You CAN go home again…

Writer/director David Gordon Green and Jamie Lee Curtis return with a true sequel to Halloween that pays reverence to the original with some classic beats for the devoted fans but reminds us all that in genre filmmaking, the old ways are often best.

It’s been 40 years since those fateful events in Haddonfield, Illinois when Michael Myers went on his killing spree, but in the years since; life has moved on.  However the only thing Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is doing is waiting.  Waiting for the day that she knew would come, when Michael Myers would come back to finish what he started all those decades ago.

Green and his team capture all the nuances of what made the original film so damn special while layering in some modern touches to make it visually stunning and scary all at the same time as John Carpenter’s original music reminds us of the intensity of the narrative.

In a world where we should be immune to the scares and frights that these stories bring, this is a film with genuinely scary yet totally empowered moments as Jamie Lee commands the screen as the broken yet bad ass Laurie Strode.

While I’ll admit that I would have liked a little more character development with the generations of Strode women (played by Judy Greer and Virginia Gardner) this Halloween rolls back the clock to when the ‘Boogeyman’ was still a palpable thing that went bump in the night.