Without John Carpenter spending around 20 days shooting and $300,000 making Halloween we wouldn’t have had most horror movies, an example is Scream. However, in turn, Halloween H20 owes a lot to Scream as well. Scream made slasher movies profitable again; it drew in a whole new audience to the genre by updating its conventions and getting a new, sexier cast to play the victims and killers. In 1998 Halloween H20 hopped on the bandwagon hoping to cash in on the current craze. Their judgement paid off and thanks to Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie and the supposed ‘final battle’ of brother versus sister, H20 it managed to gross $60m making it the highest grossing Halloween of the series.

To be honest it would have been nice for the film to refer to past Halloweens even if it was just that girl recapping in a little montage near the beginning of the film. To leave all the parts out suggests that the producers themselves see them as inferior, which they were but were not all bad, and devaluing the series. However it does get rid of the silly Curse idea that the previous part implemented.

The Dimension logo pops up and the ‘Mr. Sandman’ theme tune plays away (used in Halloween II) never has a tune been so misplaced in a film, it’s really quite spooky when you think of it. The film doesn’t actually kick off with her or her son but the nurse of the now deceased Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance died shortly after filming Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers). This does serve as the part of the film explaining how Michael knows Laurie is alive and where she is and it also explains how he gets there so it doesn’t just seem he magically arrives on her doorstep one morning for a quick stab, so points for that.

Laurie refuses to believe the fact, especially when she keeps on having visions of her brother, that he is dead. Her over protectiveness denies John to go to the school camp thingy (there was a proper word but its an American thing) at first he is angry but he then learns his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams) and two friends Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd) and Sarah (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) are going to have their own Halloween party of their own at the school. Ironically, and predictably, John’s mother allows him to go on the trip. Meanwhile Myers has tracked them all down and is ready to say hello to his sister after 20 years and his new nephew. Thus begins a bloody Halloween night.

Michael Myers also looks better than the last films, his masked being improved a great deal since which made him look too dumpy; this is an altogether sleeker and meaner Myers. Yet, bucking the trend, his lust for blood is low. He actually has quite a few opportunities to kill people but leaves them alive. It may annoy people looking for gore and blood spurting from every bodily orifice but it works. It fits in with the film; he is after his sister and wants to as quickly as possible. He could kill loads of people but he wants to get down to the real business. Also having too many killings in a horror movie ruins the effect of the expected finale and the tension that it takes while the movie is creeping up to the ending. H20 does well to steer clear from that and delivers a quite tense feeling when it gets to the final act, similar to Halloween I which means the body count remains low, only a meagre six dead bodies, and the tension build up high.

However having Kevin Williamson on board and coming out in the Scream season does hold a problem. This film is polished to a high degree. The dialogue isn’t too bad and thanks to the directing shots remain spooky and there is always a sense of foreboding when anyone is walking alone through the school on a dark night. The main problem is that now Halloween is an imitator and not a trend setter and it does seem to be too squeaky clean like a Scream movie, complete with all the well-off and good looking teenagers and affluent lifestyles and sometimes the characters are displayed as too goody-goody. There is no complete raw terror in this film as in the first as everything is fine tuned. This is, of course, no bad thing as this just means that this sequels quality stands out.