Indy Comics Writer

When I was 9, my parents marched me off to the movies to see the original Halloween by John Carpenter. Yeah, my parents’ judgment there was a bit flawed. But everyone in my family has always loved scary movies. And my dad did cover my eyes during the nudity bits. Not the stabbings or strangling scenes, but the nudity.

I loved that movie. A lot. I couldn’t sleep for a week after seeing it. Still, it’s a classic of the genre, scary even in the daylight scenes, something that’s hard to do in a horror movie.

So this post has little to do with comics, except for one thing. If ever there was a holiday made for the comics lover, it’s Halloween. I just got back from my fourth-grade son’s school Halloween parade. I saw tons of Spider-Men, Batmen and Star Wars characters. (Only one Superman, though. Poor ‘Supes ain’t so cool.)

But back to the movies. Halloween was, and remains, one of my favorite scary flicks. So I was pretty excited when Halloween 2 came out. That excitement lasted until I actually saw the movie.

What a dismal, depressing flick that was. The first Halloween had characters you liked. Sure, the teens were drinking, fooling around and acting like goofs. But they still seemed like fun characters. In Halloween 2, though, the director — it wasn’t Carpenter the second time around — seems determined to be as unpleasant as possible.

Now, I know horror movies are supposed to be scary. They’re supposed to have nasty, mean-as-nails characters. But there’s a throwaway scene in Halloween 2 that sums up to me what’s wrong with the film: We see a mother ushering her young son down a hospital hallway. Turns out, the boy had bitten into an apple with a razor blade in it. We see a shot of the kid with a razor in its mouth.

It may seem minor, but the scene just left me with a bad feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even particularly gross or grisly. It was just mean. And mean without suspense, thrills or shock isn’t something that works in a horror movie. (Besides, that whole razor-blade thing is an urban legend. It never really happens. And secondly, what self-respecting boy is going to eat an apple where there’s so much candy floating around?)

The rest of the movie works in the same way. Police accidentally shoot a guy in a costume that looks exactly like the movie’s killer. Oops. Again, not scary, just sort of mean. A victim slips in a pool of her boyfriend’s blood and knocks herself out. Again, not scary, not suspenseful, just mean, and sort of stupid.

I think Halloween 2, oddly enough, provides a lesson for comics writers. You never know when you’re going to get called upon to write a sequel. (I’m working on a short sequel, in fact, for a comic series right now.) If you do, don’t forget what made the original successful. In the case of Halloween, the movie worked because Carpenter gave us characters we cared about, a villain who was a complete mystery and more thrills and suspense than blood. Halloween 2 doesn’t work because it willfully threw all of that out. In fact, every single sequel to Halloween is rather worthless. None of them remembered the lessons of the original.