After months of waiting, and perhaps a little bit of stalking, the trailer for the long-awaited Halloween sequel has finally arrived. As we all hoped, it throws Michael Myers back into deadly confrontation against original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a weathered version of his former babysitter nemesis, Laurie Strode.
The main thing to immediately note about this new Halloween from director David Gordon Green is that it’s a direct sequel to the original 1978 Halloween (a sequel with the same name, *facepalm*) that ignores each and every single film that has come along afterward. Obviously that means it ignores the “Jamie Lloyd” continuity, wherein Laurie Strode had died off-camera before Halloween 4 and its sequels, but it also ignores the canon of Halloween 2 and Halloween H20, which both actually starred Jamie Lee Curtis. In THIS Halloween timeline, Michael was simply arrested at some point after the events of the initial movie, and has been languishing in a federal penitentiary ever since. The other important thing to note is that by casting Halloween 2 from the canon you remove the revelation that Laurie Strode is actually Michael Myers’ sister, a fact that is mentioned and then discarded humorously in the trailer as well.
“I mean, your grandmother is Laurie Strode,” says one character. “She was almost murdered. Wasn’t it her brother who murdered all of those babysitters?”
“No, it was not her brother,” says actress Andi Matichak, playing Strode granddaughter Allyson. “That’s just something people made up.”
As for the trailer itself, we can appreciate the intensity that Jamie Lee Curtis in particular is bringing to the role this time around. Long gone are the days when an ingenue high school student was confronted with a force of evil she didn’t know how to comprehend. This version of Laurie looks like she’s been preparing day and night for the time when Michael would escape again and return, and now she’s clearly going to get her wish.
Halloween hits theaters everywhere on Oct. 19, 2018, marking the first high-profile slasher movie to hit American theaters in quite a while. Let’s hope it ultimately contributes a better memory to the franchise than the Rob Zombie reboots, shall we? Check out the new trailer below.