps pulling the family apart. Myers is coming, and the film wants everyone to be separated so he can get to each of them in turn. The result is a story that never settles on a single thread. It jumps between Laurie, John, Charlie, and the other students, and the pacing suffers for it.
The Final Hours
The film’s last act is where it fails most completely. Myers finds Laurie at the school, and the chase moves from the road to the grounds. There is a fight, and there is a confrontation, and the movie tries to end on a note of finality. It does not quite get there.
The problem is that the film has spent so much time building up Myers that his arrival loses its force. He is a danger, but he is not a threat that the audience fears. He is a threat that the audience expects. The difference matters.
What Works
There are moments in Halloween H20 that hold up. The chase sequences are tense. Curtis’s performance is strong. The film’s willingness to ignore the Thorn Trilogy and start over is brave. None of that changes the fact that the movie as a whole does not meet the standards of the series.
The film’s biggest strength is its lead actress. Curtis brings a weariness to Laurie that makes her feel human rather than a target. Her scenes with Brennan and Norma are the best in the movie, and they are the ones that anchor the entire picture.
What Does Not Work
The pacing is the film’s fatal flaw. It is an hour and a half of setup, and the payoff never lands with the weight it should have. Myers is a presence, not a threat. The chase is exciting, but it is over too quickly. The ending is a letdown.
The film also suffers from a lack of focus. It wants to be about Laurie, about Myers, about the students, and about the town. It cannot be all of those things at once, and it ends up being none of them fully.
The Numbers
- Title: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
- Director: Steve Miner
- Writer: Matt Greenberg, Robert Zappia
- Runtime: 86 minutes
- Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Adam Arkin, Michelle Williams, Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Janet Leigh, LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Hartnett, Branden Williams, Nancy Stephens, Beau Billingslea
- Budget: $17 million
- Box office: $75 million worldwide
- Score: 5.2/10
Ranking the Halloween Films
- Halloween (1978) — the standard
- Halloween II (1981) — a worthy successor
- Halloween H20: 20 Years Later — a mixed bag
- Halloween III: Season of the Witch — a departure that did not work
- Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers — serviceable but dull
- Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers — a step down
- Halloween H20: 20 Years Later — the current entry
Final Word
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later is a film that knows what it is doing and does not do it well. It has a strong lead performance, a decent chase, and a willingness to shake up the series. It also has a weak script, a poor pace, and an ending that undercuts everything that came before it.
The film’s box office success is a credit to its marketing, not its quality. It grossed $75 million worldwide against a budget of $17 million, making it the fifth highest-grossing film in the franchise. That is a number, not an achievement.
The film’s tagline promised that terror would not take a vacation this summer. It did. The movie is a vacation from the tension of the original, and that is the problem. It is a pleasant break, but it is not a scare.
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